The Invisible Country

Tom F. Driver
Oct 31, 1998.

I fear that to most people in the United States, Haiti has become invisible. For example, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Georges in September was well reported from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and even Cuba but not from Haiti. From such silence, one could have been forgiven for thinking that a divine hand had spared her.

One TV weather man pointed directly at Haiti on the map while talking only of the D.R. and Cuba. When a Haiti activist in Virginia phoned to complain about this, the reporter apologized, explaining that his sources of information included no one in Haiti.

During baseball post-season games, TV audiences saw and heard appeals for hurricane relief for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic with no mention of Haiti at all -- because they don't play baseball there?

There are other signs of Haiti's invisibility. The new book by the Edwige Danticat was the subject of a full page advertisement in The New York Times Book Review on October 11. The ad made mention of neither Haiti nor Haitians -- a silence much like that of the Royal Caribbean cruise line that takes passengers to a pretty beach named Labadie near Cap Haitien, announcing it as "a Caribbean island" without letting the passengers know they have come ashore in Haiti.

The New York Times broke a long silence about Haiti on October 18 with a four-column article that turned out to be highly misleading. It reduced the long drawn-out political stalemate in Haiti to a matter of personalities, strongly implying that the major cause is Jean-Bertrand Aristide's lust for power. Only his opponents were quoted. There was no suggestion that any substantive issues are involved in Haiti's political disputes. The reader learns that more than $1 billion in promised aid has been held up, but is not told the major reason, which is Haiti's refusal of the strings attached.

The article is an example of mystification: It suggests that Haitians are incapable of self-government. Coming from the Times, this slanting of the news is ominous, since it may signal that another coup is on the way, to which the U.S. would, as in 1991, have no sincere objection.

As I see it, the underlying cause of the political stalemate in Haiti is a collision between the will of the U.S. Government and that of the majority of the Haitian people. They don't like "structural adjustment." Their refusal of it, in spite of the present hardships, reveals their determination not to assent to economic policies that have trod them down before and are presently doing the same to their neighbors in Central America.

There is no quick fix for Haiti's problems. What's needed is some free space for Haiti's popular organizations to fashion a sustainable form of economic development, one not entirely at the mercy of global markets. Ironically, the troubles that the world's financial markets are having these days may create an opportunity for countries like Haiti to do some new economic thinking and be listened to.

Tom F. Driver