Around the World in 50 Years (25 page)

As I entered the shabby capital of Port-au-Prince, all that was missing was Dante's sign:
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Instead, the local Chamber of Commerce had strung a big banner across the road exhorting the locals, in Creole, to
HELP HAITI'S ECONOMY. DO NOT KIDNAP ANYONE TODAY!

Although seldom visited by American tourists, Haiti has had, I believe, a greater impact on our lives and history than any other noncontiguous country in our hemisphere:

• Haiti is on the island of Hispaniola, and
that
is where Columbus landed in 1492, opening up the New World.

• Inspired by the American and the French Revolutions, Haiti's slaves rebelled in 1791. In 1804 it became the second colony in the Western Hemisphere to cast off a subservient yoke and proclaim itself a republic, the world's first black-led republic, serving notice that democracy might have a broad future in the New World.

• Its slave unrest and independence movement impelled Napoleon to abandon his ambitious plan to use it as a base for expanding his empire in the Americas, and motivated him to sell France's extensive landholdings in North America to the fledgling United States—in what came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase—without which our country would have ended at the Mississippi River.

• The successful Haitian uprising so terrified Southern slaveholders in the U.S. that they instituted harsher punishments for disobedience, which, in turn, fanned the fires of abolitionism in the North. And we all know what that led to.

• In the 1980s Haiti was unfairly designated as one of the Four Hs then thought responsible for the AIDS epidemic along with homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs.

• Haiti supplied a large part of the population of central Brooklyn, the only place in the U.S. where I've found a proper goat stew.

Because Haiti had few safe hotels, I'd arranged, through a missionary friend who runs an outstanding charity there called Beyond Borders, to stay at the Methodist Church Guest House in Pétionville, high up the hill overlooking Port-au-Prince. About a dozen American lay missionaries with special skills passed through there every few days en route to assignments around Haiti, where they performed valuable volunteer service for two weeks, from running medical clinics to building schools to drilling water wells. Since many of them were female—friendly, generous, innocent Midwesterners—and since I was one of the rare nonmissionaries allowed to live in the Guest House, it was akin to giving the fox the key to the hen house. But even this ol' fox was never able to put it in the keyhole because the lovely ladies were down the hall in a room of six and I was sharing a room of eight bunk beds with seven highly vigilant and protective male missionaries.

I'd rented a car for ten days, planning to cross the island from end to end and side to side. My local contacts persuaded me that, because of the wretched roads, the language difficulties, and the theft of all traffic signs for use as firewood or shack building, I needed a native driver. They recommended a teenage orphan who'd been in their care and could use the income. I met him, liked him, and hired him. He just forgot to mention one thing: He didn't know how to operate a car.

He showed up for departure with a third man, a surly lout
he
had hired to drive, while he would translate and show me points of interest. I now had two extra mouths to feed and house, one a driver who did not know how to drive and the other a driver who drove like a jerk. I fired the lout after three days of dumb and dangerous driving, and I drove us to Cap-Haïtien while he sulked in the back and my guide desperately searched for points of interest to point out, of which there were none.

After we returned to Pétionville, I dumped the lout and drove the orphan over the interior mountains to Jacmel for its annual Carnival. We stayed for two days with an American college dropout who was teaching the local women to weave handbags and change purses from discarded black garbage bags, one of the few items in plentiful supply on the island.

We all went to Carnival in blackface, a common and inoffensive practice in Haiti. If you decide to do likewise, do not make the neophyte's mistake of using motor oil or shoe polish for the cover-up. The preferred formula is a combination of powdered charcoal, clerin (an alcoholic beverage), and sugar cane juice. The flies love it, so add some DEET.

The only tangible benefits I derived from my visit to Haiti are eight powerful paintings in traditional Haitian style with African overtones, and a bit of voodoo lore my good guide Godfried had somehow forgotten to impart to me: If you ever need to kill a voodoo priest, be sure to cut out his tongue and eyes so he cannot direct any retributive demons against you from the afterworld. How come you never told me about that, God?

I had had high hopes for what I thought might be an exotic, offbeat, and un-touristed destination, but it turned out to be the worst dung heap I'd been in, which covers a lot of territory. Unless you love seeing poverty and misery, or have a calling for missionary work, or want to stock up on excellent paintings at low prices, I can't think of any reason to visit Haiti. In fact, I can readily think of many reasons not to go. To list a few:

• The Creole they speak is difficult to understand.

• The roads are among the worst anywhere and make driving, even in towns, a torture. (The only worse roads I've driven are in the Gambia, CAR, northern Afghanistan, and a six hundred-mile stretch in Iran in 1965 that has surely been paved by now.)

• People encroach on the roads everywhere, and the hundreds of what should be road
side
stands come so far onto the surviving bit of concrete as to make driving a horror.

• The natives were not readily approachable. Polite and friendly when you're introduced by someone they know and trust, they generally present to strangers a dour, apprehensive, unwelcoming visage. It's nothing personal; they're just so beaten down by the daily grind of trying to stay alive that they don't have the energy to be gregarious.

• The locals were vocally opposed to having their pictures taken; they'd sooner throw a rock at you than pose for a picture (and if there's anything Haiti has in abundance, it is rocks). Their attitude stems from some voodoo beliefs mixed with generations of having their dictators' secret police spying on them, and their belief—not unfounded—that opportunists use or sell photos of the disadvantaged for their own advantage.

• Aside from the fine views offered from mountain roads in the interior (which few would dare to drive) the island lacks physical beauty. Even its beaches are bland and unappealing.

• The food available to travelers had little variety and was almost always fried. There are few restaurants because the people are too poor to eat out.

• Because Haiti is not self-sufficient in much and has to import virtually everything, prices are inordinately high, especially if they know you're a tourist.

• The governing elite did nothing for the people; it only put money in its own pockets. Six months after two hurricanes hit the center of the island, streets in the cities still were blocked with piles of mud and debris, and many of the washed-out roads had not been repaired, forcing me to make lengthy, arduous, detours.

• There was not much to do. The only legal diversions I saw the locals engaging in were wagering at Lotto, playing awful music at ear-shattering levels, shaking their booties, and rooting for any African or Latin American soccer team that was opposing France.

• Above all, the future here seemed—and may well be—hopeless. The nation survives, but barely, on international handouts. No large industries functioned there, no minable mineral resources enriched the land, no agriculture flourished (some sugar cane, rice, a few tropical fruits). Several million children were attending school, to graduate to a job market suitable for maybe a thousand. Decades of mistreatment by a succession of despotic, self-serving rulers have left the populace dismayed, distrustful, and beaten down.

It's hard to enjoy a holiday in a land so poor that parents sometimes give away their children to wealthier people to provide them with a chance for a better life, where the bodily organs of deceased disaster victims may be sold to medical shops, and where newly orphaned kids have been abducted after natural disasters and sold into slavery or sexual bondage.

To be fair to Haiti, I admit I may have what sociologists call a “roadside bias.” Their theory is that some aspects of living get better the farther one goes from the asphalt, that the more isolated residents are generally kinder, more hospitable, helpful, and unassuming. This may be true, but many important services diminish the farther you get from the roads, including access to good health care, education, entertainment, and food variety. Any way you look at it, it's a sad, sad place.

And that was the situation a year before a 7.0 earthquake killed around 200,000 in 2010. Before the deadly cholera epidemic. Before the challenged election. Before the return of dictator Baby Doc. And before Tropical Storm Isaac and Hurricane Sandy hit.

The
New York Times
summed it up in November 2012: “They had little, had endured much, and now need more.”

Help by donating to CARE, UNICEF, Save the Children, or Beyond Borders. But spare yourself the visit.

 

CHAPTER 14

Your Man in Havana

As I was waiting at Haiti's Toussaint Louverture Airport to board the aging Ilyushin airliner for my clandestine flight to Havana, the officials shepherded about 50 Haitians past me and onto the plane. They were mostly middle-aged and so gaunt and frail I wondered why they were flying. It was not until I was inescapably strapped in my seat among them that I found out they were heading to Cuba for medical treatment. For tuberculosis! (Ever try holding your breath for 90 minutes?)

I arrived in Santiago de Cuba misguidedly thinking I'd be welcomed as a Hero of the Revolution for defying the U.S. embargo and being one of the rare Americans to fly into Cuba without the official exemption granted by the U.S. to medical and missionary workers or attendees at a professional conference. Instead, I aroused their suspicions. They assumed I was CIA.

They asked my occupation, but doubted that I was “retired”; nor did they buy my story about trying to visit every country. They were skeptical of why I was carrying $4,000 cash, even after I explained I had six more Caribbean countries to visit. (They'd have been far more distrustful if they'd found the additional $4,000 hidden in my belt, boots, and a hollowed-out book.) My bulging 50-page passport led them to believe the Agency was sending me around the globe to foment trouble. And I'd walked off the plane carrying a copy of John le Carré's
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
which didn't help. But would a real spy have the
cojones
to do that?

They were on edge about the CIA. Recently declassified documents exposed that, from 1960 to 1961, shortly after John Kennedy became president, the CIA had conspired with the Chicago Mafia (which was angry at Fidel Castro for having closed down its lucrative Cuban gambling casinos) to have him assassinated.

A team of three uniformed and well-informed security agents questioned me for two hours. They studied each page of my passport, attempting to relate each entry or exit stamp to some contemporaneous anti-Communist or anti-Socialist world event: Did I have anything to do with the death of the authoritarian president of Turkmenistan? Was I involved in the referendum Hugo Chávez lost two years ago in Venezuela? What role did I play in the overthrow of the president of Fiji? Was it truly a coincidence I was in Khartoum the very day Chad attacked and almost captured it? Was I involved in the negotiations to renew U.S. rights to use the airbase in Kazakhstan? Why did antigovernment riots erupt the day I landed in Bangalore? Did I expect them to believe it was a mere coincidence that two days after I left the northeast of Sri Lanka, the government resumed its offensive against the Tamil Tiger freedom fighters? Didn't Latvia ask the Russian troops to leave shortly after I visited Riga? (They were bluffing on that one; my Latvian stamps were in a much older passport.) Hadn't the U.S. begun preparing Djibouti as a base from which to attack Saddam Hussein while I was there? Didn't Ethiopia and Eritrea resume their war shortly after I visited both countries?

I tried to explain, as politely as possible, that these were all really,
truly,
mere coincidences, and that if I had orchestrated even a quarter of the acts they suspected, I'd be the greatest agent provocateur in history. I repeatedly sought to convince them that, if I really were CIA, I'd have half a dozen passports at my disposal in various names, and there'd be no paper trail for them to scrutinize. All to no avail.

What ultimately persuaded them of my innocence was my response to their question about where I'd be staying in Havana. When I gave them the name of my backpacker's hostel and showed them the receipt for my reservation—made through an innocuous-sounding front in Toronto because the U.S. embargo did not allow Americans to use a credit card for any transaction in or with Cuba—they promptly stamped me in and allowed me to board the plane for Havana. They'd quickly concluded that no self-respecting CIA operative would ever stay at such a dump.

Havana was wonderful. The people were extremely warm and hospitable to the rare
gringo
they got to meet. (The city was packed with young tourists from Spain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and South America.) Havana had a certain raffish charm, with a quarter of the guys selling cigars on the street and a quarter of the women selling themselves. In pleasant contrast to the horrible life-or-death atmosphere of Haiti, Havana was calm and relaxed, uncongested and peaceful. I saw none of the standard indicia of a repressive dictatorship or of a people unhappy with their government: no tanks guarding the presidential palace; no soldiers or cops with assault rifles on the corners; no ubiquitous photos of Our Dear Leader; no walls or billboards plastered with political slogans, save one tattered sign celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution. The people discussed politics openly, had high hopes for reasonable treatment from Barack Obama (who was just starting his first year as president), and showed no signs of being repressed or fearful.