Haiti
 

Poor Haiti! All news is bad news, from there. But my week there in 1966 (back in Papa Doc's days) was wholly peaceful, and remains one of my favourite memories from my Caribbean tour all those years ago. Here's a brief extract of a note I made later.

On the Sunday I bought a ticket on the bus from Cap Haitien back to the capital, leaving next morning. I asked the bus dispatcher (in my schoolboy French) what time the bus would depart. “Huit heures”, he promised. But I was suspicious... Did that mean eight o’clock Caribbean time? The missionaries would have to drive me down from the mountains, and I wanted to get the time right. “Oui, huit heures juste.” he replied. But I was still wary. "Okayy, but when you say juste, do you mean really, really exactly, or..." (some local approximation)? He sighed heavily, and brushed my doubts aside, assuring me "Huit...heures...blanc!” I took that to mean “white man’s time”, and shut up. And it did leave at eight, on the dot.

Nobody on the bus spoke proper French, or was any colour but jet-black. Haiti has a minority of brown-skin middle-class citizens, but they never used the buses. I volunteered to sit on the top of the bus with eight or nine other passengers, to keep the luggage from coming loose, and to hand bags down and catch bags thrown up. My companions told me by gestures why we were stopping and for how long. It was a ten-hour journey down the coast road via Gonaives, but the time passed easily; it was a lovely trip. The driver went out of his way to drop me at my shabby hotel. I was the most exotic passenger he had ever carried, I expect - probably the only white person ever to have travelled the whole distance on the roof of his bus.

He and all the passengers shouted a farewell salute. “A’voi, blanc!” “A’voi!”, I shouted back

Re: Haiti
 

Note to Monitors... When I posted this above Thread Starter, I didn't notice that there had been another Haiti thread, abandoned in 2021. If you want to combine the two threads, it's fine by me.

Re: Haiti
 

The news from Haiti wasn't that great in 1966.
Did you read Greene's book before you arrived?

Re: Haiti
 

No, I don't think I had. I read it a few years later, though. An excellent book, and a good movie too!

I've always felt sorry for the poor bloody Haitians. My wife's church in Cayman used to send missions across to them - mainly with bibles, rather than food.

Re: Haiti
 

Greene's introduction is quite appropriate...
"Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier’s rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night. The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur"

Re: Haiti
 

I was only in the country for a week, that time in '66. And I stayed with a bunch of Mennonite missionaries from Canada up in the mountains not far from The Citadel, having met the brother of one of them on the plane in. I did walk around the capital a bit by myself, and it was as mucky as it probably is now. But out of the city, life seemed to be pretty normal. About par for Caribbean islands in general, as I remember it. Did you ever get there?

I never felt unsafe there. In all dictatorships, the police have a monopoly on violence, and visitors are a protected species.

Re: Haiti
 

I have never been. Its a country that is beset by so many troubles.

Re: Haiti
 

Here is the latest news from Haiti... reparations! https://www.rt.com/news/604808-haiti...rations-water/

Re: Haiti
 

The history of Haiti is depressing. It was born in the vicious cruelty of a series of slave-rebellions, nurtured in the equally vicious cruelty of home-grown tyrants, and pauperised by US and European politicians. In order to discourage any future slave revolts anywhere in the world, in 1804 the new nation’s government's revenue was embargoed for the next hundred years and more, to pay compensation for the property lost (i.e. the slaves themselves) in the successful revolution.

(The slaves’ defeat of Napoleon’s army of occupation prompted his sale of French “Louisiana” to the new United States of America. The removal of the French presence there left the native-American tribes open to conquest by European immigrants.)