It was déjà vu all over again. There I was back in Haiti listening to Jean-Bertrand Aristide speaking in his sing-song, deliberate and well-articulated way in several languages (I’m a polyglot!), to an adoring crowd. And using his usual array of flowery metaphors that are more like Zen koans of the political kind.
Aristide had come back home after seven years in exile, he said, to bring a message of “peace and love” and “honor and respect” for Haiti. But he also said the Haitian government was wrong to have forbidden his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, from putting a candidate on Sunday’s presidential election ballot. “Haiti should be about inclusion,” he intoned like the liberation theology priest he used to be, “not exclusion.” As with so many things Aristide says, it works better in theory than in practice.
Still, you have to take Aristide seriously since millions of Haitians do. “No Aristide, no Haiti,” a Haitian named Daniel waiting outside the Port-au-Prince airport told me. “Everybody in Haiti loves Aristide.” Not the wealthy in their baronial mansions up above the city in Petionville, but it’s undoubtedly true of the poor and dispossessed living in the slums below. Absolutely true of the several thousand excited Haitians who gathered at the Port-au-Prince airport on Friday to greet and cheer their returning hero and savior.
“He is the only one who has stood by the Haitian masses,” Farah Juste, the fiery Miami-based singer and Aristide supporter told me. “Hallelujah, President Aristide is back to his country!”
He returned on a sleek chartered jet — and who paid for that? — after seven years in exile in South Africa. He was accompanied by his wife and two daughters and a small entourage of U.S. lefties including the actor Danny Glover and Washington, D.C. activist James Early who both spouted the usual bromides about how great Aristide is and how unfair and hypocritical it was for President Obama to have pressured South Africa’s president to stop Aristide’s return.
Miami attorney Ira Kurzban facilitated the trip and was constantly at Aristide’s side, but he isn’t talking to me since I wrote a column in 1994 saying Aristide needed to leave Haiti given the great harm he had caused.
Will he cause harm now that he’s back? There’s no way to know yet, but I’d say that returning to a politically, socially and economically fragile country only two days before the election was an act of immense egoism. Even if he didn’t endorse either of the presidential candidates, Aristide’s very presence detracted from their last-minute campaigning. Some Haitians appear to have stayed away from the polls in a show of support for Aristide. In his 20-minute speech at the airport, Aristide professed no interest in politics and said that he will work to improve education in Haiti, which desperately needs it.
But one way or another and sooner rather than later, I expect to see Aristide back in politics. He is a political creature and a very clever one at that. I vividly remember interviewing him for the first time during his first run for president in 1990. We spoke in the back yard of a home in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. He was at once articulate and opaque, peaceful and revolutionary, smoothing his revolutionary rhetoric with those flowery metaphors, just as he did in the pulpit of his St. John Bosco church where I also heard him speak. But his record as president was mostly dismal and divisive, his tacit approval of violence by his FRAPH goon squad indefensible and the allegations that he siphoned off millions from the government treasury still refuse to go away. He was, of course, never formally charged in Haiti. Nor did the federal grand jury in Miami that looked into alleged ties to drug smugglers ever produce an indictment. Could that cloud of suspicion be the work of the CIA and other political foes? Of course. Could the allegations be real but never proven? Of course.
Haiti has survived a massive earthquake, a cholera outbreak, several hurricanes, the return of Jean Claude Duvalier and now that of Aristide. Job-like, the poor, sweet benighted Haitian people endure. They have a gritty and graceful tenacity that you must admire. As I walked out of the Port-au-Prince airport last Friday, I encountered the usual mob of waiting cab drivers and luggage porters who descend upon visitors. Despite my entreaties that no help was needed, one man was able to put his hands on our luggage cart with TV equipment and never let go. Once they touch it that way, you’re theirs. And once you’re touched by Haiti, it will not let you go.
On the flight home I sat next to a beautiful little girl with skin the color of dark chocolate who was dressed in an immaculate bright orange dress of embroidered linen. Her hair was carefully braided and in it were two white ribbon bows and orange plastic flowers. Her father, sitting directly in front (and unable to change seats with me), told me she was 7. She started to quietly cry as the plane took off. I tried to reassure her that everything was all right, but she kept crying until she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. Fifteen minutes outside of Miami she awoke and started crying again, but with quiet dignity, her head tucked down. Was it for family she’d left behind? For her future in another country? Perhaps her tears were for the country she’d just left. I was dry-eyed, but knew exactly how she felt.
MPUTNEY@LOCAL10.COM
