Haiti’s Rich Slip Through Cracks in Economic Embargo

At La Souvenance, the line of those with reservations reaches into the street. Those without reservations will have to eat somewhere other than Haiti’s most expensive restaurant.

“I’m so sorry,” said Souvenance owner Jean-Guy Barme with a satisfied smile as he turned aside several longtime customers. “You must call for reservations now--two or three days in advance for weekends.”

At the nearby Plantation, the good times show in the menu handed to the bejeweled and silk-suited clientele. The featured wine is a $65 bottle of Montrachet, the perfect complement to the delicate sea bass prepared by the Cordon Bleu-trained Parisian chef.

“Business couldn’t be better,” according to Maryse Panette, the elegantly dressed former Haitian diplomat who owns the extravagantly priced Plantation. “The people here like to go out, to show off.

“Yes,” she agreed to one customer’s assessment, “they like to flaunt it.”

And flaunt it they do, and not just in the glitzy restaurants of Petionville, the luxury mountainside suburb where the Plantation and Souvenance flourish. The shop windows are ostentatiously decorated with the latest of costly fashions. The hair salons are booked throughout the day. The specialty food stores provide all that any gourmet could want.

The masters and matrons of Petionville and the other rich neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince ride to these restaurants, salons and pate-filled shops in Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. Their children go to parties in option-loaded Jeeps.

“When people are pleased and confident that they are safe, they bring out the Mercedeses and BMWs,” explained a foreign businesswoman who lives among the Haitian elite. “When they expect trouble, they drive junkers.”

This wasn’t the kind of life predicted for Haitians when an international economic embargo was authorized to punish the island’s elite for the Sept. 30, 1991, overthrow of the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president.

“The idea,” said a U.S. official when American participation in the sanctions was authorized 15 months ago, “is to deprive these people of all the things that make their lives so pleasant. We’ll show them there is a cost to what they do.”

The immediate effect was severe--for about six weeks. Then cracks appeared, which developed into yawning holes through which products, including tons of goods from the United States, poured into the homes, businesses and pockets of Haiti’s well-to-do.

“Everyone’s given up on (enforcing) the embargo,” said one foreign official. “The ships aren’t even really counted anymore, let alone identified. I don’t think the Coast Guard or Customs have stopped or seized a (violating) ship in months, and the Miami freighters sail here directly every day.”

“In fact,” said another foreign businessman with detailed knowledge of the affairs of both the ruling military and its ally, the civilian elite, “many of the (rich) people are even better off because of the embargo. It’s certain that the poor are far worse off. No matter how you measure it, the embargo’s a failure.”

Daniel Gara can stand in front of his house and see that failure.

The harbor that spreads out before his bedraggled Carrefour neighborhood is nearly choked with shipping: oil carriers unloading petroleum, freighters from Miami full of banned consumer goods, including automobiles. European-owned ships disgorge French wine and pate, even Italian furniture. It would take a very stupid captain not to find his way through the sieve that passes for an embargo.

But for Gara, a 31-year-old unemployed clerk, the embargo has been, literally, a killer.

He has been unable to find work for nearly 14 months because the office supply company he used to work for closed in the early days of the boycott and its owner moved to Miami. Worse, his 18-month-old daughter died two months ago because he couldn’t get the medicine to cure her respiratory illness. “The rich keep getting the medicine,” Gara said. “We don’t get any here.”

Medicine, some food and other so-called humanitarian aid were exempted from the boycott, but the reality is that while the rich continued to get their $30 bottles of Scotch, the poor got still more misery.

“The boycott wrecked the country’s distribution system,” said an international development expert. “Gasoline is available, but the price is three times what it was, and the rich keep it for themselves. That is true for almost all goods. Spare parts are a good example.”

When spare parts for cars became available, they were monopolized by the business leaders for their own use, meaning that the small trucking and bus company owners have major difficulty in keeping their fleets on the road.

The results are evident and well known: no heating or cooking fuel, disappearing jobs, planting seasons missed, deadly malnutrition.

And the future is even more bleak if nothing is done quickly.

“You are right when you say the embargo is a joke,” said the international development expert, “but not entirely. Nearly anything wanted or needed can be imported here. But nothing goes out.”

Haiti produces nearly nothing, according to this expert and to the statistics compiled by diplomats.

“Haiti buys hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of foreign goods,” said one economic specialist. “But last year the value of its exports was less than $100 million.”

And, he said, “if they do grow something or make something, there is no market. Whatever they produce now can be bought cheaper and more reliably elsewhere.”

As an example, he cites mangoes. Even before the boycott, Haiti had lost its ability to market its traditional agricultural exports, coffee and rice--but not mangoes.

That oily, stringy, sweet fruit became a staple, wanted by Americans and Europeans alike, and Haiti produced it cheaply, plentifully and nearly all year round.

But in the brief time that the embargo was effective, “Haiti lost the mango trade,” said an owner of an agriculturally related business. “Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, even Florida have picked up the slack, and there is no way Haiti can get back in the game.”

What all this means to most economists here is that Haiti has almost no chance of returning to a normal economic existence.

“Inflation is really starting to kick in now,” said one expert. “The gourde (Haiti’s currency) has lost its value by a factor of three. That means the money used to pay workers here is worthless. Contractors want only dollars. The middle class will start to hurt soon, and even the elite are going to feel it.”

However, said another Haitian economist, “there is no shortage of dollars here, and increasingly dollars are earned in the drug trade.”

He and other observers say the Haitian drug trade, in which narcotics pass through the island en route from South America to the United States and Europe, brought in more than half a billion dollars here this year.

“That,” said one economist, “makes it the highest earner of foreign income, even more than the money sent here from Haitians living in the United States.”

Originally, experts said, the drug trade was largely in the hands of a few civilian families and members of the military. Since Aristide’s overthrow and the embargo, other powerful civilians have involved themselves in drugs to replace whatever business they lost.

Some of Haiti’s biggest families are getting even richer, said one foreign expert. “Even if the embargo is revived and truly enforced, the truly rich and powerful will survive, unless the world gets serious about stopping drugs here.”