Haiti Embargo Brings Misery to All but Rich

Anyone who thinks economic embargoes don’t work should come to Haiti, a land fast running out of fuel, electricity and patience.

“This place is about to explode,” is heard so often that it sounds like the national motto, along with, “The people just won’t take much more.”

In a country where driving bumper to bumper for 18 hours a day, seven days a week was a way of life, the number of cars now seen moving in any 10-mile stretch can be counted on two hands and less than a foot, and most of them are trying to coast on a shut-down engine.

Once upon a time, the daily 90-degree heat was fought by air conditioning and lots of water and rum. Now the lights are out for most of the day, the water pumps can’t pump and there is no gasoline to deliver the booze.

“This place is about to explode,” said Jean (Speedy) Beltran, operator of a tiny general store on the edge of downtown Port-au-Prince.

What is turning this once-carefree producer of nearly all of America’s baseballs into the Ethiopia of the Western Hemisphere is an almost totally effective economic embargo imposed by Haiti’s regional neighbors, the United States and most of the rest of the world.

Life since Nov. 5 has been miserable, said Marie Morel, another Port-au-Prince shop owner, referring to the starting date of an embargo imposed by the Organization of American States to pressure Haiti’s military to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, overthrown in a Sept. 30 coup.

Actually, the worst of the embargo began three days after Haiti’s first democratically elected president was forced from office when Mexico and Venezuela, the country’s main suppliers of petroleum, stopped shipments.

Without even a refinery to convert oil to gasoline, Haiti has been trying to cope by rationing and conserving what little it has in reserve. The coping is quickly turning into a life-and-death struggle.

There are no official statistics, but the best guesses are that gasoline will be exhausted within two weeks and oil for generating power in less than a month.

In the meantime, gasoline can be purchased on the black market for $10 a gallon. But even at that price, a driver will wait at a station for two or even three days to buy 10 gallons. Port-au-Prince’s wealthy pay car-sitters $10 to wait in line for the duration.

The lack of fuel is more than just an inconvenience. Without cars, buses and trucks, Haiti’s people, already the poorest in the hemisphere, can’t get to work. They can’t get to markets and the growers can’t get produce to the markets.

In the countryside, farmers wait beside rotting piles of vegetables and fruit for customers who can’t get there. In the cities, families line up with empty plastic bags to buy the small amounts of produce that people grow in vacant lots and sell on the curbs.

Without workers, steady supplies of electricity and water, businesses are shutting down, a situation worsened by the embargo on all trade with Haiti except for medicine and emergency food shipments.

Over the last two days, Port-au-Prince’s once-busy port was empty of all ships, except for one freighter moored at the dock since Nov. 5, the captain ordered to stay by its owner.

In supporting the boycott, the United States has ordered the phasing out of all trade, including the importation of all Haitian goods, which is shutting down the 80 U.S.-owned plants set up here in recent years to assemble products ranging from stereos to sport jackets. Haitian women hand-sew nearly all the baseballs used in North America’s professional leagues.

When the boycott takes effect completely in two weeks, about 32,000 people will be out of jobs.

While the hardship for the ordinary person is seen in the faces of people waving at the infrequent passing car, and the worker standing outside his shuttered plant, life for the rich is going on with little more than the inconvenience of finding their favorite French restaurant closed for lack of waiters.

“The rich are MREs,” said one diplomat, using the initials originally applied to U.S. military rations called “meals, ready to eat.” But here, MRE stands for “morally repugnant elite.”

Most diplomats and human-rights observers say the main prop for the dominant military are the rich, who were eager to rid the country of the populist, and what they say were the semi-socialist, policies of Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who swept last year’s election with two-thirds of the vote.

“It is incredible,” one diplomat said. “In a country where 90% of the people can’t read and swollen-bellied children are the norm, you have a handful of people who would rather see the people starve than accept even a tiny bit of economic reform.”

This attitude was evident in a visit to the Publix supermarket in the wealthy suburb of Petionville, a neighborhood of estates, luxury restaurants and BMW automobiles.

While people in the city below carry rusting buckets in a search for potable water, women wearing dresses from Miami push shopping carts down aisles lined with American goods and French cheeses.

“How do they do it?” asked a Haitian who asked to be called Alexander. “They fly it in from Miami as personal baggage. There are always ways.”

While shopping trips to Florida can’t explain all of the luxury goods at the Publix, standing in line at the Miami airport for a Haiti-bound plane was an exercise in dodging dozens of large cases marked “Frozen Meat” and “Food Products; This Side Up.”

“This is the only way I can stock my store,” said a Haitian woman guarding nine large boxes of laundry products as she waited to check in at the Miami airport. “My customers don’t mind the extra cost.”

With this willingness to pay almost any price to avoid buckling under the pressure of the embargo, the OAS-U.S. strategy is questionable.

So far, the military has repressed any popular pro-Aristide movement, partly by arresting and brutalizing demonstrators.

The hope for a peaceful settlement--a hope seen by many diplomats as slight--lies in negotiations scheduled to start in the next few days in Colombia between the OAS and members of the puppet civilian government.

But there is fear, or expectation, depending on the point of view, that any agreement to return Aristide to office would result in mass violence, even civil war.

Members of the military pointedly state publicly that Aristide will be shot on sight if he returns. Even the usually mild-mannered Jean-Jacques Honorat, the prime minister installed by the army, recently told U.S. reporters that Aristide “will be a dead duck” if he comes to Haiti.