21142: radtimes: Haiti divided by race, wealth (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti divided by race, wealth

http://washingtontimes.com/world/20040405-092821-4875r.htm

April 6, 2004
By Mike Williams
COX NEWS SERVICE

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The orange peel was removed with the utmost
care, in one long, thin strip. Not one speck of savory fruit was wasted.
The peel hangs from a rusty nail under the battered tin roof of the
one-room shack where Fanfan Cherie lives, and it is eloquent about his life
and that of Haiti's impoverished masses.
     "We must save that to start our charcoal fire for cooking," said Mr.
Cherie, a muscular but thin man of 33. He is a plumber and welder who has
not worked steadily in years, despite his best efforts to find a job.
     "But today there is no food anyway, so there is no fire in the
kitchen. It will be another day of hunger."
     Five miles away, on the outskirts of the notorious slum called Cite
Soleil, Marie Louise Baker chokes back tears as she surveys the gutted
ruins of her family's textile-assembly factory, which was destroyed by a
gang of marauders on Feb. 28 — the day before President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide went into exile.
     "When I look at this, it is a feeling of destruction," she said. "They
broke all the machines and then burned everything. My family has lost all
that we built in 30 years of work. We invested everything here. None of our
money left Haiti. And now our 800 employees have lost their jobs. Each job
here supports about 10 people. That's 8,000 people now with no income."
     Mr. Cherie and Mrs. Baker: Their two faces, like their backgrounds,
couldn't be more distinct. Mr. Cherie is dark and handsome, with piercing
eyes, and Mrs. Baker, 59, is light-skinned and striking, possessed of grace
and beauty.
     They are the two faces of Haiti, and their lives reflect the country's
divided past, as well as its hope for a future of unity and progress that
would end 200 years of violence and failed governments.
     Split country
     From its founding in 1804 as the world's first independent black
republic, Haiti has been riven by resentments, suspicion and exploitation,
pitting its overwhelming black majority against a tiny elite class,
probably less than 1 percent of the population, that owns most of the
country's wealth.
     When black slaves rose up and overthrew their French colonial masters,
they went on a killing rampage, and the surviving whites fled. Left behind
was a scattering of mixed-race people, called mulattoes, who quickly took
over the plantations left by the French.
     The black generals who led the rebellion seized power, while the
mulattoes became Haiti's business and plantation owners. In the next two
centuries, the two coexisted, at times acting in alliances, at others in
standoffs edged with resentment.
     Haiti's governments were rarely successful. It became a "kleptocracy"
— a system of government based on taxation and theft. Its dictators were
typically brutal, and many were overthrown in coups d'etat, 33 times in 200
years — on average, every six years.
     The mulatto elite, for the most part, did not develop a sense of civic
duty. Having to pay bribes to do business, many took the easy way out,
building lives of luxury and comfort on the backs of poorly paid servants
and laborers.
     The sad history created a marked contrast in geography: Port-au-Prince
is a sprawling city of 2 million, with the poor living jumbled in
ramshackle shantytowns along the hot lowlands, while the rich reside in
opulent walled compounds on the cooler slopes of the mountain range that
rises abruptly from the city's edge.
     Dying hopes
     Fifteen years ago, there were great hopes that Haiti finally might be
shaking off its troubled past. Mr. Aristide, a fiery-tongued Roman Catholic
priest of the slums, became a celebrity and won the country's first free
and fair elections on a promise to lift up the poor masses.
     Now that dream has died.
     Removed once in a military coup, then restored in 1994 by U.S.
intervention, Mr. Aristide gave up the priesthood to wed and, his critics
say, betrayed his populist promises — building a corrupt government of
cronies who looted the national treasury and enforced their will through
armed gangs.
     Mrs. Baker does not know who burned her family's factory, but there
seems little doubt the destruction came at the hands of Aristide loyalists.
The Bakers were part of the opposition, a nonviolent group that accused Mr.
Aristide of corruption and violence and demanded his resignation.
     "The government in place did nothing to protect us," she said,
referring to the last day that Mr. Aristide was in office. "The government
and its leader did not encourage unity in Haiti; instead they encouraged
division and hatred."
     A hallmark of Mr. Aristide's oratory was his harsh criticism of
Haiti's rich, whom he likened to rocks in a stream washed by cool waters.
He often called on his followers to help the rich learn about the life of
the poor, whom he likened to rocks baking in the hot Caribbean sun.
     Mr. Cherie comes from the same small town in southern Haiti where Mr.
Aristide was born, and though he swears that a poor man like himself has no
time for politics, he was a strong Aristide supporter.
     "Haiti's whole problem is the elites," he said. "When Aristide tried
to do anything to help the poor, the elites would block him. They would
play a trick or boycott him, and that's why he finally had to go. The
elites held their marches, but what were they marching for? Themselves.
They don't care about the poor."
     Different worlds
     Mrs. Baker said her family built its factory near one of Haiti's most
dangerous, hopeless slums precisely because she does care about the poor.
     "I will not leave Cite Soleil," she said, vowing to rebuild, even if
it takes generations. "If I leave Cite Soleil, I abandon Cite Soleil. We
are working the best way we know how to change Haiti, by creating jobs, by
paying taxes to the state. We are not here to step on the poor. We're
trying to provide jobs to help them improve their lives."
     Some of Mrs. Baker's employees have worked for the family for decades.
They earned the equivalent of about $4 per day, roughly four times Haiti's
minimum wage.
     Mr. Cherie has never in his life been touched by any such concern on
the part of Haiti's rich.
     "The only work I find is small jobs for the elite," he said. "They
offer me a job that I know should cost 5,000 gourdes [about $125], and they
say they will only pay me 500 gourdes [about $12]. If I refuse, they will
find someone else because there are too many here who will do anything to
feed their families."
     Mr. Cherie is a proud man who built his house by hand, much of it with
castoff materials that he begged from the rich. The walls are not rough
block but smooth stucco, painted a cheerful blue. The clean floor is made
of broken tiles that he carefully reassembled before setting them in mortar.
     When he is not looking for work, he spends his days cleaning, washing
clothes or sitting in the shade on a broken metal chair. His wife goes out
each day and begs or borrows something to feed their children. Three of
their five children live with his mother because Mr. Cherie and his wife
cannot provide for them.
     Mr. Cherie sometimes keeps an eye on Israel and Natan Germain, the two
toddlers of his equally impoverished neighbor, who sometimes cavort naked
in the dirt around their run-down hovel, then bathe in a plastic tub filled
with rainwater caught by a rusty piece of bent metal fashioned into a
gutter under the edge of the roof.
     "I finished high school," Mr. Cherie said. "I wanted to become an
engineer or a doctor. But those jobs are only for the elite in Haiti. No
poor person like me has money to go to the university for such an education."
     Mrs. Baker's grandfather was an Episcopal missionary from England, her
other grandfather a trader, and her father an agronomist. She and some of
her siblings opened their first, small sewing operation in 1970, making it
grow through hard work, constant attention and steady reinvestment of the
profits.
     Her brother, Charles, is one of the most outspoken leaders of the
Group of 184, a coalition of business, civic and peasant groups that sprang
up in the past 18 months seeking to resolve Haiti's political crisis.
     "Haiti has always been divided between rich and poor," Mrs. Baker
said. "That's why the Group of 184 was started. We are all one nation, and
we spent months going around the country holding meetings, telling the
leaders of peasant groups that we are all brothers and sisters. Dozens of
their groups joined. We are finally working toward the same objective, and
not looking at each other across a divide."
     Whether such an appeal will break down the suspicions of the poor like
Mr. Cherie is the question that might decide Haiti's future.

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