21663: Esser: The handshake man (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

In the Fray
http://inthefray.com

May 02, 2004

The handshake man
Can a priest help quell the ethnic, class, and political divisions
that afflict Haitian society — from the Dominican Republic?

Written by Justin Clark / Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Photographed by Justin Clark and Devin Asch
Posted Monday, May 3, 2004


“Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least
they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been
indifferent … If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all
faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it
the same faith under another mask?” —Graham Greene, The Comedians

A few hours across the border from Haiti, in the hot sprawling sugar
plantations of the Dominican Republic, lives a man everyone knows.
When the Haitian migrants, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and
Dominicans who cut cane here see the storm of dust stirred by the
approach of his Toyota pick-up, they stop what they are doing and
come forward with their weary smiles and their problems. “Pedro,”
they say.

The man in question is a 52-year-old Belgian priest whose real name
is Pierre Ruquoy.
But to them, he is Pedro. If the locals were once surprised by the
presence of a Creole-speaking foreigner, they are no longer. When
Pedro came to the Dominican Republic in 1975, during the corrupt
Balauger regime, there was little electricity outside the capital,
Santo Domingo. The roads were so terrible it took eight hours to make
a trip that now requires two. Like Don Quixote he rode his mule up
into the mountains, not to do battle with the windmills of poverty
and suffering, but to learn with “the people,” a favorite phrase of
his.

Pedro lives in a modest house, paid for by the Church, and runs the
local Catholic radio station, Radio Enriquillo. He is a busy man,
delivering his nine weekly masses, and listening to the endless
problems of “the people”: a man whose wife has been stolen by a
plantation security guard; a young man who wants to avoid marrying
the girl he has gotten pregnant; a man whose shoulder is infected and
needs antibiotics. Pedro listens, and intervenes when he can, as he
has been doing for almost three decades.

The batey is a strange place to spend 30 years by choice. It looks
like nothing more than an army base. There are checkpoints, to make
sure that the workers stay put working the jobs for which they have
been recruited, and to prevent rival plantations from stealing each
other’s workers. There is barbed wire, here and there, though there
is practically nothing to steal. Security is a rooster tethered to a
stone.

Once the batey was a more ramshackle affair, but each presidential
administration builds more modern structures, plastering them with
campaign posters afterwards — and it is an election year in the
Dominican Republic. Vote Hipolito, for the good times. Vote Leonel.
Vote Eduardo Estrella. We have built your houses. The church itself
has built the newest ones: pastel-colored houses that cost $3,000 a
piece, a small fortune here.

But the labor, that never changes — the hot endless labor that gives
the workers food to eat, provides sugar for our coffee, and defines
the batey’s atmosphere.

Now, mid-March, is the tiempo muerto, and the men and women sit
around in the shade of their barracks like bored soldiers. Across the
border, in their homeland, their countrymen are killing each other,
exacting political revenge, but news is hard to come by, and almost
always comes secondhand. Here there is no work, no killing, nothing.
The women sit in plastic chairs and watch the laundry dry, and the
men, those who have not contracted malaria or rougeole, the measles,
take turns trimming each other’s hair. Their children wander around
sucking on bits of cane or plastic bags of yellow homemade ice cream.
One clever boy ties a rope to another’s bicycle, and they take turns
towing each other around through the gray dust that surrounds the
gray-green sea of cane stalks.

It is, as words fail to express, a hard life. The majority of the
workers are second generation Haitians or Dominican Haitians, half of
whom do not speak Creole, the language of Haiti. Lacking
documentation, fully a third cannot assert the political rights
guaranteed them as citizens born in the Dominican Republic. The
conditions are worst for Haitian immigrants, who, for the privilege
of cutting cane from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. for $3 a day, pay their
traffickers $600 Haitian dollars (around US$70 ) to take them across
the border to the Dominican plantations. Because of interest owed to
the traffickers, the immigrants often do not earn enough to be able
to return home. The hard work has not advanced any cause but their
short-term survival.

Without documentation, they are continuously deported. In 1997,
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that 25,000
Haitians were deported in the months of January and February alone,
or one out of every eight of the 200,000 workers on the bateyes. That
another stream of Haitians continuously replaces those deported
testifies to Haiti’s dire economic conditions. Often, newly-arrived
sugar cane cutters show up at Pedro’s house naked, having sold their
clothes to the traffickers. They knock on the door in the middle of
the night. They have malaria, they have the mumps, they are often
simply heartbroken and tired. Pedro gives them something to wear,
something to eat, a place to stay, medicine. But their biggest
problem is something he, as a foreigner, cannot solve.

“To work here you have to know you are a stranger,” Pedro says. With
a fencer’s lean frame, a gray European moustache, wire-rim glasses,
and pants hitched high over his waist, he holds his Nacional
cigarette with an intellectual delicacy as we drive to the shanties
where the cane cutters live. “You will never be Dominican. It’s
important to have confidence in your own identity — then you can
bring something and receive something. It’s the people who will save
the people. There is no people in the world that believes another
people will save it.”

These seem odd words from a missionary, especially when one considers
the steady flow of aid that comes from the church. But far more would
be needed to close the plantations’ open sewers, to put running water
in each house. Pedro can only afford to shelter a dozen or so
refugees at his house. Even if there plight of the refugees
themselves were eased, says Pedro, refugees would still spill across
the border, probably in greater numbers. The economic problems of
Haitians in the Dominican Republic are inseparable from the economic
problems of Haiti, which are at least partly political in nature.


Learning about Haiti through sound bites

For a few weeks this spring, the world gained an intermittent
awareness of the tides of misery that send Haitians looking for work
in the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic, that threatened
to wash up boatloads of refugees on Florida’s shores. “The poorest
country in the Western Hemisphere,” we were told in sound bites on
the nightly news, watching a rebel force creep down from the northern
city of Gonaives toward Port-au-Prince. “Forty-five percent of
Haitians are illiterate. Seventy percent are unemployed. Thirty
percent are malnourished. Eighty percent live in poverty.”

The reason we were treated to this statistical portrait had less to
do with its inherent tragedy than the need to flesh out the story of
Haiti’s most recent upheaval, to give it context before it sparkled
and faded into the ether of more pressing conflicts. We needed these
numbers to understand why, when the nation was so occupied with
seducing new parts of the world with democracy, there were yet more
dark faces overturning cars and lighting tire barricades afire and
protesting against their first democratically-elected president.

At the same time, it didn’t matter. A cruel anomaly of geography
landed a nation of dire poverty just 150 miles from Miami, and so we
heaved a sigh of resignation, and dispatched a few thousand Marines,
as Colin Powell recently put it, to avoid “a bloodbath.” The question
was not intervention, which has proven necessary throughout Haiti’s
history, but who to blame for the failure of a man once considered to
be Haiti’s hope.

Critics who fault Aristide say he strayed too far from the promises
and methods he used as a radical priest who criticized Haiti’s
repressive Duvalier regime. Twenty-thousand U.S. marines forcibly
reinstated Aristide’s rule in 1994, after being forced from power by
the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress (FRAPH), a group
allied with long-time Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc”
Duvalier. Did Aristide expect us to do it again? On the other hand,
say supporters of Aristide, the United Nations and the State
Department also pressured Aristide to accept an economic structural
adjustment program in exchange for expediting his return to power – a
deal that made it difficult, impossible some say, for him to carry
out promised reforms. Some in the Congressional Black Caucus even
claim that Washington and Paris engineered his failure as retribution
for criticizing their economic policies.

One thing is for certain: even if the people could save the people,
history has not given them the chance. Recognizing that Haiti’s
proximity to the Windward Passage gave the island strategic
importance, U.S. Marines occupied the country for nearly two decades
after the assassination of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in
1915. After their departure in 1934, the constitution was rewritten
and the infrastructure was improved, but the country remained in a
state of economic hardship that undermined the American attempt to
create political stability.

Haitian-Americans such as activist Serge Lilavois, 57, argue that
this pattern has simply repeated itself again, and that the reform
efforts Aristide proposed never had a chance. “If you don’t have
enough money, you’re going to find people in disagreement with you,”
said Lilavois, organizer of the Coalition to Resist the February 29
Coup in Haiti, a New York-based group convinced that Aristide was
ordered by the Bush administration to depart, or as the president
himself claimed, kidnapped. The Coalition says the press exaggerated
the human rights abuses of Aristide’s partisans, which they allege
numbered only a fraction of those committed by the rebels who deposed
him. Lč yo vle touye chen yo di’l fou, goes the Creole saying – when
they want to kill a dog they say it’s crazy.

Locating divisions

Strangely, the upheaval in Haiti politics seem to be more on people’s
minds in the Haitian diaspora of New York City than right across the
border. Many of the workers of Haitian descent do not recognize
pictures of their country’s ousted president.

Instead of political divisions, the bateyes are segregated by
antihaitianismo, a word that succinctly spells out the country’s
ethnic hierarchies. Haitians, Dominicans, and Dominican Haitians,
live in separate shanties. Anxious to distinguish themselves from a
lower social standing, the Dominican Haitians in the bateyes get
along even worse with Haitians, says Pedro.

“Trujillo made the division between Haitians and Dominicans in the
batey,” Pedro says. “Dominican people feel they are Spanish people
and it’s a lie. They don’t acknowledge African culture. You have to
break the idea that white people are superior.”

But the most odious division of all, according to Pedro, the one most
inimical to the plight of Haitians both in their country and in the
Dominican Republic, is class.

For the past couple of months, he has given refuge to a half-dozen
young Haitian student demonstrators, all of them from the upper
classes. In January, they were stopped and detained by militiamen in
the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince. They feared for their lives.
The government press had taken their picture at the demonstrations
they’d helped organize, and read their names on the radio — the
primary means of communicating in the mostly illiterate country. The
brother of one, Johame, had been a long-time enemy of the Lavalas
government, and the radio journalist brother of another, Samuel, had
been beaten to the brink of coma four days earlier. They worried they
would suffer the fate of their friend Brignol Lindor, a radio station
journalist who had been stoned and hacked to death for opposing
Aristide’s partisans, the chimeres.

Fortunately, the chimeres did not discover their identities. They
were merely beaten and released, and with the help of the Committee
of Lawyers for Individual Respect and Liberties (CARLI) they escaped
to the Dominican Republic, where they now stay with Pedro. In
exchange, they have agreed to teach a class to the plantation
workers, most of whom have had little formal education. Pedro says
much of the political instability in Haiti owes to a lack of
education among the rural population. It is easy for demagogues to
persuade them to unsettle governments, he argues.

“There are two countries in Haiti: people who come from
Port-au-Prince, and people from the mountains. We try to help them
understand what happened in Haiti, but it’s not easy. Last week I
went to the mountains, and talked to 25 people who had almost made a
decision to help [rebel leader] Guy Philippe,” Pedro explains. It was
a demonstration of how poor the flow of information is to the people
in the mountains: An interim government had already taken the reigns
from Philippe weeks before Pedro’s trip.

Pedro says he wanted the class to be an opportunity for the students
to learn from the workers. Asked if that was the students’ motive for
teaching it, he sounds frustrated.

“They are teaching the class for solidarity with me. It’s not for the
people. They (the workers and the students) speak two different
languages.”


Building the New Movement

I am eager to meet the students, nevertheless, wondering if this will
be an example of the people helping the people. I sit with them in
the early afternoon at a table under a pavilion in Pedro’s backyard.
A refreshing breeze has picked up, and the relaxing click of dominoes
fills the hours while Pedro is off at Radio Enriquillo, the local
Catholic station.

When I begin to ask them how they intend to foster political unity
here in the Dominican Republic, and across the border, the students
evade my questions. They begin an intense discussion in French about
my presence. Several times I hear the acronym “CIA.” An American’s
sudden presence in the middle of nowhere, the students’ recent
experiences, and the long history of clandestine U.S. intervention in
Haitian politics make this a reasonable possibility. When asked the
name of their group, they say they can’t decide, because they are
changing it.

“We’re calling it the New Movement,” says Gethro, their unofficial
spokesman.

Gethro has the best English, good enough that he translated for the
U.S. marines in 1994, the last time they occupied the country.
Johame, still in his early-20’s, is already graying, and the unspoken
leader of the group. Michelle, with short red hair, maintains a
petulant silence. Smith is tall and lanky, Samuel a champion cyclist.
I cannot resist imagining that I am meeting, in its gawky youth, the
future leadership of Haiti, and so I empty out the disorderly
contents of my wallet onto the table to calm them.

“Our fathers could be killed,” says Gethro, who asks me not to use
his and the other students’ surnames, fearing for their families’
safety. He shows me a local Dominican newspaper printed a few weeks
earlier, whose cover story was on the political crisis. The
photograph shows the students and several of Pedro’s other refugee
guests walking together across the batey. They toss it around,
angrily.

“It’s the picture,” Gethro explains, stabbing the page with his
finger. “It puts us with the other refugees.”

Johame points across the half-finished domino game at Samy, a young
man who caught malaria while cutting cane, and is now recuperating at
Pedro’s house. He speaks no English and looks at us with concern,
unsure what we are saying. Earlier he said that he came here to look
for life, but that he hasn’t been able to find it. I wonder if the
phrase is as poetic before translation.

“He,” says Johame, referring to his countryman, “is an economic
refugee. We are political refugees.”

At first I think the students are upset because the article might
endanger their case for political asylum, but Pedro later tells me
this is not the case, that indeed, the article, which clearly
identifies the students as political refugees, has boosted their
chances of receiving it.

Their anger, Pedro says, has a much simpler cause: This student
elite, these brave organizers of the demonstrations against Aristide,
have been thrust together by history into the squalor of the batey.
Even though their immediate cause, Aristide’s departure, has been
achieved, their country remains politically unstable, their
university closed. Among the very people they seek to help, they are
culturally and often linguistically isolated.


Who are the People?

Pedro’s dictum is, “The people must save the people.” The aid
workers, the 2,500 foreign peacekeepers sent to Haiti after
Aristide’s ouster, can only lend a hand. But who are the people?
Students, cane cutters, rich mulattoes, political or economic
refugees, Haitians or Dominican Haitians? Who, when the international
community returns its attention to more pressing matters will be left
in power? Whose interest will they have in mind?

Perhaps it is too difficult to predict how things will change for
workers on the bateyes, following this month’s election in the
Dominican Republic. It is harder still to say what will become of
Haiti after the election scheduled in 2005. In the meantime, the
tiempo muerto continues, and the struggle for survival trumps the
political one.

But Pedro insists that the strength needed for both fights will come
from the same source. He takes me to the house of his friend, Noel,
one of more than a hundred voodoo priests on the batey. Noel, 76,
diabetic and blind, lies naked on a wooden mat in his boxers as we
enter. The father of 54 children, he looks remarkably young, and I
wonder if there is something to what Pedro says.

“He says it is time to die, but I say I don’t agree,” Pedro smiles,
after conferring with the other man in the mushy sounds of Creole. He
explains he has promised to speak with Baron Cimetiere, the god of
the dead, on Noel’s behalf. “I said I have to go to the Pantheon to
speak with the spirit of the dead and give rum. Now is not the moment
to go to the land of the dead.”

“Can I take a picture of him?” I ask. Pedro gets the old man’s
permission and his son steps inside to close the fly of Noel’s
boxers. I take another picture of the priest’s altar, an unimpressive
collection of bottles and dusty picture frames that looks to me like
a pile of recycling. Later, as we drive back to Pedro’s house, I ask
Pedro what the Church thinks about his close relationship with a
heathen religion, and his attendance of voodoo ceremonies.

“It was a problem for them when they saw I visited a voodoo priest,”
he says. “The Catholic Church doesn’t accept voodoo as a religion,
but the most progressive people in the church call it religiosity. I
don’t like to call it religiosity. They tend to say, ‘We have
religion, they have religiosity.’ For two centuries voodoo allowed
people to maintain their identity — we need to respect it.”

This sounds reasonable, but his tone suggests something greater than
mere respect. I ask him if he believes in voodoo himself.

“Once I was sick and visited the priest. He said, ‘I will see what
the spirit can do, but I don’t know what I will say because you are a
Catholic priest — anyway, I will say you are a friend.’ He gave me a
bottle of water and something else in it, some herbs.”

“Did it work?” I ask, not interested so much in the efficacy of the
herbs, as Pedro’s faith in the people, which seems larger at times
than his allegiance to the Church. He seems, frankly, to be a closet
humanist.

“Yes,” says Pedro, happily.

I ask him later where he gets his own energy, and indeed he says it
has come from the example set by the people he has lived with for
more than half his life.

“The thing is to live every day,” he answers. “In Europe and in the
U.S., we live next month, next week. These people live every day.”

“But,” he adds, after a moment, “that’s a problem too.”

I think of Samy, who is looking for life but cannot find it, and I
think I know what he means. We spend the rest of the day driving
through the bateyes. The people come forward to tell him their
problems, to share a joke, to shake his hand. They shake mine as
well, though if Pedro is right, I cannot really say what they are
hoping for.

The writer
Justin Clark, INTHEFRAY.COM Assistant Editor

© 2004 INTHEFRAY.COM
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