GONAIVES, Haiti -- For weeks Gerald Leveille would take his fishing boat onto this crescent-shaped bay, hoping to snare enough fish to supplement the small daily portions of rice, peas and corn for his family of five. Each day he came back empty.
Then one morning, the net caught something heavy, but not a big fish as the weight would suggest. It was a body.
"I just want to think I caught nothing" that day, he says.
As sanctions take hold in this northern Haiti town - a citadel of support for exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide - Leveille and many like him seem unbent by the ruling military's repression.
Nor are they bowed by the even deeper poverty a tighter embargo is likely to cause in their island nation, already the hemisphere's poorest.
Leveille, 38, is one of those who snagged dozens of bodies dumped by the shore - all victims of what human rights observers charge was a massacre of civilians by elements of the Haitian military and para-military "attaches" in early April.
Some reports say 78 people died in that massacre - out of more than 200 people thought to have been killed in political-related violence in Haiti since the year began.
In an effort to combat such brutality, new U.N. sanctions against Haiti's ruling junta went into effect just after midnight Saturday, covering everything except food, medicine, cooking fuel and humanitarian items. Commercial air service also remains in operation.
"I don't care if they invade or there is an embargo but they have to do something to help us," says Evelyn Chery, 26, who sells lemonade. "I have three kids with no father, I don't know how I can feed them."
The U.N.-imposed sanctions are similar to those applied last summer, which helped lead to an agreement - signed by Aristide and coup leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras - that was to have restored Aristide to power last October.
But the military, backed by neo-Duvalierists - sympathetic to the past dictatorships of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean Claude, who together ran Haiti like a private fiefdom for more than 30 years - reneged on that agreement and launched a new reign of terror against Aristide supporters.
They also used the resulting easing of sanctions to protect their assets abroad and build strength and numbers.
The result: Most independent observers think the military-dominated regime is in much better shape now to wait out the new embargo.
"The military are trained and educated for hard life. They are not even linked to the economic life of the country. Because of that, they don't feel the sanctions and the consequences are just economic, not political," says Raymond LaFontant, executive director of Association des Industries d'Haiti, a business organization that has called for coup leaders to step down.
Junta leaders, given until last Saturday night to quit, appear determined to thumb their noses at the United States and United Nations.
Gambling the United States will not invade, Haiti's military chiefs last week installed a new president - 81-year-old Supreme Court Justice Emile Jonassaint - cut off the telephone service to former Aristide-backed Prime Minister Robert Malval, and began an effort of painting a veneer of legitimacy on their junta.
In the past few weeks, the price of black-market gasoline has dropped from about $ 12 a gallon to $ 7. Electricity has been expanded from four hours a week to 12 to 14 hours a day. Blatant public political killings have diminished.
Nowhere is the resistance so obvious as the massive black market for gasoline from the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Fuel can be found in every town of any size in Haiti, brought across the border in fuel trucks, boats or jugs carried by peasants. The road along Port-au-Prince's harbor has been dubbed "Kuwait City."
Where sidewalk businesses once fixed bicycles or sold flavored chipped ice for cool drinks, entrepreneurs - wearing metal gas funnels on their heads like the Tin Man in the movie The Wizard of Oz - now dispense fuel in plastic gallon jugs.
"When the price is low, we can buy a lot and sell a lot more," says Jean Wensik, 28, calculator in hand. Still, he is no fan of the embargo, which should increase his profits.
"Lots of other small people will suffer and then there will be a lot more crime," Wensik says. "People will have no money to eat."
In bastions of economic and political activism like Gonaives - this is the same city where the uprising began that led to the ouster of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier in 1986 - maneuvering by the outside world is secondary to survival.
Reporters and others who walk the oozes of mud and sewage that pass for streets here are chorused with shouts and murmurs demanding immediate action.
"It's time for Aristide to come back," one man says.
Another in the crowd joins in: "It's time for them" - meaning the United States and other nations - "to send the man back."
Aristide won almost 70% of the vote in 1990 to become Haiti's first democratically elected president, mainly in votes from the poor such as those living here.
He was ousted in September 1991, after only seven months in office.
Yonel Lunick, 38, says the military is determined to break that rebellious spirit, but vows, "you can kill the people and they still would not say, 'Down with Aristide.' "
Even without the embargo, inflation probably would be higher than 50% and two-thirds of the nation would be unemployed. Thousands of jobs may be lost if the embargo continues.
As always in Haiti, embargoed or not, life continues, often defined by economic class.
Sunday morning once again brought Haiti's poor out to church, including dozens of babies dressed in brilliant white clothes whose parents rushed to have them baptized during the lull in violence.
The wealthy greeted the embargo differently. Over the weekend in the casinos and clubs, they were dancing in defiance.
At a lavish wedding Saturday in exclusive Petion-ville in the mountain above Port-au-Prince, guests first toasted the bride and groom, then to outlasting the embargo.
But the threat of the sanctions did cause some panic among those who enjoy items purchased from abroad.
All week, flights from Miami to Port-au-Prince have been filled to the brim with Haitians - some wearing four or five hats each - carting back overstuffed bags of canned food, electronic goods, batteries and a host of other items deemed necessary for survival.
And as always, some macabre good emerges temporarily from the rumors. This week the number of nightly killings of Aristide supporters has diminished.
The reason, some Aristide supporters speculate: The army is saving its bullets for an invasion.
