As the price of gas in Haiti topped $11 a gallon last week, Port-au-Prince turned into a city of pedestrians. The total trade embargo, clamped on the country in an effort to remove the military rulers, is biting harder, but there is still no sign that Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras is about to say uncle. No country has ever been so isolated: Airlines have suspended flights, and the United States has halted financial transactions. Should sanctions fail to do the trick, the threat of a U.S.-led invasion looms. But when the generals go, the staggering task of lifting up the hemisphere's poorest country will remain.
Haiti was already a shambles when a military coup ousted President Jean- Bertrand Aristide in September 1991. In the 1980s, the economy contracted 15 percent; by the end of this year, it will have shrunk another 30 percent. Since the coup and the ensuing embargo, the price of beans has shot up 134 percent, corn 192 percent. The national treasury has been looted. "If Aristide returns," says a U.S. official, "he won't have a pot" to call his own.
Chaos or tyranny. President Clinton has vowed to put Haiti on the road to stability and economic recovery. The obstacles are daunting: a heavily armed and deeply polarized society, nonfunctioning institutions, decayed infrastructure, severely denuded land and a lack of democratic traditions. A recent study published by the U.S. Army War College warns that success is far from guaranteed, but "unless the international community -- and especially the United States -- is willing to stay the course, one must expect Haiti to again descend into chaos or tyranny once the foreigners pull out."
Whether the generals leave by force or by choice, establishing a climate of security will be the first task. The 7,500-man Haitian military is not expected to put up much of a fight, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. Paramilitary groups have plagued Haiti since the days of the Duvalier dictatorship; their current strength is estimated at 30,000 men. They are a Hydra-like network clustered around various power centers: the Army high command, the local Army posts, the port authority, rich Duvalierists, rural sheriffs and new paramilitary groups like the Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress (FRAPH).
Some analysts fear that these bands will target Aristide supporters -- and vice versa. Plans are being drawn up for disarming civilians, possibly including a weapons buyback, and purging the Army. A United Nations peacekeeping mission of 6,000 troops will be responsible for keeping order while they train a new civilian police force. That will take at least a year, says a U.S. military official. After the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, the official says, "they put new uniforms on the same old guys. We don't want to put them right back on the street here."
U.S. staying power might be eroded by even a few casualties, says a U.S. official here, "particularly if a soldier is killed in some gruesome way, like hacked to death with a machete." Another official doubts that Haitians will attack peacekeepers, but then adds: "If foreigners stay longer than two years you are going to have a guerrilla war. And if you do not meet expectations for food, water, democracy, you could have it earlier."
Bankers, and other friends. Many Haitians fear that the United States will abandon them. A middle-class businessman who has been forced to close two factories since the embargo was imposed says: "The U.S. is going to come in and get out after three or four months. They just don't have the money to do what they say they're going to do." What will it take to get Haiti on its feet? A Haitian banker estimates that some $200 million will be immediately required for emergency aid, government spending and restarting business: "I'm talking about the first six months -- that's the critical period." But that is just a start: One of Haiti's wealthiest businessmen says $5 billion will be needed to rebuild infrastructure and resume agricultural and industrial production. Most of it will have to come from the private sector rather than from international donors, he says, "so they should stop treating us like the enemy." Many wealthy Haitians feel branded by a U.S. Treasury Department list ordering the freezing of all their assets in the United States.
Such bitterness polarizes Haiti's wealthy -- dubbed "the morally repugnant elite," or MREs, by a former U.S. ambassador -- and the followers of Aristide, a populist priest. Reconciling Haitians may be the tallest order of all. One percent of Haitians receive 50 percent of national income, while the average income of the rest is $125 a year. Yet however reviled, the MREs are a crucial source of capital in a country that has precious little of it.
Gregory Mevs is the scion of one of these families, whose large industrial complex includes the Haitian American Sugar Co., a distillery, a port terminal and tank farm and several factories -- among them, a cooking-oil plant. Since the embargo, the Mevses' 14,000-worker payroll has been reduced to 300. Mevs has ambitious plans for a power plant and port terminals around the country, if the Haitian hatchet can be buried. "If the private sector is not allowed to participate in economic recovery, it won't happen," he says.
Potential international donors are meeting in Paris this week to discuss some $500 million in aid to Haiti, including about $195 million in emergency economic assistance. But no aid will be pledged until Aristide returns. Meanwhile, Haiti's unpaid debt has expanded from $45 million last year to an estimated $80 million by the end of 1994. And the country is crumbling by the day.
Over 100,000 jobs have been lost, and most assembly plants have closed, since they can no longer export. Mangoes, the second-largest agricultural export, were exempted from the embargo in 1992, but exports have recovered to only 20 percent of their pre-embargo level.
Standstill. Government employees sit in darkened, hot offices doing nothing: The Ministry of Justice has just three electric typewriters and no fax machine. Since the coup, the state flour and cement companies have been shut down, but the employees are still being paid. The state utility companies have padded their employment rosters even as services decline and taxes go uncollected. Less than half of the electricity produced is paid for, and rich Haitians paid an average of 79 cents in real-estate taxes last year.
Nothing works in Haiti. Only 800 kilometers of its roads are paved, and 80 percent of these are pocked with deep potholes. Only 40 percent of the capital's residents have access to safe drinking water; planned foreign aid will boost that only to 60 percent. Blackouts are common, and the sole present source of power, Peligre Dam, will be too silted up to generate at all in seven years. Port-au-Prince produces 1,000 metric tons of garbage daily, yet the only trash collection is U.S. funded.
The country has so far escaped mass starvation because more than 70 percent scratch out livings as subsistence farmers. But their future is grim: One third of the land is severely eroded, and trees cover only 4 percent. Yet wood supplies 70 percent of all energy consumption.
As long as Haiti continues to be an economic, social and political disaster zone, the threat of massive refugee outflows will not only recur but grow -- intervention or not. Says CARE director Tom Friedeberg: "The United States can't have a stronger vested interest in a country than [it has in] Haiti. If it doesn't deal with the problems here, a whole lot of people are going to come over there."
