A Year After Duvalier : Haiti: Better Life Is Still Out of Reach

Everything is different but nothing has changed on this transplanted mote of black Africa in the Caribbean.

A few Haitian children watch the cartoon figure Sgt. Slaughter, “a real American hero,” in English on cable television. The rest contemplate bare feet and empty bellies.

A hoped-for presidential election is nearer now than at the end of a 29-year Duvalier dictatorship a little more than a year ago.

But Haiti remains a long-shot runner in a poor man’s race against historic misery and repression. As it limps toward elected government, the hemisphere’s poorest country epitomizes the dilemma of sister Latin American nations where restored democracy is jeopardized by failure to demonstrate short-term economic benefit.

Resolve Mocked

Politics, like speech, is free, but the average Haitian, existing on $1 per day, is hung over from a year-ago block party that promised change but brought none to his kitchen table. Progress is painful, eroded daily like the Haitian hillsides that paupers strip for fuel. Everyone wants Haiti to become a decent and healthy place now that the Duvaliers are gone, but the depth of national crisis mocks their resolve.

“One cannot decree change after 29 years. Of course there is great uncertainty in a weak, poor country that lives off foreign aid,” said Hubert De Ronceray, a sociologist, a Cabinet minister under the dictatorship and now a presidential candidate.

In the squalor of downtown, with beggars on every corner, Haiti’s three-domed presidential palace has lain empty since President Jean-Claude Duvalier fled in the night Feb. 7, 1986. His army still lives in the big butterscotch-colored barracks next door.

Country of Voids

With Duvalier or without him, Haiti is a country of voids. At least 10% of all Haitians live in the United States as economic refugees, most of them illegally, according to U.S. government figures. Jobs, roads, schools, hospitals, clean water, sewers--all are urgent but overwhelming priorities. There is so much to do, so few resources with which to begin.

“The transition has gone tremendously well, but it is too slow. There have been many promises, but no movement,” said businessman Pierre R. Bayard, who publishes a monthly English-language newspaper from a corner office at his lumber yard.

The United States, which flew Duvalier from the country and actively supports the quest for democratic change, watches anxiously. It is no secret that the Reagan Administration is eager to proclaim a success in Haiti, but no success is yet apparent.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is investing $100 million in economic aid this year, most of it going to a Haitian countryside that has barely left the 17th Century.

Another $4 million is going to professionalize the police and army. When crowds gather, ill-trained soldiers and policemen tend to shoot; in Haiti they have killed about a dozen demonstrators since Duvalier left.

From his exile on the French Riviera, Duvalier himself represents no direct threat. But the Duvalierist legacy of authoritarianism and corruption that began in 1957 with his father, Francois, or Papa Doc, as he was known, fuels frustration and uncertainty.

Amid all the unfulfilled expectations, the economy has slid from the basement into the well.

In a country of 5.6 million where 85% of the people live at subsistence level in the countryside, 75% are illiterate, unemployment is reckoned at 49% and only 150,000 Haitians can be sure of a weekly paycheck, about 12,000 of 60,000 jobs have been lost in an assembly industry that is the most dynamic sector of the economy and a major source of foreign exchange.

“We think we touched bottom in October. There are now some signs of recovery,” said Joel Thebaud, who heads a U.S.-financed program to promote a labor-intensive industry that assembles garments, electronic components and all of the baseballs for the major leagues.

Vicious Circle

Behind state terror and a family-and-friends network of lucrative monopolies that Haitian officials are now unraveling, Duvalier offered stability. Investor nervousness, social ferment and wildcat strikes that followed his departure are bills still being paid.

Thebaud and other Haitians are nagged by a vicious circle unknown in Duvalier times: A failure to create jobs worsens social unrest, which threatens political stability, which discourages investment, which means a lack of new jobs.

People worry about a surge in crime and smuggling. They see despair as kindling for spontaneous street eruptions. “The social time bomb” is what lawyer Gregoire Eugene, another of the half-dozen serious presidential candidates, calls it.

“Little has been done to alleviate misery. Now hope is running down. Desperation is a potential source of explosive violence--and we are still nine months from elections,” said Mirlande Manigat, a political scientist trained at Paris’ Sorbonne University who returned to Haiti after a 24-year exile to work in the presidential campaign of her husband and fellow professor, Leslie Manigat.

‘Total Degradation’

“We suffered as exiles, but those who stayed suffered worse. We came back to encounter total degradation, physical and human,” she said.

As a tiny Port-au-Prince elite jostles for political advantage, Duvalier retainers stay on in mid-level government posts, their venality perhaps diminished but their efficiency unimproved.

“It is exceptionally difficult to govern. Only those Duvalier put to work know the routines. Where does one get replacements among people who have nothing?” asked Aubelin Jolicoeur, who quit in disgust after a few months as a post-Duvalier information minister and now talks of his “deception and disillusionment.”

A journalist, Jolicoeur was a gadfly institution at Port-au-Prince tourist hotels, back when there were any tourists. Tourism was finished by a combination of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome)--which was originally thought to be highly prevalent among Haitians--the sight of Haitian economic refugees washing ashore on Florida beaches and political unrest. A number of the old standby hotels are closed. The government’s 1986-87 budget for tourist promotion is zero, according to Thebaud.

‘I Know I Can’t’

A transition Council of Government headed by army Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy gets high marks for its lack of ambition and poor grades for its lack of energy.

“The council reacts, it does not govern,” said Louis Roy, one of 60 members of a Constituent Assembly drawing up a new constitution. “Not long ago I asked Namphy if it was that he didn’t want to do things or because he couldn’t. ‘I don’t want to because I know I can’t,’ he replied.”

A no-waves officer who climbed through the commissioned ranks in Duvalier days, Namphy disclaims political ambition. The general, whose stutter is a favorite target of political foes, vows that the army will guarantee a democratic transfer of power.

Most people seem to take him at his word, and Constituent Assembly member Roy, for one, says there has been no government attempt to influence the assembly’s deliberations.

‘Retrograde Dictatorship’

When a French reporter asked recently if Namphy did not feel handicapped by the loss of popular support for his government, the general rankled:

“What do you expect from a people who have lived for 30 years under a retrograde dictatorship and who never had the occasion to express themselves?” he demanded. “It’s an explosion. There is now a desire to know about the administration of public affairs. That’s what we must keep.”

In a country where political dissent has long been brutally suppressed, deliberations of the Constituent Assembly were broadcast live by the government’s radio station. More, they were open to all comers. While one recent session ran deep into the tropical night, students and passers-by lounged on a second-story balcony while assembly members spoke in polished French or staccato Creole about agriculture, erosion, the separation of powers and the need for punctuality among assembly members.

An economic team headed by a young Chicago-trained minister of finance is poking through the Duvalierist rubble in a controversial search for an export-oriented, free-market economy.

Tariffs have been reduced and many import duties eliminated, export taxes have been cut and a new income tax announced. Under a so-called “transparent budget,” one in which everything that goes into the government must be seen to come back out, government spending is up for education, health and agriculture.

$6 Million Recovered

Phantom workers by the hundreds are getting the ax as part of an administrative and economic restructuring that has recovered for the national treasury an estimated $6 million that used to go into Duvalierist bank accounts.

Economists believe that the reform will pay long-term dividends but, critically, they are not providing enough short-term jobs despite some quiet victories. A suburban elementary school, reopening after being closed for 12 years, attracted 300 students in two weeks. There are now three new teachers. The principal came back too: he had never missed a pay day in all that time.

With the United States at his elbow, Namphy has overseen a breathtaking political opening with, by Haitian standards, minimal repression: the dozen civilians killed by panicky security forces; one politician, a naturalized U.S. citizen, deported, and a handful of what the government calls leftists jailed briefly on the eve of the first anniversary of Duvalier’s flight.

There are nascent political parties and new publications at every turn.

‘Down With Government’

“The Council Is Moribund,” asserts the cover headline on a magazine published by De Ronceray’s party.

“Nothing has changed. Down with the government,” the poster of one leftist group states.

Exiles like Roy, who practiced medicine in Montreal for 28 years while on a Duvalier death list, have hurried home, and the government is stoking grass-roots organization programs in the desperate countryside.

Opposition to the Namphy liberalization is outspoken even among some who benefit from it. And in a country occupied by the U.S. Marines between 1915 and 1934, the charge is often that Namphy is doing no more than he is told to by the United States.

In the Communist Party downtown headquarters that are tenuously huddled behind an appropriately red iron fence, party boss Rene Theodore, one of those back from exile, said:

“It’s all a great bluff. The people are frustrated. They were promised justice and reparation: We haven’t seen it. Instead there is an old-time Duvalierist economic policy dictated by the U.S. Embassy.”

Election Timetable

A constitution assembled one protracted phrase at a time would give Theodore’s Communists and other political groups a chance to win power in elections later this year.

An ambitious timetable that threatens the organizational abilities of official Haiti calls for a referendum on the constitution in March or April, local and regional elections in August and a November vote for president and a bicameral legislature.

The president, to be chosen for a five-year term without right of immediate reelection, would take office Feb. 7, 1988, the second anniversary of Duvalier’s fall.

In the best of circumstances, then, it will be at least another year before an elected leader could assert policies that might inspire investment and promote stability. A year is a long time in hungry Haiti, where schedules tend to be as ephemeral as the hand-made kites hawked along the roadsides.

Many will not believe that a democratic alternative to strongman rule will fly in such an impoverished land until after it is airborne, just as many of those same Haitians hope desperately to witness the takeoff.

“Things have been bad. Many painters have given up for want of a market. I used to sell four times as much, but still I sense an improvement coming,” said Georges Nader, owner of Haiti’s best-known art gallery.

Tony Jean, lounging next to a wall bursting with primitive art outside an almost empty tourist hotel, nourishes the same hope with less conviction.

“If we don’t die first, maybe things will get better,” he said.