Archives for January 2010

I went to Haiti about eight years ago for Conde Nast Traveler magazine. Yes, I was pretty surprised about that too. Haiti has never been a glossy-story kind of place. In fact, the only tourism this country ever seemed to get in the past few decades was visits by cruise ships that anchored off a small secluded and fenced-off beach in the north, where visitors couldn’t spot a town or a road. The only Haiti they saw was a dozen palm trees and a few women selling trinkets on the sand. But the feature I was meant to be working on wasn’t about gloss but about the various foreign communities that had settled in the Caribbean over the centuries. Some Poles, believe it or not, had come to Haiti in the 18th Century and had stayed on. I also had to visit the Jews who fled to the Dominican Republic during WW2.

I couldn’t wait to get to Haiti. This was the land of voodoo and Papa Doc Duvalier and where Graham Greene had written The Comedians, based on his stay at the legendary Hotel Oloffson. But it didn’t take me long to see that Haiti even eight years ago was screwed. And that’s a nice way of putting it.

I’ve traveled to many parts of Africa, but I had never seen such utter degradation and unhappiness. The streets of Port au Prince – even though there were some terrific buildings behind the decrepitude – were beyond terrible, and those of Cap Haitien in the north were even worse. I felt more unsafe walking in these cities than I have anywhere else. The people, God bless them, were possibly the most unfriendly I’d ever met.

On the trip north (one very scary flight in a battered plane, where some of the passengers carried on talking on their cell phones during take-off and for a long while thereafter), we flew low enough to see the terrain below. Except there wasn’t any terrain. The trees were virtually nonexistent, and the hills and mountains had, after countless rains, been torn away and eroded. It was just the saddest place I’d ever seen.

On the drive to Sans Souci Palace outside Cap Haitien, my taxi driver told me he wasn’t going to vote in the upcoming election because his vote didn’t matter. It was all so pointless, life in this place. And then we arrived at San Souci, a gorgeous structure you might have found in Europe, built in the 19th Century by local monarch King Henri I. Above it was the magnificent Citadel. There were all kinds of fabulous canals and tunnels linking them once upon a time, but not long after King Henri’s death the lands were divided up, revolutionaries fomented violence, and civilians saw the island slip and slide all the way down until they thought there was no further to go. The king himself committed suicide, as did his heir, and in 1842 both palace and Citadel were severely damaged by an earthquake.

Now it’s taken yet another tragedy for the world to focus its attention on a place that seems to have been built on tragedy. If anyone is orchestrating all of this – the slew of catastrophes that have befallen this place for the last two centuries – they have a very strange sense of humor.