Changing Lifestyles : Haiti’s Wealthy Elite Turn Blind Eye to Plight of Poor : The wall of privilege that shields the upper class from poverty and despair has never been higher.

The English novelist E. M. Forster once wrote that the very poor “are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

Forster never saw Haiti. For here in this lost land of skeletal children, a land purged of nearly all human values, the very poor are everywhere, spectral forms, some with just enough strength to hold out their hands for alms, many with dead eyes void of even the hope of charity. These are faces too horrifying for even the words of poets.

The statistics are numbing: 6.3 million of Haiti’s 7 million people cannot read or write; their diets do not reach minimal international nutrition standards. About 90% of working-age people are jobless, and a majority of those employed earn less than $300 a year. That’s just over $5.08 a week in a country where a 14-ounce can of evaporated milk costs $1.60 and a bar of soap $2. In rural Haiti, where most people live, children die of starvation and related diseases, 10 a day in some areas.

But here’s another statistic: An estimated 100,000 people, demographers say, constitute the Haitian bourgeoisie--an elite group that the world rarely focuses on.

Often related through years of intermarriage and business dealings, they are rich, sometimes exceedingly so (about 200 are millionaires), educated, worldly and multilingual.

And many of them would agree that Forster was right. To them, the very poor are unthinkable.

Some are white, a few are black, most are mixed. But whatever their skin color, for almost two centuries of political independence, they have separated themselves from ordinary black Haitians in an isolated state of self-perpetuating privilege, even opulence, in a morass of otherwise nearly inhuman conditions of misery.

In nearly all aspects, the only common ground they share with the overwhelming majority of poor and black Haitians is the half-island they live on.

The segregated nature of Haitian society has become more evident since the army, nearly one year ago to the day, on Sept. 30, 1991, overthrew the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a radical populist who was Haiti’s first democratically elected president.

In league with puppet civilian politicians--and encouraged and supported by most of the elite--the army has repressed all popular opposition, while the wealthy business sectors have reduced or eliminated the normally meager benefits provided to the vast number of poor. This has been particularly distressing because of the impoverishing effects of an international embargo imposed by the Organization of American States in an effort to force Aristide’s return.

So, while the elite continue to make weekend shopping trips to Miami, hold high-fashion shows and engage in profit-making contraband activities, they have fired workers, slashed pay and eliminated health and welfare programs.

“I’ve fired half my workers and cut the salaries of those I’ve kept on in half,” said Jean Pierre Bailly, owner of Haiti’s largest computer business. “They are all pro-Aristide, so they have to suffer. They have to feel the effect of the embargo.”

Bailly says he has suffered as well. His net profits dropped from more than 30% of investment before the coup to 20%.

In discussions in offices, at parties and over some of the best French cooking that can be found in the hemisphere, the theme is constant.

“These people aren’t Haiti,” said one woman, her gold bracelets clinking as she waved her arm, dismissing the grim-faced people who stood on a roadside in the futile hope that motorists would slow and toss out some money. “The reality is that they were brought here centuries ago as slaves, and they are still slaves. I mean, they have never really been part of the society. It may not be right, but that’s the way it is, and it is too late to do anything about it.”

Her remarks tumbled out in a sort of French-accented, stream-of-consciousness response to a question as she and a visitor set out in a Mercedes-Benz sedan from Port-au-Prince to the woman’s seaside cottage near this beach resort area, once the site of a Club Med.

“What do you think about,” asked the visitor over the sound of a Gipsy Kings tape, “when you see these people standing by the road?”

What is scary about her answer is not just the callousness of the remark but the fact that it came from someone seen by many of Haiti’s elite as a soft-hearted liberal. “I really don’t think about them at all,” she said. “They don’t count.”

It is a sentiment heard every Friday night at Le Belle Epoch, a restaurant in the wealthy suburb of Petionville, located 2,000 feet above the mosquitoes, heat and misery of the capital of Port-au-Prince. By tradition, the elite visit the restaurant every Friday night to drink expensive Scotch, eat Creole specialties and gossip.

“Did you know that there was a coup attempt last Monday?” a Haitian businessman asked an American reporter.

“No? Well, it happened, and your embassy stopped it,” he contended.

Another of the elite said: “I know that 43 soldiers were killed in an attack on the barracks at Gonaives. I was in the (military) high command when the report came in.”

As the night droned on, a shadow of paranoia grew in proportion to the Scotch that was downed. “You Americans are funny,” said a doctor, obsessively beating time on his highball glass with a diamond-studded pinkie ring. “You talk about democracy, but you eat at Souvenance (another upscale French restaurant). The only time I see you with a Haitian, it’s a Petionville (elite) woman you take to the Montana (a hotel favored by American journalists).

“You want the benefits of the good life we’ve built here,” he said. “If you really feel we are so bad, you would spend your time with the poor blacks you are always taking pity on. You don’t for the same reason I don’t: They aren’t the same as us, and they don’t deserve the same benefits.”

With people thinking that way, it came as no surprise that, when Aristide seemed to threaten the privileges of the rich by suggesting that the poor had a right to the country’s bounty, the elite rebelled.

“Aristide is the devil,” said Bailly, 31, the Canadian-educated son of a longtime bourgeois family. Aristide “wants to take away what we have made for ourselves. To hell with him and his followers.”

By their own account, the elite are hard-working, creative, self-sufficient. They think of themselves as the type of people who fought their way to the top of business and society by talent and effort. And they want to stay there by using the same characteristics, but on behalf of their survival.

Their approach is mostly denuded of any idea of sharing the wealth, of providing opportunities to others, of working for the common good.

“What’s in it for me?” was the way Marc Bazin, the army’s puppet prime minister, put it when asked why he would not set aside his personal animosity toward Aristide in an effort to end the nation’s crisis.

Or as Bailly said: “You tried to plant a seed of democracy, but you planted it without preparing the land. The people aren’t ready for democracy. We are the only ones capable of running this country. We are the creators, and we will survive.”

Haiti was colonized by French and Spanish white men who forcibly settled the country with enslaved Africans. From this arose a social system in which whites and individuals of mixed heritage ruled the majority blacks without limit. Even after a “black revolution” evicted the French in the early 19th Century, leadership remained in the hands of the elite, who continued a slavery-like economic system bolstered by a captive government and military.

The resulting sense of racial and cultural superiority, separation and bourgeois solidarity was actually strengthened by Haiti’s only successful pro-black movement, called “Negritude,” led by a country doctor named Francois Duvalier, the infamous “Papa Doc” who ruled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971.

The perceived selfishness of the elite, according to Jean Didier Gardere, scion of a prominent family, is due in modern times to the attacks by Duvalier on their privileges, which took the form of brutal extortion and the bloody repression of the bourgeois political parties. “We inherited our position because of the punishment we, the business class, took from Duvalier. We learned our first responsibility was to survive,” he said.

Gardere, whose family counts several past presidents in its ranks and is among the richest in the country, calls the elite’s position “neutrality” rather than selfishness and acknowledges that it may be time to step from behind the stage and get more directly involved in the nation’s affairs. “Perhaps we have to become a little more Haitian,” he said.

But to Bailly, he and his fellow bourgeois are the true Haitians and must maintain themselves at any cost and without giving an inch to the majority.

“Aristide hates us; the bourgeois are always the enemy,” he said. “But we are good at bypassing opposition and those who try to take away what we have created. If someone tries to drown us, we will drown the little guy first. We will flourish.”

Republic of Haiti: The Land and the People

* Capital: Port-au-Prince

* Population: 7 million

* Languages: French, Creole

* Area: 10,714 square miles, about the size of Maryland. The country occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic.

* Religion: Roman Catholic 80%, Protestant 10%. Voodoo is widely practiced.

* Life expectancy: 52 (male), 55 (female)

* Infant mortality: 106 per 1,000 live births

* Literacy: 10%

* Gross Domestic Product: $2.7 billion.

* Exports: $169 million (1990 est.), mainly light manufactures, coffee and other agricultural products. Main trading partners: United States, Italy, France.

* Imports: $348 million (1990 est.), mainly machines and manufactures, food and beverages, petroleum products, chemicals, fats and oils. Main trading partners: United States, Netherlands Antilles, Japan, France, Germany, Canada.

* Wealth: There are 200 millionaire families. 1% of population receives 44% of all national wealth (goods, services, personal assets and property); 1% of population owns 60% of land (or 90% of usable land). 90% of population earns an average of $120 per year.

Source: CIA World Factbook 1991, international development agencies.