Miami Haitians Frustrated by New, Tighter Sanctions : Embargo: Plan to halt flights to island nation, limit cash transfers, causes worry about business, kin’s plight.

Travel agent Carole Thebaud can only guess what effect the impending cutoff of U.S. air traffic and large cash transfers to Haiti will have on restoring democracy to her impoverished homeland. But she is sure that the tough new sanctions are about to drive her out of business.

Days away from the start of new Clinton Administration measures designed to increase the pressure on Haiti’s military government, Thebaud said: “I’m barely surviving. This should be our high season right now. But look. There’s no one in here. Because all available flights out of Haiti are sold out.”

Thebaud, whose small storefront business is in the heart of Miami’s Little Haiti, is just one of thousands of Haitians in the United States, most of them in South Florida and New York, being squeezed by the U.S. effort to tighten the screws on the leaders of the military coup that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

As of Saturday, all commercial flights between the United States and Haiti will end and cash transfers between the two nations will be limited to $50 a month. The targets of the stepped-up sanctions, announced by President Clinton June 10, are the coup leaders and their wealthy supporters. Last week, U.S. officials reported seeing signs that an embargo put in place earlier is beginning to work and that a military invasion of Haiti seems less likely.

But according to those on the streets of Miami’s vibrant, Creole-speaking neighborhoods, the embargo is hurting those outside Haiti too.

“I think the embargo is a cruel thing,” said Joseph Pierre, director of the Caribbean Marketplace, where several vendors rent space in a tin-roofed warehouse. “This is killing business in Little Haiti. We are down to six tenants, and, if the embargo continues, all will close.”

Many import-export businesses, and the once-brisk overseas freighter traffic between Miami and Port-au-Prince, have been shut down since May, when a hemispheric economic embargo was broadened to include all but humanitarian shipments. Several small Haitian cargo boats now sit idle in the Miami River.

Thebaud, whose business was based almost solely on booking flights to Haiti, suddenly has nothing to sell. Although American Airlines added flights between the United States and Haiti after the ban was announced, all seats out of Haiti were snapped up within hours.

“I can get you to Haiti,” said Thebaud, “but I can’t get you a flight out.”

The run on flights out of Haiti has left many Haitians in Miami unable to attend to family or business affairs there. Moreover, many Haitians with visas for the United States cannot find a way out of their country.

Miami attorney Cheryl Little said she has asked the White House to provide special charters for several children, dependents of U.S. residents, who have visas but no way to get to this country.

Across 54th Street from Thebaud’s office, Fred St. Amand was busy. Half a dozen people, some with cash in hand, waited in line at his Valparaiso United Services to transfer money to relatives in Haiti before the deadline. Said Antoine Jean, 50, a liquor warehouse worker who had just wired $100 to his four children in Cape Haitien: “I do this every week.”

So what will happen after Saturday when his family’s monthly stipend drops from $400 to a maximum of $50? Jean grimaced and shook his head.

St. Amand fears the worst. “I think there is a potential for violence, here and in Haiti,” he said. “What do you think is going to happen when a man in Miami gets a call from his wife, and she says: ‘Honey, I’m starving to death. I have no money, and there is nothing in the markets. What are you going to do?’ ”

U.S. Embassy officials in Haiti have estimated that about 15% of the country’s residents are dependent on money or other goods sent regularly from the United States. St. Amand says that figure is too low. He said his agency, one of many in Miami, transfers up to $200,000 a month to Haiti in amounts that average about $100 a week per customer.

“In my opinion, I think most people are having second thoughts on the embargo,” St. Amand said. “Now they are saying: ‘Your kids won’t be able to eat, and you can’t travel to see them.’ People feel confused.”

Indeed, in a city where support for Aristide has long been fervent and near-universal, it is not uncommon now to hear criticism of the soft-spoken Roman Catholic priest. “Aristide is a good guy but I question whether he is the right person for the country now,” said Philip Dierre of the Haitian Task Force, a business development group.

Said Joseph Pierre: “Why should we squeeze the people down there, while Aristide is living well here?”

Little, an attorney for Florida Rural Legal Services, insisted that support for Aristide is still strong in Little Haiti. But, she added, “people are becoming extremely frustrated. So little seems to have been accomplished.

“The embargo has been hurting the poor because it has not been strictly enforced. The rich have been able to go around it, to get goods they need through the black market, while the military has been making a fortune off of it.

“If the embargo is enforced, and it means the return of Aristide, then people are for it.”

William H. Gray III, President Clinton’s special adviser on Haiti, has rejected the idea that the new sanctions would hurt the average Haitian. At the same time, he said the Administration would increase its $70-million-a-year humanitarian aid program to Haiti to add about 300,000 more people to the 1 million now being fed.