Flow of Haitian Refugees Slowing to a Trickle

The 20-foot boat sits on the beach, its stern to the sea and its hand-hewed ribs open to the rocks and trash beneath. Yet as crude and unseaworthy as it seems, this unfinished shamble of green oak and nails is a kind of Noah’s Ark of Haiti, a symbol of hope of a new life.

But that hope, always a gauzy dream at best, is flickering in the vacuum created by President Bush’s determination to keep impoverished Haitians from even leaving their desolate homeland, let alone reaching their dream of refuge in the United States.

Just a week after Bush announced that Haitians picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard would be immediately brought back to Haiti, without prior consideration of any claims for asylum, the surge of boat people headed for Miami has begun to weaken.

At first the reaction to Bush’s announcement was just the opposite, either from ignorance of the new American policy or from defiance. Last Thursday, for example, 1,094 people were picked up from boats and rafts in the Windward Passage off Haiti’s northwest coast.

That was one of the biggest pickups in the eight months of the current flood of escaping Haitians. So far, more than 34,000 boat people have been picked up. Of that figure, more than 18,000 have been returned to Haiti. Another 12,000-plus are being held in an emergency processing center at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. About 9,000 have been judged to have grounds to seek political asylum in the United States.

But overnight Friday and early Saturday, the Coast Guard found only 264 Haitians trying to sail to Florida, and tours by reporters of once-favored departure coves and beaches here in Haiti found few boats being prepared for launching and none actually on the water.

At Miragoane, a port city 45 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the harbor and nearby inlets were empty of all but a few tiny fishing boats and three rusting freighters.

“There haven’t been any boats leaving for Miami for a couple of weeks,” said a young man standing on a dilapidated pier at the city’s outskirts. “There used to be more. The boats were hidden in the woods and taken out at night, but not for a while.”

The story was the same at Grand Goave and Leogane, both used by thousands of the boat people since the exodus began last October in the wake of the political and economic crisis that followed a military coup that overthrew the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“Lots of people have gone,” said a storekeeper in Grand Goave, a ramshackle collection of crumbling wooden, gingerbread-style houses and dissolving cement hovels. “But most have been brought back and they don’t have the money to try again.”

A two-day midweek trip along the long coast of northwestern Haiti, one of the poorest areas in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, showed the same--plenty of people who had gone but were forced back, people who wanted to go again or try for the first time. But there were no boats or money to pay for the trip.

In Grande Savane, a parched and dying fishing village on the northwest’s southern coast, a malnourished youth rubbed his swollen hands together and explained life.

“No one leaves anymore. There is no money to buy passage. If I could find a ride for free I would go. But no one has any money.”

But in Petit Goave, on the shores of the lower jaw of what looks on a map like an alligator’s head, there are Francois Felisme and his half-finished little ark.

He said he has run out of money and wood, but “I still expect to sail by June 15.” His expectation is that the 60 people he figures can be crammed into the rub-a-dub tub will pay enough in advance to cover the purchase of enough oak and mango wood to at least finish building the vessel, if not caulking the ill-fitting planks.

This is how he arranged for two previous boats he built and launched toward Miami. The first, which set sail in December, was picked up by the Coast Guard, and its passengers were sent to the temporary refugee camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The second vessel left early in May but turned back when it wasn’t picked up and it began leaking.

The price for an attempt to sail to Miami varies widely, with some people paying as much as $250 and others pooling $10 or $12 and building their own rafts. Felisme charges just over $30 per person.

Even that price is too much for many Haitians. Berthonany Toussaint, a 20-year-old high school student found memorizing his lessons in a weedy park near Felisme’s boat wants badly to leave Haiti.

He has both economic and political reasons for wanting to leave. Not only is he broke--”I don’t have enough money to eat twice a day”--but he says he is in danger from the repressive military.

“The police came into my house in the days after the coup and took people away. They killed my sister,” he said.

It is only money that holds back thousands of would-be boat people, including Toussaint. “I have no opportunity to work, to live, to eat. I can’t even sleep because I don’t eat. But I don’t have the money to leave.”

He said that even the prospect of dying at sea in a sinking boat doesn’t matter. “What choice is there?”