Haiti – The Backstory – Part 1

Warning – graphic descriptions follow

I was planning to give insights to the main title of my blog today since I have rambled on about everything but depression. Well, today is not a lot different since I’m too depressed to write about that topic just now, ironically. I’m going to share with you the back story about my Adventures in Haiti.  We were there between 1984 – 1987. 

To frame this right, I need to digress into a little background of what I know about the Haitian people.  In a nutshell, what I experienced during my time there are people, who are poorer than anything the US has ever seen, that always wearing a smile and suffer indignities with grace.

There were the mulattos that were family lines of intermarriage over generations with French whites.  There are incredibly dark-skinned black folks.  The mulatto’s post-revolution assumed a status among the population and discrimination, not unlike ours in America back in the post-reconstruction days. The Haitian black people, like the United States, consisted mainly of slaves in the colonial days and beyond and were under the French, explaining why French and English were interwoven with African dialects to form what most Haitians speak as Creole.  While they were speaking Creole, you could hear the occasional English, and proper French words sneak in.  That is why I could navigate by communicating with them in English and picking up a little French.  If you spoke fluent French, communication was rather easy, especially among the mulatto society.

The people have a long history of tyranny, and under the French working in the sugar plantations that made American cotton plantations look like Club Med.  As I learned from tradition, the French had a unique form of punishment and sick amusement that was called blasting a black’s ass.  This consisted (sometimes publicly) of restraining some hapless slave, inserting a stick of dynamite into his rectum, and lighting the fuse. Later on, when I was there,  a little more civilized form of discipline, if you could call it that, was administered by order of Baby Doc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Duvalier and his father Papa Doc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier, the undisputed dictators of Haiti. By ordering the  Tonton Macoutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute, their paramilitary thugs to enforce.  Unlike the police, they wore blue shirts hung out under the trees, sometimes in the back of a pickup armed with machetes and an occasional pistol and waited for something or someone to do.

However, the one benefit to white foreigners like us, civil order was well enforced, and a “blanc” (white) never feared at any time or anywhere.  Since the ruling class would do whatever it took to protect the flow of French, American, and Canadian cash into the country with which they sustained themselves. They maintained a close-knit oligarchy of trade and essential services like fuel, tires, food, and autos. These essential services were only a luxury that cash bearing foreigners and the Haitian Elite were able to avail themselves.  A quick trip down any Port-au-Prince street would reveal the visual and overpowering odorous smell of feces, urine, and body odor.   There were two economic classes: one for the elite and one for everyone else.  What I found surprising was that transactionally they were segregated from each other.  For example, our mining operation paid the going wage of $3 per day for unskilled labor and maybe doubled that for equipment operators and mechanics. Now before you label me a capitalist pig, this sub-economy operated on a different scale.  Goat beans and rice on the black market were purchasable within the means of the lower working class.

To illustrate this difference more clearly in Pétion-Ville, a more affluent nearby town of Port au Prince.  A modest, cozy, and excellent restaurant called Chez Gerard was located; Where the elite went after the “workday” in Port au Prince ended, which was usually about 2 in the afternoon.  Here the real business got done over drinking and food. This place had the best blackened prime rib and all the sides of any five-star restaurant on the planet.  We later learned that the whole place was bugged by either the CIA or Baby Doc; we were never sure, so the conversations were always guarded.  During one evening business meeting, the check for an evening of drinks and food for five people exceeded our entire day’s payroll at the mine.  While we dined on prime rib, I’d look over the railing at our open-air cabana and not 10 feet away I saw this massive pile of blankets, and it seemed to be alive.  I quickly realized that it was at least 50 people and families sleeping there.   I had a hard time finishing my food and wondered if these people had ever had anything more than griot (pronounced gree·ow -generally made with pork but in the absence of pork, which was regularly, using goat) in their entire life. After this introspection,  it was back to business, discussing how we were to arrange to get more concessions from the “government,” how and who we had to pay off, and how much we were going to have to pay for fuel after “taxes.”

Our mining operation was in the middle of this, 50+ miles away from the center of corruption in Port-au- Prince in this little town of Miragoâne.   Incidentally, within 30 days after we opened the mine good ole capitalism did its magic. The cobbler opened his shop; the local markets came back to life, and the local economy flourished overnight.  Our ramrod Dean would go into town the night before payday to pick up little sundries because he knew that everything would be sold out the next day.     Miragoâne was a smuggling port for black-market supplies of beans and rice.  Virtually none of this commodity could be grown successfully in the country, making this a quasi-black market, because instead of paying the exorbitant official duty “taxes,” the importers paid some thug at the harbor to offload cargo with the government fully aware.  Another layer in a corrupt government would get a piece, and so on up the hill ending at Baby Docs personal account on its way out with what he couldn’t spend there on the island to Swiss or French foreign banks.

We had an old but huge Waukesha diesel-powered generator (that was removed from a WWII era ship) at the plant, powering the mine.  The Reynolds Bauxite mine needed this much power when they began ship loading.  At non-peak times, we bought power from the little town down the road called Petit-Goâve.  Their central generator, for the whole town, was a small 671 Detroit Diesel 300KW generator, and the wires to and from and around town looked barely heavier than your average American construction site extension cords. When we cranked up our generator, we would back feed power to everyone up and down the line. Even air conditioners could be powered again. Our behemoth generator ran on bunker C heavy oil (one step up in the refining process from tar) that they use to power ships, and we had a 20,000-gallon fuel tank left full from Reynolds when they left the mining operation unable to stomach any more of the corruption. We figured that would last us until our first ship came in, and we could snack on the ship’s bunker C.    

The purpose of our being there was not the bauxite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite but what was under it.  Pure white calcium carbonate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate.  It was soft and easy to mine compared to hard white stone in the US. The calcium carbonate was such a high quality that it could be used in everything from pharmaceuticals to paper to swimming pool marcite to any plastic filler that needed an extremely white color.   We had ports and buyers interested in Florida to the eastern New England coast. The international magnate started by our little Florida company seemed to be on its way. Stay tuned for part 2, where we’ll get into the intrigue and excitement.