21337: Lemieux: COX News Service: Haiti divided by race, wealth (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

 Haiti divided by race, wealth
-- By Mike Williams/COX NEWS SERVICE

15 Avril 2004

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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