VOODOO, AIDS AND PIGS

Anthony Daniels visits

the island of Haiti, shunned by white tourists

'WHAT we need,' said Boisrond Tonnere when he was deputed to write Haiti's first constitution. 'is the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink and a bayonet for a pen.'

Understandable sentiments, no doubt, in view of the history of the slave colony of Saint-Domingue, but not necessarily a good augury. Since those words were uttered, Haiti has had 42 heads of state, nine of whom appointed themselves for life and 26 of whom were removed by force; two emperors, one of whom was murdered while the other was deposed, and a king who committed suicide before the assassins at the gate could reach him; and more than one president dismembered by an enraged mob.

The present president, Leslie Manigat, won — if that is the word — elections which had the democratic legitimacy of a Romanian plebiscite. The very dead from the graveyards voted (by proxy, of course, even in this land of voodoo). But though his 'election' was greeted with apathy and resignation, he is nevertheless a man of considerable standing, a political scientist able to write fluently in French, Spanish or English, even if it must be admitted that trying to summarise his articles or decipher from them what he believes in is a little like trying to hum Stockhausen.

The problems that he, or any other president, faces are of some severity. The per capita income in the rural areas is $150 a year, and not rising. The population per square mile of arable land is more than 1,400. At the time of Columbus's landing, 80 per cent of Haiti was forested; in 1923, 60 per cent; in 1974, seven per cent; in 1987, two per cent. According to USAid statistics, 35 million trees are cut down for charcoal every year, and 11 million re- planted, of which half survive. Fifteen thousand acres of arable land are lost to erosion each year. But charcoal is still sent to the bloated capital, Port-au-Prince, and even exported to the Dominican Republic, where drastic forestry preservation laws are enforced.

The industrial situation is not encourag- ing, either. As a result of recession and the labour unrest that followed the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier, 40,000 of the 60,000 jobs in re-export assembly plants have been lost. In circumstances of 50 per cent underemployment or unemployment, in which every employed person supports six or seven dependants — even though a quarter or a third of his wages are spent solely in commuting to work — this is no small matter.

Not surprisingly, one of the commonest ambitions of Haitians is to leave. In Cap Haitien, where the chief economic activity is smuggling, I saw one of the wooden boats in which Haitians try to reach Flor- ida, a vessel in which I should not care to cross the Serpentine. The US Coastguard spent an estimated $30 million last year trying to keep Haitians out, and in the first three months of this year returned 2,284 aspiring immigrants to their native land, almost as many as in the whole of 1987. Haitians are even willing to go to the Dominican Republic, the auld enemy, where they are both feared and looked down upon. Haitians remember the mas- sacre of 1937, when Trujillo had 15,000 of them killed. Dominicans remember the 22 years of Haitian rule between 1821 and 1843, which were not distinguished by gentleness or good government. Neverthe- less, half a million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, and perhaps as many again in the United States.

As for the smuggling, which has reduced Haiti's customs receipts, once its greatest source of revenue, to practically nothing, it is something of a puzzle. Where does the money come from to purchase the re- frigerators and hi-fi equipment, not to mention American rice (which, much to the chagrin of the local rice-farmers, has reduced drastically the market price) that one sees unloaded from rusty Honduran freighters straight onto trucks under the very eyes of the customs inspectors? One suspects that cocaine, to the advantages of whose trade Haitians might not prove totally immune, has something to do with it. At any rate, a passing yachtsman recently saw no fewer than 70 large wooden boats under construction on the Isle de Tortue, from which the first French buc- caneers launched their attacks against Spanish Santo Domingo.

All things considered, it is remarkable that Haitians should find anything to laugh about, but, with truly impressive resili- ence, they do. Even more impressive is the fact that Port-au-Prince, poverty-stricken and under-policed as it is, is one of the safest cities in the world for visitors. Criminologists might find this worthy of note.

Not that there are many visitors to Haiti these days. First they were frightened off by the suggestion that Aids started there and was rampant. (As indeed it seems to be: I visited an undertaker in the town of Saint Marc, prosperous among his coffins, with a silver and a black Cadillac hearse parked outside, and he told me that many young people were dying of a strange wasting disease, which the locals believed to be the result of voodoo, but which he, having lived 17 years in Brooklyn, knew to be Aids; at which point an old man told me that he had had the disease many years before, but was cured by a decoction whose ingredients he would not divulge.) Then came the political troubles and the November 1987 election massacre. Since then, not a tourist — with the exception of myself — had been seen. Club Mediterra- née has closed its gates, though it was being maintained in case political stability returned and a vaccine against Aids was discovered. By all accounts it was always a grotesque place, overladen with food, and surrounded by barbed wire, whose guests' only contact with Haiti was the bus ride from the airport, and even then their attention was carefully distracted from the distressing slum scenes en route.

One tourist facility remains open, how- ever. It is a beach on a small peninsula half an hour by bad dirt road from Cap Haitien. The peninsula is leased by a cruise ship company and three times a week a sleek white liner anchors nearby and disgorges 2,300 passengers for eight hours on to the sanitised sand, there to frolic, lie in ham- mocks, consume soft drinks or snorkel (only $11 a day). As I watched them disembark, I could think for some reason only of the Dance of the Hours in Walt Disney's Fantasia: the elephants in pink tutus. Perhaps it was because so many of the passengers were enormously fat and dressed in pink. When they frolicked, it could be measured on the Richter scale.

No one was sorry to avoid the real Haiti. The things they'd heard. . . . The company had told one passenger that it was inadvis- able to wander from the beach complex, because it was dangerous and she wouldn't be insured. Another man, biting on his cigar, said sure he'd go into Haiti, the same way as he'd go any place else, with a Colt 45 in his pocket, the only gun for the conditions.

`What conditions?' He couldn't answer.

Someone asked whether there was any- thing to see in Haiti. I said we were not far from the Citadelle, the fortress built by King Henri Cristophe early in the 19th century at a cost, perhaps, of 20,000 lives, and truly one of the wonders of the world. His eyes glazed over: this was not some- thing in his sense.

Only one person mentioned Aids as a reason for not entering Haiti proper. But the beach was all right because 'they' (the company) had security. I didn't tell him I had penetrated the security from a nearby cove by means of a rowing boat. Nor did I mention the girls in flimsy dresses (business girls, as the Haitian I was with colourfully called them) struggling their way up the dirt road high above the beach to meet the crew off the liner. I didn't want to spoil the man's cruise.

One group of North Americans, ten or fifteen thousand strong, will never desert Haiti, however. These are the missionaries and their families, raising funds and fight- ing evil. They fill the airwaves with their invectives against sin, upon which they have no perceptible effect except to turn it into a six-syllable word. It is easy to make fun of them, and non-missionary expatri- ates are convinced they are either in business to enrich themselves or are agents of the CIA, or both. One medical mission- ary I met, who has run a remarkable district hospital for 30 years, gave some credence to at least the first of these claims: from time to time, he said, mem- bers of dubious, fly-by-night missions would take video pictures of his hospital and — he suspected — use them to inveigle money from the folks back home.

This missionary, at least, was a thought- ful and well-informed man who, besides providing as much medical attention as he could to a population of 300,000 otherwise completely deprived of it, devoted himself to rescuing the physical remnants of Haiti's past, both pre-Colomban and colonial. (He told me that the few walls and gate- posts remaining from the French colonial estates were still being plundered for their bricks). He had started a local museum and was an expert on the history of the area.

His view of voodoo was rather more nuanced than that of a colleague of his at another mission, who had kept me enter- tained, as he leant back in his chair with his feet on the desk, with stories of how children disappeared, parts of them to be eaten (with boiled green bananas, a detail which he found particularly depraved), the rest to appear as goat meat in the market. Voodoo was the work of Satan, he said: the viler the acts, the stronger the magic.

The medical missionary, on the other hand, recognised the value of voodoo in Haiti. In pagan societies like this, he said, the social cement was of necessity fear, indeed terror. Voodoo externalised evil, turning man into a perpetual victim (a message reinforced by liberation theology and Marxism). The great originality of the Judaeo-Christian message, he continued, was to internalise evil and to make man responsible for his own destiny. One of the consequences, strangely enough, was the development of science, whose continual checking against reality, and reformulation of theories amounted to a kind of conscien- ce impossible in pagan societies. Thus he could train a believer in voodoo to be a technician, but never a scientist. A man who diagnosed malaria with a microscope in the morning would cut out the heart of a dead relative in the afternoon to prevent him from being turned into a zombie. The liberating message he bore, the missionary said, would not be assimilated for genera- tions, and in the meantime religious syn- cretism was all for the best.

As for externalised evil, there was plenty of it about. I heard it said several times that the real cause of Baby Doc's downfall was the slaughter of the creole pigs in Haiti at the behest of the United States, which feared the spread of African swine fever to the North American mainland. Since pigs were the peasants' only form of saving, their destruction — on the grounds that if they were not killed, they would die, an argument the peasants found somewhat bewildering — was a disaster.

I went to talk to a veterinary scientist working for USAid to clarify the story. Surely the general impression in Haiti of American malfeasance was in error, yet another example of self-gratifying outrage?

The vet was perhaps the most evasive

man I have ever met. He scarcely looked me in the eye. Whatever I asked was either a matter of public record — by which he usually meant was somewhere to be found in the archives of the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture — or a matter on which he could not comment, even though it was in his area of specialisation. I asked whether he had been in Haiti during the actual slaughter of the pigs.

He pushed a document across to me. It had the name of the Freedom of Informa- tion Act liaison officer for the project, whom I could call in Washington for a list of personnel with their dates of appoint- ment.

Finally, exasperated, I asked whether the Haitian pig population had been res- tored to its pre-slaughter level, as prom- ised, but in view of his inability to specu- late on either the pre- or post-slaughter figures, it was impossible for him to say. But he did let fall one small remark. 'Of course, there is no market now for pigs in Haiti.'

`Why is that?' I asked.

He smiled enigmatically. I suggested poverty, or the symbolic value of pigs, perhaps? Still he smiled, but said nothing. Only later did I discover that the United States is dumping pork products at $600 a container-load in Haiti.

As I was saying only recently, what we need is the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell. . . .