CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN : Contradictory Emotions Overtake Miami’s Little Haiti : Reaction: Many feel action is needed. But fear of bloodshed and mistrust of American motivations temper community’s enthusiasm.

On what could be the eve of a U.S.-led invasion of their tormented homeland, the parishioners of Notre Dame d’Haiti Roman Catholic Church will don their Sunday best today and pray for a quick end to any bloodshed.

The cause may be a just one, they allow, but the fact remains that once again lives may be lost in the Caribbean.

“As in all wars, some innocents will pay for it,” said Jean Destine, a social worker who took his 11-year-old son to a peace vigil that broke up after sunrise Saturday. “But the invasion has to be done. It’s the only way.”

As a fearsome armada waits off the coast of Haiti, ready to disgorge its cargo of troops and weapons, a sense of expectation--tinged alternately with hope and suspicion--has overtaken the bustling streets of the Miami neighborhood known as Little Haiti.

Contradictory emotions abound in this singular community, where news broadcasts updating developments resound in English and Creole amid the tree-shaded streets of deteriorating pastel cottages, rainbow-hued mom-and-pop shops and flimsy apartment complexes.

“I don’t like the invasion,” said Erve Paul, a 35-year-old construction worker from Cap Haitien who spoke in the Ceci bon bakery. “But I agree with it.”

His comments seemed to encapsulate a rough consensus in Little Haiti, a center of the Haitian diaspora, where the many likenesses of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide attest to his Gandhi-like standing among some.

New York, particularly Brooklyn, is home to more Haitians, but Florida’s Haitians are more likely to be recent arrivals closely attuned to the fierce politics of their native land.

Grating on the Haitians here and elsewhere is the reality that it will probably be a U.S.-led force--not Haitians themselves--that will restore Aristide to the presidential palace.

Many mention the humiliating U.S. military occupation of Haiti earlier in the century (1915-34) and Washington’s longtime tolerance of the Duvalier tyranny, which finally collapsed in 1986 with the flight of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier to France.

Proud of the slave revolt that led to the proclamation of the world’s first black republic in 1804, Haitians point out that a pro-slavery U.S. government denied it diplomatic recognition for more than half a century.

“The invasion is a very bitter pill to swallow,” said Father Thomas Wenski, the Creole-speaking Polish American who serves as pastor of Notre Dame d’Haiti.

Most invasion opponents seemed to agree that Aristide must be restored to power and that the military regime of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras must be ousted. But they favored other means--continued economic pressure on Haiti, material support for pro-democracy groups inside the country, even the arming and training of an exile force--than the Clinton Administration’s ambitious blueprint.

“It’s very hard to believe that this invasion is going to solve things,” said Jean-Claude Exulien, a historian who came to the United States after spending a year as a political prisoner during the Duvalier years. “I don’t believe in miracles myself,” added Exulien, who spoke on a field as he coached Haitian American youths playing soccer.

He and others fear that Aristide could be reduced to a figurehead, hemmed in by Pentagon officials who they suspect will really run Haiti until a transition occurs to a new government more malleable by White House interests.

“I wonder what will happen once some general countermands an Aristide directive,” Wenski said after presiding over a prayer service in Creole at his parish church, a converted school cafeteria. “Where’s the principle of legitimacy then? Where’s the principle of rule of law?”

Many here are also not optimistic that occupying U.S. authorities will ever call on the coup’s principal supporters--the Haitian mixed-race elite, largely ensconced behind gated compounds in Petionville, a fashionable Port-au-Prince suburb--to answer for their actions. Among Little Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor and black population--many of whom had to endure harrowing boat journeys and lengthy immigration detentions--there is great resentment against the power clique back home.

“For Clinton to identify Cedras as the one bad boy is so simplistic that it almost seems done by design,” said Roger E. Biamby, director of the Pierre Toussaint Catholic Center in Little Haiti, named after an 18th-Century Haitian activist in New York. “The Americans are going to end up protecting the very people who are backing Cedras and his thugs.”

Such mistrust runs deep here. Many believe that the CIA had a role in the September, 1991, coup that ousted Aristide, a populist priest whose strident advocacy on behalf of impoverished masses gained him many enemies in both the United States and Haiti.

“These are all CIA boys,” Guy Gerald Victor, a longtime activist here, said about Cedras and his cohorts. “The CIA will always find a way to protect them.”

Nonetheless, Victor, who fled Haiti during the brutal reign of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, calls the invasion necessary to stem the slaughter that he says has cost thousands of lives since the coup.

“We see no harm in the troops going there to help,” said Victor, who predicted that the ragtag Haitian forces would run away in the face of advancing U.S. troops, despite Cedras’ blustering comments to the contrary. “This operation won’t last more than one day.”

The Haitian Refugee Center, the social service group that Victor heads, has often harshly criticized Clinton Administration policy--particularly the now-discontinued practice of repatriating Haitians intercepted at sea. (A mural outside its Little Haiti headquarters depicts a desperate Haitian in a swamped boat chained to the Statue of Liberty and pleading, “Why?”)

But this time, refugee center advocates said, Clinton finally got it right.

“The systematic killing must be stopped now,” Steven Forester, chief attorney at the center, said as he handed a visitor a photograph of a recent victim whose face had been mutilated.

“People walk in here all the time with these kinds of cases,” Forester said, noting that the dead man’s mother lives a few blocks away.

Outside, on Northeast 54th Street, the commercial hub of Little Haiti, a mood of jubilation prevailed the other night during a storefront rally.

“Finally, we see the lifting of the dark clouds that have covered the horizon for so long!” a speaker leading pro-Aristide chants shouted to the exultant crowd of more than 200 that spilled onto the street.

Anguish about the prospect of civilian casualties, however, tempers such expectations.

“I got a feeling some of my family might die,” said Paul, the construction worker.

Once any invasion starts, residents predicted, Haitians themselves will likely target the paramilitary thugs--known as Tontons Macoutes during the Duvalier era but now often called “attaches”--who enforce the government’s reign of terror. Many fear a fratricidal bloodletting.

“There’s nowhere in the woods you can hide in Haiti,” said Apollon Philias, a 45-year-old restaurant manager. “Everyone knows everyone else.”

An ouster of Haiti’s military rulers would also mean an end to a near-total U.N. embargo, allowing expatriates to visit relatives and presumably reigniting the once-thriving Florida-Haiti commerce.

“We’ve got to be back there,” said Samedi Fiorvil, who was locked up for 17 months as an illegal immigrant when he first arrived in the United States, despite an ultimately successful asylum claim based on death threats received in Haiti.

“We accept the invasion now because we don’t have any choice,” Fiorvil said. He plans to return home next month and rejoin his wife and three children--under an Aristide government.

Hard-hit merchants who ply the cross-cultural trade in everything from foodstuffs to healing potions to Creole tapes seemed ecstatic that things may finally improve.

“If the invasion comes true, everyone will be glad,” said Louna Phillipp, who keeps a combination variety store, market and business office along Northeast 54th Street, its walls adorned with images of Aristide and assassination victims. “There’s been too much killing already.”