From Horror to Hope : For the First Time in Decades, Haiti Has a Popularly Elected President. Can He Steer His Country Away From Its Bloody Past?

Throughout Port-au-Prince, Haitians were trying, for the first time in 30 years, to dig out of their own filth. From their wretched, unsanitary hovels, they came at twilight, pouring into the streets by the thousands. Most carried homemade brooms and rakes, others used their bare hands to assault the mountains of human refuse that had risen about them for so many decades, largely unnoticed and insignificant, until now.

Clouds of dust and smoke choked the city for the next week, as laughing, radiant Haitians swept and hauled and burned. Sidewalks gradually emerged where none had been seen for years. Rotten, blackish heaps of everything from orange rinds to moldering mattresses disappeared. The rusting hulks of old cars were carted away. A few people even attempted to skim the pestilent, open sewers. Chickens and pigs and goats scattered shrieking into the night; scrawny dogs chased them with delight; throbbing Creole music filled the air.

Lavalas. In Creole it means “flash flood.” Now it’s what Haitians call the grass-roots movement that elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a 37-year-old socialist priest, president last December, in the country’s first free elections since the brutal Duvalier-family dictatorship fell in 1986. “Together, we are the lavalas ,” he told them. Together, they would wash all Haiti’s nightmares away. No more, he swore to them, would Haiti belong to just a precious few. Now everyone would “sit around the table, instead of just a few, with the rest underneath, catching the crumbs.” He won in a landslide.

Democracy sweeps through Latin America, everywhere flinging tyrants from power, and now, at last, Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere, also belongs. Lavalas. In the weeks before Aristide’s February 7 inauguration, its magic was everywhere. Artists painted dazzling murals on city walls, mostly of Aristide’s campaign symbol, the brilliantly feathered fighting cock. Others painted cheap plastic juice bottles red and blue, the colors of the Haitian flag, then strung them on electrical poles, makeshift ornaments fluttering with all the bright pride of neon. Even most of Haiti’s beggars had temporarily disappeared. “Aristide, he tells us that we must work,” said one little boy who wanted $1 but offered, in exchange, a crude but clever hand-carved bird.

Lavalas . It even has its own language. Throughout Haiti, people were crowing with more raw joy than the barnyard roosters. “ Rrrrrrr uh rrrrr !” squawked a laughing, ragged old man, Alex DeNir, standing in the shadows of what was once the eternally lighted Duvalier-family crypt, now a crushed pile of weedy rubble. He grabbed his armpits and, flapping his elbows wildly, crowed again, and again. Soon a crowd of at least 50 others drifted toward the sound, all crowing and flapping, and laughing, too.

For now, at least, it seemed that all of Haiti was laughing as it tried, in its own small way, to dress up for perhaps the greatest moment in its sad history. By inauguration day, the shantytowns of Haiti, home of 6 million of the poorest, most diseased, illiterate, brutalized and overlooked people on Earth, were as spotless and gay as human effort could make them. In those final hours, no one thoughtlessly tossed even a stray candy wrapper or cigarette butt into the gutters. Visitors were astonished, and even Haitians marveled at what they had wrought in honor of the young priest they affectionately call Titid. Little Aristide.

Expelled by his Salesian order two years ago for fomenting class warfare, his presidential victory still the object of stony Vatican silence, Aristide may next be stripped of his priesthood altogether. But now he sweeps through Haiti with the aura of a Messiah. “Hallelujah,” a lilting, melancholy Haitian version of the classic Handel chorus, has virtually replaced the national anthem. “God has sent us Titid,” explained one exuberant teen-ager, taxing his English. “So we clean, because we do not want that he must come and sit for us in the nasty.”

Lavalas. After decades of docility at the point of army Uzis and vicious, paramilitary goons called Tontons Macoute, 34 years after a country doctor called Papa Doc set up the Duvalier tyranny in 1957, and two centuries after Haitian slaves, in one of the most heroic moments of black history, threw out the French to establish the world’s first black republic, only to descend into ever worsening misery, now comes frail, myopic, homely little Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to see if he can do any better for Haiti himself.

DECHOUKAJ

By election day on December 16, Aristide had antagonized, alienated and alarmed every pocket of power and privilege in Haiti. From the fenced mansions in the hillside suburbs above Port-au-Prince to the downtown enclaves of big business and government sinecures, he was being called a demagogue, another Papa Doc, a closet Communist and, because he is given to what his friends call “nervous prostrations,” maybe mentally unstable, too. They scoffed at his slum origins, his faded ‘60s rhetoric and even made fun of his appearance, his thick lips and drooping left eyelid. “I call it the E.T. syndrome,” sniffed one millionaire. “He’s so little and ugly, even I want to protect him.” But few had the nerve to utter a word of this in public.

Because hand in hand with lavalas , January was also the month of terrifying dechoukaj-- in Creole, the “uprooting.” In reality, in the weeks leading up to February 7, it meant mob justice.

Dechoukaj. It began with real enough cause when, on the night of January 6, Roger Lafontant, former leader of Duvalier’s infamous militia, the Tontons Macoutes--disgruntled because he had been disqualified as a presidential candidate himself--staged a short-lived coup. Lafontant had barely cleared the National Palace doors with his band of 16 cohorts before the conch shells were sounding all over Haiti, the same alert to danger that the slaves used centuries ago. By dawn, the streets swarmed with hundreds of thousands of enraged Haitians. The army moved in; Lafontant and company were jailed within 12 hours.

But the blood bath lasted two days. Eighty-seven Haitians died. The street in front of Lafontant’s headquarters was littered with corpses, some of them Macoutes, others merely hapless idlers. They were chased down and shot or hacked to death in the streets. Or burned alive. For the first time, Haitians have picked up the South African habit of “necklacing” their victims with burning tires.

“It was something to see, to see how they ran, ran, ran, trying to escape. But the people caught them, and they went to see God,” said a gas-station manager, laughing, and ashamed of himself for it. “It is not a happy laugh--it is bad to see Haitian killing Haitian, but. . . .” He began giggling helplessly again. “It’s just that I never thought to see those big, tough guys, running, running, trying to get away like snakes.” In a few instances, captured by news photographers, Haitians also ate pieces of the dead Macoutes. “When you hate someone so much, killing is not enough,” said one young cannibal, maybe 20, standing in front of a burned-out hotel.

Dechoukaj . It was the same terror of the Duvalier days, only reversed. Now, as then, nobody was safe. Two weeks after the Lafontant coup, a rumor spread that yet another coup was in the making. Mobs swarmed again. By dawn, 17 more were dead--including two popular local musicians, both blind. They were necklaced, supposedly because the crowd thought they were celebrating Aristide’s rumored downfall. As it turned out, they had been hired by a proud father, also murdered, to help celebrate his 18-year-old daughter’s birthday.

In January, to have even served the Macoutes a beer or cashed their checks was enough to invite disaster. Hotels, supermarkets, private homes burned throughout the capital. Anybody even remotely associated with the old Duvalier regime either fled the country or sat in dread, wondering just how far the dechoukaj would spread. At times, Macoute seemed a virtually meaningless word, a catch-all phrase for anything disagreeable or suspect.

“I saved all my life to build this place,” sobbed Nicador Victor, 54, a burly one-time New York City longshoreman, sitting amid the ruins of his business, a combination restaurant-whorehouse. Before burning the place, mobs had stripped it of refrigerators, beds, even stolen the hookers’ clothes. “Sure, some Macoutes were customers, but I am not a political man; I ran a business. What was I supposed to do, ask them for IDs? Tell them to get out and get shot?”

And heaven help the Haitian actually known to have been a Tontons Macoute, Creole for “bogeyman.” In reality, the Macoutes--estimated to number anywhere from 30,000 to 300,000, depending on whom you ask--were basically a band of hired thugs, with some seriously evil leaders and killers but, otherwise, just a loosely organized crowd of illiterate, armed, costumed country boys, hustling a buck and a macho identity. Most just liked strutting around the airport and hotels in their dark glasses, red bandannas and bell-bottom jeans, looking tough. (In a bid for respectability, Papa Doc’s son, Jean-Claude, later forced the disappointed Macoutes into boring blue uniforms.)

“It was 15 years ago, and I joined because you had to. It was the only way to make money and to get a safe-conduct pass, to keep them from hurting me and my family,” said a slender man of perhaps 40, sitting in his one-room hut with his wife and four children. Everybody was whispering. “I’ve moved (from his rural village to Port-au-Prince), and I don’t think anybody here knows that I once wore the uniform. But I’m scared. If they find out,” he said, trembling, “they will dechouk me, for sure. They will come with the cans of gas.” A curtain of cheap beads across his door rattled in the breeze, and he jumped. “I never hurt anybody, I swear,” he whimpered. “I only did what they told me. I was just a little Macoute.”

Dechoukaj. Now the tables were turned. The people were in charge. Long displeased with the Roman Catholic Church’s treatment of Aristide, mobs also took revenge on the Vatican’s ambassador, Papal Nuncio Guiseppe Leanza. Before burning the luxurious hilltop nunciature to the ground, they stripped him for the amusement of the crowds, then nearly beat his protesting chief aide to death. Others went searching for the archbishop, Francois Wolff Ligonde, whose standing with Aristide supporters had hit rock bottom when he warned the populace, during a New Year’s Day Mass, against embracing “a defrocked social bolshevism rejected by the countries of the East.” But he escaped the country. Now Haiti has neither an archbishop nor a nuncio.

Through it all, Aristide refused to calm his people. Instead, in a radio address, he blamed the attacks at the nunciature on Macoutes, who were trying to derail the lavalas , and even further inflamed the population. “I understand your will to catch the big Macoutes so they will not massacre us tomorrow,” he said. “That is legitimate. Watch that they don’t commit bad acts and blame them on us. Watch them, catch them, stop them and prevent them from creating disorder.”

“He is inciting people to riot! We have all the ingredients here for a new fascism. Human rights violations have been as severe in the last month as they were under Duvalier,” exploded Jean-Jacques Honorat, head of the Haitian Center for Human Rights, one of the few willing to go public with his complaints. “As a Haitian, I am ashamed! We have political prisoners (Lafontant and others) who are being held incommunicado. Lawyers are afraid to defend them! Journalists are afraid to criticize. Everybody is afraid. . . . But even Papa Doc didn’t burn blind musicians alive !” he finished, shouting.

But Honorat is only one idealist, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a priest fast making the transition to Third World politician. The power of the mobs, as he well knew, was all that stood between him and a successful coup, all that held the 7,000-man army in check, all that kept him alive. Already he had escaped at least three assassination attempts: In the bloodiest, a gang of killers stormed his church, Saint-Jean Bosco, during a mass in 1988 and massacred 12 of his congregation with Uzis and machetes, while soldiers stood by. Aristide reportedly remained frozen in his pulpit, praying aloud, until somebody snatched him to the safety of a locked courtyard, where he watched as his church went up in flames. Assassins were still trying, too. Only days before the election, hand grenades were thrown into a political rally he had departed only a few minutes earlier. That time, seven died.

Dechoukaj . It goes both ways. Five days before his inauguration, arsonists--presumably the “big Macoutes”--set fire to an orphanage Aristide had founded for 200 street children. Four youngsters were burned to death. Aristide came to the scene and cried. The small bodies, charred beyond recognition, were left on display at the morgue all day, so that Haitians might witness this latest, cruelest assault on Aristide, on their fledgling democracy, on themselves. Hundreds passed by, more rage than sorrow in their faces. The city braced for the dechoukaj that was sure to happen that night.

But no conch shells sounded, no bullets were fired, no buildings burned. Only five more days until the inauguration of Titid. That night, the streets were eerily empty; even the taxi drivers were afraid to go out. The city was frightening in its silence. Next morning, Haitians returned to their sweeping. Lavalas.

TITID

Jean-Bertrand Aristide is one of them, a son of the slums himself, raised in a fatherless household, with one older sister, by a mother who was once a street vendor and part-time domestic. He grew up in and around the neighborhood of La Saline, a place on the road from the airport, where tourists can still see people bathing in sewers, grimy charcoal vendors laboring under inhuman loads and smoke rising from the huts of voodoo priests, first and last resort of those without the resources for modern medicine. In La Saline, there is no running water, only a few public water taps. Children suffering from that disease of terminal malnutrition called kwashiorkor, characterized by red hair and bloated bellies, are a routine sight here, 750 miles from Miami.

Nearly everyone, most of them refugees from the ruined rural countryside, is unemployed--eight out of 10 Haitians earn less than $150 a year. Hundreds line the curbsides, eking out a few pennies a day, selling everything from vegetables, rubber thongs and charcoal to smuggled cans of Carnation milk. Sometimes, one of Haiti’s legendary artists will also appear, offering to sell some brilliant piece of his soul for whatever the buyer can please give.

Born in 1953, Aristide grew up during the cruelest days of President-for-Life Francois Duvalier’s long reign. Throughout the ‘60s, Haitians were either exiled for the merest hint of dissent or, worse, taken away by soldiers and Macoutes to a yellow edifice on the edge of town, known as Fort Dimanche, a place from which uncounted thousands never returned. (Although campaign literature says only that Aristide’s father was a peasant who died when Aristide was 3 months old, La Saline locals swear that the senior Aristide was a local shoemaker and street musician, shot at Fort Dimanche for criticizing Papa Doc, when his son was 5.)

During Aristide’s childhood, Haitians were not even permitted to walk on the sidewalks in front of the National Palace, which rose like some ephemeral white fairy-tale castle amid the shantytowns of its impoverished subjects, who could only imagine what luxuries lay within, what opulence their leaders enjoyed. All they could see from afar were the glittering ballroom chandeliers beyond the tapestries and the Rolls-Royces descending from the hillside suburbs, discharging guests in elegant evening dress, golden military braid and clerical collars.

Aristide was 18 when Papa Doc died, bequeathing Haiti to his obese 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude (promptly nicknamed Baby Doc). But Haitians almost never saw their new President-for-Life. Baby Doc was reportedly so depressed by the misery in his streets, he rarely left the palace. When he did, he flung small change from his car windows to people groveling in the gutters. Meanwhile, his glamorous, chain-smoking mulatto wife, Michele, briefly attempted to play Evita to the poor, building one of the best-equipped hospitals in Haiti, which she named for herself.

By the time the Duvalier regime finally fell five years ago, with the royal couple escaping to France aboard a U.S. government jet in the wake of massive public demonstrations, Jean-Bertrand Aristide could take some credit. By then, he was among the most powerful voices for change in Haiti.

Aristide owes his escape from a dead-end life in large part to the Salesian Fathers, who took him into their huge school in La Saline at age 6 and educated him, sending him to high school and college in Haiti, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Then the Salesians sent him abroad for three years of advanced studies in Israel, England and Canada. By the time he returned to Haiti in 1982, when he was ordained, he was conversant in six foreign languages. Today, half the people in La Saline claim to recall the studious, smart, tiny boy. “Aristide was always the best student, very serious, very smart,” says Salesian Father Cazo Nau, a one-time Boy Scout leader who best remembers Aristide as very diligent in earning his merit badges and “always a good person.”

Aristide has been horrifying the Salesian Fathers, among the most conservative of orders to begin with, almost since the day of his ordination. What the Salesians had created, they soon discovered, was a headache that would not go away. Aristide had become a committed liberation theologian--one among that progressive breed of Latin priests who use their pulpits to preach social justice for the poor, blending Scripture with Marxist terminology. Assigned a parish near La Saline, Aristide was soon electrifying the poor, as much with his courage as with his message: Not only must the Duvaliers go, so must all those who had helped maintain Haiti’s cruel status quo, from the U.S. imperialists, complacent Catholic bishops and greedy elite to the killer army generals and Macoutes.

“Capitalism is a sin,” he preached. “They use their capital to exploit the people. They use the army to kill those who are working for real democracy.” He decried U.S. businessmen as “bloodsuckers” for exploiting Haiti’s slave wages of $3 per day; the U.S. government--those “cold imperialists to the north”--could keep its foreign aid, if it continued to arrive in a form that was “destroying Haitian dignity and national productivity.”

He attacked the Vatican for seducing the poor into passivity. He compared the Pope to the chief executive officer of a multinational corporation, “whose job is to ensure efficiency, continuity and profit while maintaining the status quo.” He took special aim at Archbishop Ligonde, a distant relative of Michele Duvalier, for hobnobbing with the dictators over fine food and wine in the palace while presiding over what Aristide calls “the parish of the poor.”

“The whole of Haiti is like a bicycle,” he said in one sermon, “and the wheel is in our hands. Everyone wants us to turn right, but that would maintain the corruption. We must turn left. Does that mean we are communists? No. But we must have a society where we can respect the communists and all sorts of people, and not shoot them, although what we choose for ourselves is a socialist society. I think it is the only type of society where everybody can find justice and respect and food.”

And, finally, Aristide advanced the notion of dechoukaj. He quoted Scripture in urging Haitians to defend themselves against the army and the Macoutes: “And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one” (Luke 22:36). “Don’t be fooled,” he told his flock. “A machete is useful in almost any situation. Those rusty blades are long and sharp. They remind me of (Simon) Bolivar’s sword.”

The Salesians tried to transfer him out of the country. But each time they tried, Aristide’s growing flock rebelled, once occupying the splendid pink and yellow cathedral in a week-long hunger strike. Aristide continued, with escalating passion and mounting nerve. A tremendous showman with a flair for theater, he kept a mannequin of a Macoute in his office, in sunglasses and red bandanna, that he sometimes berated for the TV cameras. He periodically held mock funerals for Duvalierist ministers and generals.

Before long, thanks mainly to the sloppiness of the henchmen who were trying to kill him, he had also come to be widely regarded as divine. Haiti is, after all, the land of voodoo, a place of walking spirits, of living sacrifices and zombies and possession, where evil and good co-exist without the judgmental stress of other religions. In voodoo, very little is impossible--and it remains at the spiritual heart of Haiti, despite the missionaries. It was the burning of Aristide’s church and the massacre of his congregation that turned speculation into widespread faith that Aristide is possessed of supernatural powers.

“Their bullets cannot kill him. God protects him. Aristide can disappear whenever he wants,” said Luisa Charlemaigne, a vegetable vendor. Even Aristide’s fragile appearance and much discussed “nervous prostrations” only lend to the mystique. “He suffers so for the people, just like Jesus,” said another woman in the market. It was not a comparison Aristide discouraged. Two months after the church burning--which, remarkably, the Vatican never publicly condemned--he emerged from seclusion, looking haggard, to remind his flock that “Jesus wasn’t a priest either.” By then, he was also referring to himself as the prophet of the people.

During the years following the Duvaliers’ flight to France (looting the treasury of anywhere from $200 million to $800 million in the process), Aristide’s anger toward the United States escalated, as he watched five U.S.-backed governments--three of them led by Duvalier’s generals--perpetuate corruption, killings, sham elections, coups and mass misery. And nothing would change, Aristide preached furiously to his followers, because Washington was not interested in real democracy in Haiti--only in “the appearance of elections,” in order to install yet one more puppet government to do its bidding.

“Revolution, not elections,” he was exhorting Haitians, almost until the day he entered the race himself.

A HISTORY OF DOOM

In many respects, Haiti is still a slave revolution in progress. Its beginnings were glorious. In 1791, Haitian slaves rose in terrifying might against their French masters and, to the horror of the colonial world, won. After a vicious 13-year war, Napoleon Bonaparte was obliged to give up one of his richest possessions, a lush island bursting with sugar, coffee, spices, indigo and fruits, the envy of the Caribbean. “We have a false idea of the Negro,” one of his retreating generals remarked. In 1804, Saint Domingue, on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, bordering the Dominican Republic, became Haiti, the world’s first black republic. Haitians have been paying for it ever since.

For decades the fledgling nation was isolated from the world, partly through its own paranoia that the French would return, but mainly because colonial powers, despising the precedent set by these rebellious slaves, refused to trade with Haiti. The French ultimately extracted about $150 million in reparations for lost plantations. The U.S. embargo lasted until 1862.

Shunned by the world, its leaders illiterate and unworldly, with no frame of political reference beyond that imposed by white kings and emperors and their own diverse African tribal customs, Haiti never developed a democratic tradition. A potpourri of different peoples ripped from all parts of Africa, communicating in the slaves’ improvised, communal language of Creole, now flung together in search of instant national harmony, Haitians seemed doomed from the start. From the outset, violence marked the changing of Haitian regimes, as did the tendency of Haitian leaders, aping their colonial masters, to name themselves to lifetime positions. In all, Haiti has had nine emperors, governors and Presidents-for-Life.

Nor did Haiti ever overcome the racial hatreds that gave birth to the country in the first place. Even before the revolution, the mulattoes, lighter-skinned and finer-boned, half-breed descendants of the French and their slaves, were often granted privileges that black slaves were not, ranging from better food to French lessons. In later decades, mulattoes gradually took control of Haiti’s civil service and professions, while blacks worked the fields and manned the army.

Today, the small mulatto minority, maybe 10% of the population, remains better educated, speaks French and owns most of the national wealth; 75% of the blacks are illiterate and speak Creole. In another class distinction, mulattoes tend to publicly deny any attraction to voodoo, while black Haitians, even those who are also nominally Catholics or Protestants, overwhelmingly rely on it just as they did 200 years ago.

Class resentments have always been a bonanza for ambitious Haitian politicians, mulatto and black alike. Francois Duvalier rose to power on the promise of restoring black nationalist pride. He also fed on the fierce anti-American sentiment that resulted from a 19-year U.S. occupation of the island, from 1915 to 1934. Fearing that the Germans might attempt to establish a Caribbean outpost during World War I, the Americans invaded Haiti and treated it as their own.

By then, Haiti had already slipped into such disrepair that American largesse was welcome in many respects. Hospitals, highways and communications systems were built. But the insult to the pride of the slave nation was so great, the Jim Crow attitudes of white Marines so offensive, that even today older Haitians cannot hide their remembered bitterness. But, to many, the single most damaging legacy of the American occupation was the newly equipped, efficient Haitian army the United States left in its wake--a military machine that has, in the decades since, virtually dictated who Haitian rulers will be.

Thanks to the army, Francois Duvalier was able to slam the doors once more on the outside world and run Haiti his way. When his corrupt, murderous regime finally became too notorious to ignore, President John F. Kennedy cut off U.S. aid in 1963. It was not restored until a decade later, when Jean-Claude took over. In theory, the young, supposedly dim-witted son would be more amenable to U.S. suggestions about how a civilized country should be run. The only difference turned out to one of form: Baby Doc didn’t look at whites with such naked hate. But Fort Dimanche remained a busy place. Haiti’s decline continued unabated.

Whatever statistic you pick, Haiti is at the bottom of the world charts. Malnutrition is still the leading cause of death, followed by such treatable diseases as tuberculosis. Infant mortality is one in four; the average life expectancy is 54. Some 5% of the population owns 50% of the wealth. Meantime, the cost of living soars--a chicken now costs $10.

Haiti is a country where nothing works. Because corruption has been more rampant than ever, during the past five years of political upheaval, even basic services have gone ignored. Roads are crumbling, where they exist; such state-owned services as telephones barely work and Haitians are now lucky to get three or four hours of power a day, which, in turn, is driving small businesses into ruin. Water has been in pathetically short supply for years. Only 13% of the population has access to potable water.

In perhaps the saddest note of all, Haiti’s urban problems are only compounded by the ruination of its once lush countryside. Impoverished peasants have cut down all the trees to provide charcoal fuel either for themselves or to sell in the city. As a result, the topsoil has been eroding for decades at a dramatic rate, clogging the dams, plugging the few irritation ditches. Now only 30% of the country is arable. Much of the once tropical Haitian countryside looks like central Nevada.

Then, like some final blight from hell, came the AIDS panic of the early ‘80s, falsely stigmatizing Haiti as a source, costing the country all that it had left, its tourist trade and thousands of jobs. Completing the ever-descending picture, while dozens of foreign assembly plants are still based in Haiti, employing about 45,000 people at $3 a day, even some of those are now leaving the island. Long the world’s biggest producer of major-league baseballs, Haiti recently lost Rawlings, one of its largest employers, to Costa Rica.

Since the Duvaliers were overthrown, it has been a revolving door at the National Palace--five regimes in five years, all supposedly leading Haiti toward democratic elections. First came Gen. Henri Namphy, one of Duvalier’s favorites. He proved as repressive as his boss, presiding over what turned out to be an election-day massacre in 1987, when 34 voters were shot at the polls, as soldiers reportedly stood by. Another election, early in 1988, was so crippled by voter fear and bribery that no one regarded the winner, a professor named Leslie Manigat, as legitimate. Manigat took himself so seriously that he attempted to purge the army, starting with the arrest of Gen. Namphy--who promptly put the misguided Manigat aboard the next plane to Santo Domingo, four months into his term.

It was during what Haitians call Namphy Two that Aristide’s church was burned. This time, Namphy only lasted four months, before being deposed in a coup led by Gen. Prosper Avril. By then, many were wondering if there was a general in Haiti that the United States wouldn’t trust--and, to the surprise of no one, within 18 months, Washington was obliged to fly Avril out of the country, too, after he began Duvalier’s old trick of exiling critics. In March, 1990, the first civilian provisional government was appointed, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Ertha Pascal-Trouillot. By then, Haiti had sunk into such demoralized chaos that former Tontons Macoute chief Lafontant, who had fled into exile when the Duvaliers did, felt confident enough to return last summer.

After the army refused to enforce a warrant issued for his arrest, Lafontant declared himself a presidential candidate. The stage for his coup attempt was set when he was ruled ineligible under a highly controversial provision of the 1987 constitution, which says that until 1997 no person can seek office who is “well-known for having been by his excess zeal one of the architects” of the Duvalier dictatorship. That, bristled the Macoute, “was undemocratic.”

As recently as last summer, Aristide was also assailing the constitution, as well as the scheduled elections, as just another U.S. sham. He was a late, surprise entry into the race. When he did announce, he ascribed it to the will of God and the people: “If the people say I must run, then I must run. . . . When I know I am doing God’s will, I am at peace,” he said, adding, “I could sleep from now until election day and still win.” He was right, too. The day after he announced, a million illiterate Haitians registered to vote--to mark their X in the box of the little fighting cock.

With about 700 United Nations poll watchers swarming through the island, nobody cheated, nobody died. Aristide won with 66% of the vote in a field of 11 candidates. Remarkably, most Western political analysts viewed it as an upset. Until election day, few were taking Aristide’s candidacy seriously, predicting instead that Marc Bazin, a dignified former World Bank economist, widely regarded as the U.S. government’s candidate, was certain, at least, to force a runoff.

“Bazin didn’t win because he spent more time talking to us than the Haitians,” said U.S. Embassy information officer Bruce Brown, disgustedly. “Face it, we can give advice and support, but we can’t vote for them.” His boss, Ambassador Alvin Adams, was more circumspect. “We are only interested in democracy for Haiti. . . . We will work with whoever is elected,” said Adams.

“Without us, there wouldn’t even have been an election,” said Brown, exasperated. A young diplomat who last served in Manila, Brown finds the anti-American attitude of Aristide’s people highly annoying. “They’ll never let us forget that we supported Duvalier,” he sighed. “Well, in my opinion, Duvalier was a logical consequence of Haitian history. Here it’s only a matter of time until presidents get overthrown or assassinated. . . . So, we put up with Duvalier, just like we’ll put up with Namphy, just like we’ll put up with Aristide. . . . What do they think we’re going to do--send in the Marines? This isn’t Panama. Besides, who the hell wants Haiti? Castro? He’s not crazy!”

In any case, Brown finished, all this tough talk won’t last. “They’ll like us well enough when budget time comes around.”

PRESIDENT-ELECT ARISTIDE

First impressions of the small man sitting beyond the big, bare desk, adorned only by a wooden plaque honoring the black nationalist W.E.B. DuBois, is that he is either braced for attack or prepared to hear confession. He is wearing a gray suit and white shirt, slightly too large at the collar, accenting his smallness. His front tooth is chipped, his left eyelid droops oddly. His unflinching gaze is riveting.

For the next 45 minutes, he sits utterly still, hands clasped on the table in front of him, face grave, speaking so softly that the listener must strain, even from two feet away, to hear, and uttering not a single word that hasn’t been considered. Despite his resume’s claim that he is fluent in eight languages, he speaks English with the simplicity of one who has just completed a Berlitz course.

“I love everybody. . . . I have to, otherwise I should not be able to feel free, to feel happy,” he says. “When you love people . . . just because they are human, then you feel free, you feel happy. When you don’t love people, you don’t feel happy.”

What about the Macoutes? Does he love them, too? His odd eyes flicker with mild annoyance. “Listen, I am a theologian, I am not a judge,” he says. “So I cannot judge people. I ought not to judge people. Right now, what I have to do is build democracy; it’s to respect our constitution, it’s to welcome every body, to be together . . . building a society of justice. . . . It doesn’t matter to me if some people don’t understand that, or don’t know who I am.”

Does he expect the Pope to expel him? At this, his eyes smile briefly. “I don’t want any kind of conflict with him,” he says. “I have just to continue to do my job, the way I’m doing it. If I respect what I have to respect, then I feel at . . . peace.” He clearly expects to stay a priest, and if not, as he told the people, he might just get married--”if the Haitian people give me a wife.”

(“They won’t dare touch him,” predicted his friend Smark Michele, Minister of Commerce and Industry, earlier, laughing. Already, said Michele, the Vatican has approached Aristide, asking him to quietly resign. “But Aristide threw the ball back in their court. He told them he will not oppose them-- if they make their request public. So far, he hasn’t heard another word.”)

The public Aristide is now equally diplomatic about almost everything else. Of his relationship with the United States, he says, “We have very good relations, and I want to build a very beautiful future from this very good relation.” He hoped that Vice President Dan Quayle would attend his inaugural. “It would make me very, very happy.”

As for the army he has so long assailed, he no longer even dreams of a Haiti without one. “The constitution provides for an army, so it is not for me to say,” he says. “It is for me to accept what the constitution says. My personal feeling is a constitutional feeling.” He will not be baited. Not even into a smile.

The new president of Haiti is trying hard to make the leap from firebrand to statesman. It’s such a different game now than last fall, when he was riding white horses into the countryside, driving the crowds wild with his teasing smiles and furious rhetoric. In time he may even master the art of political doublespeak. Meantime, he is compelling, even likable, in his determination. If he privately wonders what the hell he’s gotten himself into, he hides it well.

What are his priorities? Where does he begin to fix his ruined nation? He studies his questioner. Aristide doesn’t like mainstream American journalists. He sees them as little more than agents of the U.S. government--shallow mirrors of a privileged culture that will never understand that Haiti is not a place where sewage systems will ever be priority number one.

“Justice. First, Haitians need justice, OK?” he says, patiently. “So I start by hearing the voice of everybody . This is the way to a government of democracy. And, if you obey the constitution, of course you will get justice. If you respect human rights, of course you will get justice. If you respect the rules of democracy, you will of course get justice. And I think what we are doing is exactly that. You cannot govern a country without law . . . and once you do that, every body will realize how their right is respected. . . . You just have to obey the constitution, to obey the law.” constitution was a piece of junk, Aristide now loves it perhaps best of all.

INAUGURATION

Aristide’s inauguration passed largely ignored by the world. Only three heads of state attended--from Venezuela, Jamaica and Belize. France sent its first lady. A delegation of 26 Cubans came, but not Fidel Castro. Former President Jimmy Carter came on his own, but, in what was widely regarded as just another in a long line of insults, the U.S. government sent a delegation headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, the Cabinet’s only black.

But nothing could mar this day for Haiti. Here stands Titid, at last, taking the oath of office. “ Lavalas ,” he says softly, teasingly, a faintly amused smile on his lips. “ Lah-vah-las ,” he repeats, treating each syllable like a kiss of congratulations: Together, they have done it. They have won. The crowd outside the National Palace explodes in ecstasy. For the next half hour he plays with them, tells them stories, sets up riddles, leads them in question-answer chants familiar to every Haitian child. He tells them, as he always does, “I am in love with you.”

Then, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide seized upon this moment, perhaps the single most powerful hour of his five-year term as president, to do what is both dangerous and virtually unprecedented: He publicly purged the army of six of its most feared generals, in the most humiliating fashion possible. Turning to Herard Abraham, the poised, U.S.-trained army commander-in-chief who sat at his side, he said, almost tenderly, “I love you, too, general”--and, in the next breath, politely but firmly read off the names of the six generals that he “suggested” Abraham should retire. Immediately.

Aristide also rejected his own $10,000 monthly salary as obscene, promising to donate it to the poor. He announced a travel ban on 100-plus top former officials until their financial records can be investigated. He also detained provisional president Ertha Pascal-Trouillot on suspicion of conspiracy in the Lafontant coup. (Earlier this month, she was jailed overnight, and then placed under house arrest.) He called on France to help recover the millions stolen by the Duvaliers.

Not least, he publicly called for the killing to stop, for the people to join hands “in a marriage with the army” to fight the Macoutes through the courts of law. He urged Haitians to treat soldiers as friends, thus putting the military on notice: For however long it may last, the army is now an institution under popular control. He finished by thanking several nations for their promises of aid--pointedly omitting the United States.

That night, this nation of slaves danced in its clean streets, celebrating its new beginning. Twenty-four hours after he was sworn in, Aristide went to Fort Dimanche, where human bones are still turning up in the desolate field and, as thousands of Haitians wept openly, planted a tree, turning the place into a museum of memories. Then he threw open the palace gates and invited hundreds of the poor inside for lunch. Nobody on Aristide’s staff was able to explain how the guest list was compiled. The guests were among the oldest, sickest, most pitiful citizens of Port-au-Prince. Even by Haitian standards, these people stood out.

There were perhaps 300 of them, and they came, not in a joyful flood, but slowly, quietly, like people who sense some trap. No soldiers were there, no Uzis, but they were still afraid to be in this mysterious place. An old woman with a massive tumor on her neck wore a pair of shredded nylons. A blind man wore a wrinkled red tie over his filthy brown shirt. A young man with no legs shoved himself along, wearing a brand-new T-shirt with a rooster on it and the single word: Lavalas. Through the manicured gardens, past the marbled halls with their antiques and tapestries and ivory-tusked sofas they went, most keeping their eyes to the ground, careful not to depart from the pathways, as they made their way to that corner of the palace lawn where the president would be. And where the food was--hot bowls of a thick chicken noodle stew. They fell upon it with pathetic need.

Aristide speaks Creole, the language of the people, in public, but, now, in a stunning bit of theater, he lapsed into a few minutes of French, as he stood before the TV cameras, watching his starving subjects eat. He took aim at the heart of every rich Haitian household, so removed from this dirty, desperate scene: He spoke directly to their children. “Go to your parents tonight, as you sit at your nice dinner table,” he said, “and ask them if they couldn’t please share just a little bit of all that you have with the poor people of Haiti. And if they say yes, then give them a kiss, and say that it is from Titid.”

Haiti has always been a place that bypasses the brain and strikes directly at the heart, and this was just another of those moments.

AFTER THE MOUNTAIN, THE MOUNTAINS (Creole proverb)

So little has changed. Haiti today, as in 1804, remains hostage to Western beneficence. Without massive aid, Aristide has no real hope of bringing his country into the 20th Century. Just how much help his nascent democracy will receive from such major donors as Canada, Germany and France remains in question. The United States announced that it would increase by about $30 million the $54 million it has annually funneled indirectly into Haiti for years. But terms and conditions are unclear.

Worse, although Aristide has promised to make the Haitian rich pay their fair share through tax reform and a crackdown on corruption, by the time he gets his government together, he may find that much of Haiti’s wealth has disappeared. From the lovely, misty enclaves above Port-au-Prince, where the azure swimming pools are always full and dozens of servants flutter about, to the moss-laden plantation palaces of the interior, elegant aristocrats are predicting that Aristide won’t last more than a year before being either overthrown or assassinated. At the same time, some have admittedly been busy, transferring assets abroad, just in case the priest gets serious about redistributing wealth.

“Just who is this young man, anyway?” asked a white-haired old lady, a Sorbonne-educated mulatto who owns a big chunk of Haiti but spends most of her year in Paris where she sometimes lunches with her friends, the Duvaliers. “Such a different class, you know? Well, I do wish him well. Those poor people have been living like animals for years. . . . I’ve always been struck at how hard Haitian women have to work, just carrying water to their families. Those buckets on their heads look so heavy.” Once, she recalls, she even drilled a well for them on one of her ranches.

“He’s another Papa Doc--he appeals to their primitive instincts. He’s their new houngan (voodoo priest). Even if he’s sincere, those around him will be corrupted, just like all the rest,” said another U.S.-educated landowner, as annoyed by American condescension as Aristide is, but for different reasons. “Those people,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the city below, “are ignorant. They can’t even read. Haiti isn’t ready for the democracy that you Americans insist on imposing everywhere you go.”

February 7 had barely passed, at least temporarily quelling the threat of dechoukaj , before some leading politicians were also doing their best to undermine Aristide to the Western press. (Haitian journalists won’t listen; they adore Aristide as much as the general public, at least for now.)

With ill-concealed satisfaction, Aristide’s critics expressed their alarm that, mere days into his administration, the new president was already showing signs of becoming Haiti’s latest black nationalist demagogue. They accused him of ignoring the nation’s new democratic institutions, of arrogance, of surrounding himself with a handful of fawning yes-men.

Translated, this meant that Aristide was ignoring them--he had bypassed leaders of the various parties to pick, as his prime minister, Renee Preval, 47, an old friend in the revolutionary trenches and a local bakery owner. In naming his cabinet, he compounded the insult by picking doctors, spaghetti makers and notary publics--political novices whose views on how to govern a nation were as murky as Aristide’s. “We don’t know who the hell half these people are-- much less what their programs are going to be--if they have any,” summarized the ever-succinct Bruce Brown of the U.S. Embassy. Even now, no one has any real idea of what programs Aristide has in mind, what his economic and social policies may be. Few Aristide-watchers expect him to make any serious attempt to socialize Haiti. “He’s not stupid,” said one of his critics wryly. “After all, what’s to socialize? If anything, he’s going to have to privatize the state companies (telephone, power) he’s got, if he wants them to work.”

All of it, according to a typical American press account in the Washington Post, was “stirring concerns that (Aristide) plans a highly personal style of government that disregards political parties and other national institutions.” Many of those whose “concerns” are “stirred” can be discovered on any given evening lounging about the terrace of the Hotel Grand Oloffson. A wonderfully decadent white gingerbread complex in the heart of Port-au-Prince, made famous by Graham Greene in his novel “The Comedians,” the Oloffson continues to be the favored meeting place for those with pretensions to power or status. Foreign journalists lurk on the balcony like birds of prey.

“I am the most popular leader, after Aristide, but he hasn’t even called me! To me, this is unbelievable! All the people in the streets think Aristide has chosen me for prime minister, and he hasn’t even called me,” sputtered Louis Dejoie, one of the losing presidential candidates, a mulatto so Americanized he might pass for a Chicago ward healer. His father was Papa Doc’s most important competition in 1957, and the Dejoie name remains extremely popular.

What the supposed U.S. candidate, Marc Bazin, had to say about Aristide was entirely off the record. Bazin clearly expects to become president yet. “I intend to remain quiet for a while,” former president Leslie Manigat snapped, “until Haitians can see for themselves what they have done.”

“U.S. policy-makers don’t try to get the pulse of the people. They stay in Villa Creole (a luxury hotel above the city), which is why we now have an anti-American president,” said newly elected Sen. Bernard Sansarique, a former Miami exile whose chief claim to fame was his bloody 1982 attempt to invade Duvalier’s Haiti with a small band of exiles. He also aspires to become president.

“But they (the Americans) said I was too nationalistic,” lamented Sansarique. Now, he predicted, the hammer and sickle may fly over Haiti within a year, since, as everyone knows, one of Aristide’s chief economic advisers is Gerard Pierre-Charles, a well-known communist. As for Preval, the new prime minister, “from what I hear, he was just an errand boy, he was sent to buy Cokes, get ashtrays and make phone calls.”

Always, it comes back to Aristide’s inner circle. If Aristide fails, it will probably be, just as the Oloffson pundits say, because he has surrounded himself with such a mixed bag of advisers. They run the gamut from insufferable Marxist ideologues from New York City to earnest young organizers from the interior to those who privately suspect that Aristide is no ordinary mortal.

“This is a typical fight against imperialism,” said Aristide’s friend Antoine Izmery, a wealthy food importer of Lebanese descent who calls himself a Palestinian rebel. Irrepressibly colorful, Izmery financed more than half Aristide’s $500,000 campaign. He is often held up by Aristide’s critics as a mirror of things to come, mainly because he is hopelessly in love with the rhetoric of revolution.

Izmery is convinced, as many are, that the U.S. government was directly involved in the attempted Lafontant coup. “The (American) plan was to let Lafontant take over and kill Aristide, then they could fly Lafontant out of the country, like all the rest, and start over again!” he exclaimed. (“What nonsense,” said ambassador Adams.)

“His relationship with the Haitian masses is almost uncanny. And his command of the Bible has always amazed me,” said Patrick Elie, another confidante, a biochemist and now chief of staff to Prime Minister Preval, who confides that he is among those who wonder if Aristide might not possess supernatural powers. “I admit it, he has put a little crack in my scientific armor. You know (after one assassination try), some of those people involved just, well, they suddenly died--for no apparent medical cause.”

In between the extremes are such charming, exuberant newcomers to politics as Smark Michele, 54, an affluent businessman whose father was shot for political dissent at Fort Dimanche. He flushes with emotion discussing it, sitting in his pretty house above the city. “At first I didn’t like Aristide. I thought he was too uncompromising,” said Michele, who met Aristide in 1986. “I finally learned that Aristide is always right. He can sound arrogant in his certainty, but in the end he always turns out to be right. He speaks eight languages! He’s some sort of a genius! He’s a miracle!”

Others of Aristide’s inner circle are tough sophisticates like Fathers Antoine Adrien and William Smarth, who operate a school in the shantytown of San Martin. “Haiti is just a banana republic to your government,” said Adrien, chuckling at how the election had backfired on Washington, burying its man, Bazin. “The U.S. is absolutely convinced that a small nation in its back yard should be docile. They cannot believe that the masses could give power to anyone, that the slaves would resist the will of Big Brother. (But) now we will prove the U.S. wrong. Our goal is a very modest one--to go from dire deprivation to decent poverty--and we don’t want your billions. We can do a lot by ourselves.”

Aristide’s inner circle also includes some former Duvalierists, people such as Gladys Lauteur, a wealthy pharmacy owner and former cohort of Michele Duvalier. They thrived under the dictatorship, but now they see the light. “Aristide is a man of God; he is not going to take my home away. This talk of Marxism is nonsense,” said Lauteur. “If you go with God, then you are right. He will govern with the Bible in one hand, the constitution in the other.” And she bustled away, a plump mulatto with a silvery pony tail, in billowing skirts. Lauteur’s home, a huge, open-air estate, locked away from the public behind not one but two gates, was something akin to a sorority house in the days preceding the inauguration, aflutter with a gaggle of sleek, cunning matrons.

“The private sector, the well-to-do, represent only 10% of the population. It’s time for us to go with the majority, for our own interests, if nothing else,” said Arlette Batiste, a coffee exporter. Elegant in a white linen suit, her hair in a tight French chignon, Batiste, whose family has thrived for generations under whatever regime was in power, wore an expression of mild amusement as she explained her shift with the political winds.

“We live the good life. The majority is living a worse life every day. Our situation will be less fragile if everyone lives better,” she said. “I am here from self-interest, as every wealthy Haitian should be. This man is our last chance. Haiti is on the verge of revolution. I can’t understand why the U.S. doesn’t see that Aristide is what Haiti needs right now. We can either move with the public mood or be destroyed. After all,” she added, smiling, “how can we put our best linen on the bed until we dust?”

“THE FIRST LADY”

In the end, it may be Marjorie Michele, 27, a Brussels-educated psychologist, daughter of Smark Michele, who can tell us most about the enigmatic priest who now leads Haiti. She is, by her own description, the closest thing Haiti has today to a first lady.

“He’s a very secret person, you’ll never know exactly what’s on his mind,” she says over lunch. “And the man is ridiculous. For a psychologist, he has no idea how to take care of himself. He’s killing himself. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep. . . . This is why I’m first lady. I run into his office, and I say, ‘Please, I think now we should go eat.’ When he stays (at her father’s house), I go into his room and I turn off the light and I say, ‘OK, now it’s time to sleep. . . .’ ”

She became his friend, she says, right after the Salesians expelled him, an event that didn’t simply anger him--”He was crushed. He felt so alone. He was so used to living in groups, with other priests. But, suddenly, he was left so alone. He told me, ‘Now I’m sitting here in this room alone, with no family, except the poor people.’ ”

She smiles, lights a cigarette and, in French, orders the pigeon. The restaurant is another of those serene terraced Port-au-Prince enclaves, a world away from the misery outside. Michele is at home here, both poised and glamorous in three-inch earrings, her white cotton dress revealing cleavage.

During the inaugural she sat in the family box. She shows up at most of Aristide’s press conferences. Just recently, a New York Haitian newspaper announced her engagement to the new president. She laughs, enjoying the gossip, but says, pointedly, “We are social friends. Political friends. With Aristide, if you don’t fit into his priorities, you’re out. And my priorities are also the poor people. I don’t have a superiority complex; I want the people to be like me. So Aristide and I, we fit.”

Politics besets the friendship. “He worries that we are not born to the same class. He tells me that. He has no problems with me, or any other social class. But when the people see him with me, they see the bourgeoisie. It’s a very big problem for him. And if he has to sacrifice me for the people, he will. For example, if we have to have a civil war, the people’s feelings are first. If I get killed, he accepts it. If 20,000 are going to die, it’s fine for the movement. It is all that matters to him.”

She agrees with Aristide’s critics, that he’s surrounded himself with yes-men. “All these people, Gladys, Renee, Adrien, William (Smarth), even my father, they will never push him very hard,” she says, exasperated. “They fight behind the scenes, but in front of him, they’re peaceful. They protect him. They say, ‘Oh, no, we will not tell him this or that now, because he’s so tired.’ They are always pampering him, protecting him. I tell them to stop it. I am the first lady because I am the only one who will tell him the truth. I don’t swallow anything from him. I tell him when he’s full of it!”

She is also looking ahead, to the end of Aristide’s five-year term. “I keep telling him, it is very important that he takes someone near to him now, to teach. Because in five years more, Haiti will need another Aristide. If Aristide died today, there is absolutely no one who can replace him. The people don’t just like him, he is their God. I want Haitians to be their own god. He’s human! Over my dead body will he be king.”