Haitian Gourmands Find Their Pickings Slimmer as Embargo Hits Elite : Caribbean: Even the privileged are now feeling the pinch. Many are focusing on a relief fuel shipment.

First went gasoline. Then it was the electricity and telephones. Now it’s Baltic Mousse.

Until now--and all through a series of international economic sanctions that have almost emptied Haiti’s streets of vehicles and left the already beggared nation largely without power and telephones, with most of its people malnourished if not starving--the country’s elite had counted on maintaining its usual privileges.

Chief among them were the half a dozen or so quality international restaurants in Petionville, a tony suburb of Port-au-Prince high on a mountainside overlooking--but distanced from--the capital’s squalor and misery.

And the creme de la creme of the fancy beaneries was La Souvenance, where the specialty was Baltic Mousse, a mixture of herring and salmon eggs served with chopped onions and capers, often accompanied by champagne.

But Baltic Mousse is no more, finally falling victim to the latest international sanctions. Those were imposed in mid-October to punish the Haitian military and its civilian allies for refusing to permit the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been overthrown in September, 1991, in a violent revolt.

Some people had put their hopes on a 300,000-gallon shipment of gasoline and diesel fuel, due here this week for distribution to international feeding centers, hospitals and other humanitarian agencies.

Perhaps some of it could be siphoned off through traditionally corrupt avenues to those willing to pay; or perhaps even given legally to restaurants on grounds that they provide “humanitarian” assistance by employing people.

Not a chance, say diplomats and officials of the international agencies organizing the fuel shipment.

They are determined to avoid charges that they are violating their own embargo--so determined that they are tightly restricting distribution of the admittedly small amount of fuel.

Not even the nation’s most prominent hospital will receive any. The reasoning is that it mostly cares for the rich.

Although the diplomats and other international officials acknowledge that probably 25% or more of the fuel will be subject to “leakage,” even the most cynical observers doubt that any will find its way to Petionville’s restaurants, at least not enough to keep them open for long.

That is a shock to an elite that easily and arrogantly found a way to frustrate earlier sanctions, paying huge fees for ships to smuggle in spare parts, French ice cream and other delicacies.

Jean-Guy Barme, the owner of La Souvenance, was once heard to say with a sly grin, “Vive l’embargo” as he served freshly smoked Norwegian salmon, accompanied by a fine French white wine.

Now, standing in his restaurant, its tables adorned with wilting flowers, the subtle pink and gray colors of the elegant dining room darkened by a power outage, the French-born Barme says he is finally beaten.

“I hope I can stay open on the weekends,” he said, “but I don’t know. If there’s no power and no fuel for the generators, I don’t know.”

What he does know is that he can’t get the fresh ingredients needed for something as fragile as Baltic Mousse. Neither can he count on the steady refrigeration necessary to protect such delicacies from the tropical heat and humidity.

The same restrictions have written finis for other posh restaurants--La Voile, Cascade and Chez Gerard, all of which have closed or restricted their openings to one or two days on weekends.

“It is a real loss,” said the owner of a pharmaceutical company who lives in Petionville. “I want Aristide back, but I want to be able to go to Souvenance or La Voile. Why shouldn’t we have something nice in our lives?”

For the international organizers of the boycott and the overwhelming majority of Haiti’s 6 1/2 million people, the vanished Baltic Mousse is no loss, not when most of the population is out of work, has no private or public transportation and thus has no access to the already severely limited health system.

CARE, the American relief organization, has had to suspend most of its feeding operations in the Northwest, Haiti’s poorest region, because of the lack of fuel, while Catholic Relief Services has been forced to cut back to one meal a day its feeding program in Port-au-Prince and other urban areas.

With black-market gasoline selling for nearly $8 a gallon, only the richest can afford to drive.

Buses are charging passengers $5 to travel half the distance of their old routes, making it nearly impossible for most students to reach their schools.

The Haitian power company has cut output so severely that even Petionville goes days without electricity. Now utility officials are saying that all service may end within days because the only working turbine is on the verge of breaking down.

Cap Haitien, the country’s second-largest city, has not had electricity for more than two months, and most other areas have been blacked out for even longer.

Several telephone exchanges have shut down; others are in such bad repair or so overloaded that it takes hours to get a dial tone, and that only leads to a busy signal.

For more than 12 hours, from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, Haiti was without outgoing telephone service: no international calls, no local calls, nothing.

“We’ve got some service restored,” a telephone company official said Wednesday, “but it could happen again. It probably will.”

The humanitarian fuel shipment by Royal Dutch-Shell, arranged and paid for by the United States, will not alleviate most of these hardships.

Diplomats acknowledged that it is a gesture to offset growing criticism that the embargo is seriously harming Haiti’s poor.

Distribution of the shipment, about 85% of it diesel fuel, will be restricted to select public hospitals, four internationally operated feeding programs and non-governmental water treatment facilities.

Officials said the shipment will be rationed to stretch it for as long as two months.

“Three hundred thousand gallons, that’s nothing,” one diplomat said. “It’s about a pint a person. It’s what Shell sells in two days. It’ll take longer to hook it (the tanker) to the pipe than it will to pump it out.”

Anti-Aristide forces here, and even some people who favor his return, argue that the shipment is discriminatory.

“So you give fuel to a hospital,” said Emmanuel Constant, head of the Front for Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a military-linked, violence-prone, anti-Aristide party. “What about the poor person who has no gas to drive his sick child to the hospital? Isn’t that humanitarian as well?”

As small and relatively insignificant as the shipment will be, it has been threatened with theft and violence, armed intervention to prevent either its unloading or its distribution.

“If it isn’t distributed equitably,” said Constant, who led a violent demonstration Oct. 11 that discouraged a U.S. military cargo ship from docking here, “we’ll just steal it.”