A Cyber-Revolution Dawns in Haiti Despite All the Odds

PETIONVILLE, Haiti — Dmitri Fourcand started out early at Station 2 in the Art Deco cafe known as Click 123 one morning this week.

By nightfall, the 28-year-old graphic designer had marketed an array of products from his cyber-mall. He’d made a tidy commission and swapped dozens of e-mails with customers the world over--all without phone or power lines in a nation that ranks among the world’s poorest.

“When I look at that screen, I’m not in Haiti anymore,” Fourcand said as young Haitians all around him downloaded research papers from France, explored job opportunities in Florida and, yes, ventured into steamier subjects with far-off cyber-suitors in chat rooms.

“When I’m on the Net, I’m a citizen of the world. I can see how the world is evolving. And I can see forever.”

It is a scene that is repeating itself daily now in more than a dozen generator-powered cyber-cafes that have sprouted in this mountainside suburb of the Haitian capital in the last year like spaceships in a scrap yard.

It is a phenomenon that many analysts here say ultimately could revolutionize Haiti. And it already is beginning to offer a precious sliver of hope for the younger generation of a country that 2 million Haitians have left behind.

Tapping the Potential

Haiti is, after all, a nation in utter disrepair: There are just 60,000 phone lines in the nation of nearly 8 million people--less than half the per capita average for the African continent. Most of the country has no electricity, no clean drinking water and no paved roads.

And at least two-thirds of the population is illiterate--after a succession of dictatorships taught that information was an unnecessary evil.

“The Internet is important because it has the potential to open up the nation to the rest of the world,” said Francois Benoit, general manager of the company that pioneered the Internet in Haiti.

Benoit’s Alpha Communications Network is the first of three servers to set up shop, using a technology declassified by the U.S. military in the mid-1990s. Spread spectrum technology, he says, has made it possible to relay Internet connections without phone lines or cable TV lines, through a network of repeater stations that--despite government obstacles--his company intends to extend nationwide.

Benoit’s cyber-customers buy an antenna for $4,000 that links them to ACN’s satellite ground station and then pay a $250 monthly fee for the service.

Although far cheaper than a new national phone system, the prices remain far beyond the reach of most Haitians.

“Let’s get real. In Haiti, the first step is [to] give the people something to eat,” said Wilhem Trouillot, administrator and co-owner of the Click 123 cyber-cafe, which mostly draws Haiti’s well-educated elite. “I’m sorry, but the Internet is a luxury here.”

Cost Steep for Many

In a nation where the annual per capita income is less than $400, the fees are indeed steep: At Click 123, members pay $37.50 for a 20-hour block of time on the Internet.

Nancy Roc, who opened a combination cyber-cafe and cultural center a month ago in the capital, Port-au-Prince, agrees that most Haitians can’t afford such an extravagance. But Roc, a prominent journalist, stresses that the Internet remains in its infancy here.

“This tool has to be made available to the poor--to the masses--and it will in time,” said Roc, who offers membership discounts to students and the poor. “But it is a luxury and shall remain so for several years, and that’s why you have the success of the cyber-cafe.”

In fact, many Haitians use the cafes not to surf the Net but to reach relatives in the diaspora, using rented headsets to tap into Web sites offering free international phone calls.

But young entrepreneurs such as Fourcand see the cyber-phone fad as fleeting.

“When I see the people using the Internet as a phone, I imagine Superman cradling a baby--the vast power of this thing being wasted,” said Fourcand, who has a degree from the University of Florida and U.S. residency but came home “to help save my country.”

“And I do believe this thing is our key,” he said, “to a new and better Haiti.”