Haiti In the Land Where Hope Never Grows

By Cristina Garcia

At first light Mercius Pierre rises and leaves the stuffy interior of his mud hut. He opens the door and window that have been shut tight against strangers and the loups-garous, the werewolves that stalk the nights of the superstitious. Pierre's movement stirs up the rats nesting in the thatched roof, as well as his wife Annaise and three young daughters. Annaise lights a fire with a few scarce twigs, then boils coffee with the last drops of water from a gourd and sweetens it with a piece of sugarcane. Her daughter Melina, 6, places the gourd on her head and begins a morning-long walk to a well. Mercius, meanwhile, picks up his wooden hoe, balances it on his shoulder and scuttles down the mountainside to till a field of millet for a gros neg, a landowning peasant. If he is lucky, he will earn 60 cents for his day's work.

So begins another day in the "other republic," as rural Haiti is known. Governments come and go in Port-au-Prince, but daily life in the western hemisphere's poorest country remains a tedious grind, with little chance for Mercius and the hundreds of thousands of other landless peasants to improve their lot. Hope flared briefly in 1986, when Haitians rebelled and forced "President-for-Life" Jean-Claude Duvalier into exile. Since then, the government has changed hands three times, most recently last month, when a coup installed the regime of Lieut. General Prosper Avril. No matter how good Avril's intentions are, however, Haiti is so dirt poor, literally, that it may never flourish again.

As desperate as life is in Port-au-Prince's slums, a truer picture of Haiti's plight emerges in the countryside, where some 75% of the country's 6.3 million people live. Land is both the hope of these peasants and the yoke that dooms them to poverty. Over the years, land parcels have shrunk to handkerchief size through repeated division among descendants and illegal seizures by landowners. Even the practice of voodoo has had an effect: some peasants have been forced to sell their land to pay for elaborate religious rituals for dead relatives.

Decades of misuse have left the earth spent and barren; today only 2% of Haiti is forested. The rape of trees began in colonial times with the export of hardwoods, used for the production of everything from dyes to ships. These days trees are the peasants' only real cash crop. A muddy brown ring surrounds Haiti's coast as the topsoil erodes and dissolves into the turquoise Caribbean, leaving behind what amounts to tropical desert. Reforestation efforts are outpaced by the country's demand for charcoal, a critical fuel in the urban areas.

Victims of hurricanes, drought, debts, superstition and disease, peasants are constantly preyed upon. Those with a bit of land are hesitant to improve it for fear of attracting the attention of covetous gros negs, who often hire corrupt lawyers to steal the land on one pretext or another. The rural police, notaries and Tonton Macoutes also seize property with a flourish of phony documents and a bag of city tricks. Even those who try to help the peasants often end up hurting them. When African swine fever hit the pig population of Haiti several years ago, Haitian authorities, under U.S. insistence, slaughtered all the peasants' hardy black Creole pigs. Unable to afford the new, imported white pigs or provide for their finicky tastes, most peasants suffered a severe decline in their standard of living.

The lure of escape is beginning to replace the dream of land ownership for many rural Haitians. On the beach outside the southern town of Petite-Riviere- de-Nippes, peasants are building three large boats, each capable of carrying 100 illegal immigrants to Florida. A youngster eyes the boats wistfully. "There is nothing for us here," he says. Some peasant families sell their land or chip in money to send their smartest relative to be a "boat person." They are dispatched to America in the hope they will find jobs and send money home. When the boat people return, they are often shocked at how life has deteriorated. "I cried and cried to see how poor my family was," said a young man who works as a busboy in Orlando. "I gave them all I had and left penniless after only three days."

Back in the Central Plateau, Annaise is preparing her family's single daily meal. She straightens her back, picks up a 20-lb. pestle and begins the rhythmic pounding of two handfuls of petit mil, or sorghum, in a wooden mortar. She cooks the meal in an ancient black iron bowl, scraping the remains from the bottom. None of her children are able to attend school this year, she says, because she cannot afford the registration fee of less than $3. "I don't sing anymore," she adds quietly. "I'm sad."

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Central Plateau