A Spirit of Change Sweeps Across Haiti : Caribbean: Politics, Christianity and voodoo mingle as celebrants mark the Day of the Dead.

As Haiti mourned its dead Tuesday in the heart of Port-au-Prince’s main cemetery, voodoo worshipers offered rum, food and flowers at the skull-topped cross of Baron Samedi, leader of the spirits that rule Haiti’s Day of the Dead.

Christians held candles in one hand and trowels in the other, offering blessings and promising repairs for hundreds of desecrated tombs, the work of impoverished grave robbers, that stand as silent and grim testimony to Haiti’s prolonged despair.

And relatives of the missing and dead during three years of brutal military rule rapped their knuckles on the Universal Tomb, awakening and greeting their loved ones’ spirits on the dawn of what most now expect will be Haiti’s first enduring era of democracy.

This was the backdrop as the city’s recently reinstalled mayor, Evans Paul--a pro-democracy leader who was hunted and in hiding for the last three years--strode proudly to the Universal Tomb. There, he laid a wreath of marigolds and zinnias bearing a sash with the dedication, “To the heroes against tyranny.”

Then, for the first time since he was overwhelmingly elected to his post four long years ago, Paul opened Haiti’s traditional two-day celebration of the dead--Tuesday’s All Saints Day and today’s All Souls Day that, in voodooism and Christianity alike, are among Haiti’s most sacred days of remembrance.

“We are here today thanks to God! We are here today thanks to democracy!” Paul declared in Haiti’s native Creole. “We are here today to remember those who died during the last three years at the hands of the zenglendos (military home-invading murderers), the attaches and the FRAPH (civilian thugs). Their blood was spilled so that democracy could flower in Haiti.”

It was a requiem for the pro-democracy movement’s martyrs, the more than 3,000 Haitians killed during the military’s 1991 coup and its ensuing reign of terror, which ended when 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti under an agreement that eased the military rulers into exile. It was also a political call to arms at a time when, under the continuing protection of a U.S. force that now numbers 16,000, Paul and Haiti’s recently returned president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, are struggling to lay the foundations of a new era.

Paul’s cemetery speech, like the holiday itself, clearly underscored Haiti’s traditional blurring of religion and politics.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked, shouting to the crowd.

“Yes!” they cried.

“Do you believe in democracy?”

“Yes!”

Tuesday’s ceremony refocused attention of many on the role of religion in a nation now governed by a Roman Catholic priest.

Few Haitians or longtime residents here see any serious problems in Aristide’s clerical past.

“The old saying here,” according to one analyst, “is Haitians are 70% Catholic, 30% Protestant and 100% voodooist.”

Even the purest voodoo worshipers believe that Aristide is possessed with great powers. Voodoo experts said many Haitians believe that their president, a deeply spiritual leader who has escaped at least five assassination attempts, is gifted with the spiritual power to become invisible to one’s enemies.

During past regimes, though, voodoo and the nationwide network of priests who practice the religion brought here by African slaves have been used by dictators to enforce their rule.

There has been no bloodletting within the voodoo community since Aristide returned with a continuing message of “reconciliation, not revenge.” And not even the voodoo priests themselves expect any.

“Voodoo is not politics. There is no political dimension to voodoo. But bad people use voodoo as a cloak, a smoke screen, for bad acts,” said Thermyl Selem, a voodoo priest in the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil who also served 11 years in the Haitian army.

“Aristide is someone who loves everybody. He favors none over another. And he will not discriminate between who he loves or between religions.”

The same feeling filled the cemetery throughout the day Tuesday.

But Sauveur Dormevil came to the cemetery neither to hear Paul’s speech nor to pray to Baron Samedi. He came to repair his brother’s tomb.

During the desperate final months of the military regime and the punishing international economic embargo, grave robbers had bashed in the front of his and hundreds of other tombs. They pulled out the coffin, tore off the brass handles to sell and left the bones to rot in the sun.

“It’s economic. It’s desperation. Things have gotten so bad, they’ll do even this to survive,” Dormevil said.