”Jason Steinbaum, a staffer in the office of U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), recently came back from a fact-finding mission to Haiti. Also speaking at the CSIS event, he pointed out that this year, the United States will provide $279 million in assistance to the Haitian people. But, echoing the ambassador and other experts, he said what the people really need is employment. “This isn’t a famine like we’ve seen in other places. Food is available, but people just can’t afford it,” Steinbaum said. “I saw food on the streets and in the markets, but the problem is poverty and a lack of jobs. In the end, businesses only invest in places where they think they can make a profit, and April’s food riots didn’t help. ”A long history of coups and the notorious Duvalier family dictatorship, which reigned from 1957 to 1986, haven’t helped either. Joseph, who was born in the Dominican Republic and later attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, spent 19 years in New York under a death sentence imposed in absentia by the murderous regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was enraged by Joseph’s radio broadcasts and writings against the dictatorship. During that time, Joseph got a job as a financial reporter for the Wall Street Journal. From 1970 to 1984, he covered everything from the Manville asbestos trials to the advent of the Sony Walkman. In 1984, Joseph resigned from the Journal to edit the Brooklyn community newspaper he co-founded with his brother, Haiti-Observateur, the first crusading commercial Haitian weekly. Joseph was called upon to serve as Haiti’s chargé d’affaires in Washington in 1990, the year Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected into office, although Joseph returned to Brooklyn to work on the Haiti-Observateur after only a year. According to a recent column in the New York Sun, “Although Mr. Joseph recognized the work against the Duvaliers of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he issued early warnings against Mr. Aristide’s penchant for dictatorship. In the past two years, he kept readers of both the Observateur and the Sun well ahead of the curve of Mr. Aristide’s descent.” Indeed, although Haiti has held elections since the ouster of the Duvaliers in 1986, coup d’états and political violence continue to plague the unfortunate country (Aristide himself was ousted twice, in 1991 and then again in 2004). But this year, the violence is threatening to get out of hand. During the first five months of 2008, at least 150 people were kidnapped — up from 237 for all of 2007, according to Haiti’s National Network for the Defense of Human Rights. And since 2005, at least 27 hostages — including 12 children — have been executed by their captors, sometimes even after a ransom was paid. Even so, Joseph said he hopes his fellow Haitians will rally around their current president, a 65-year-old agronomist who once worked as a restaurant waiter in Brooklyn while putting himself through school. Préval was a close friend of former President Aristide, a one-time Silesian priest who was initially praised by Washington as a beacon of hope for Haiti’s impoverished masses, but eventually came to be seen by the Bush administration as little better than the dictators who had preceded him. Joseph was weary of Aristide early on and still has few positive things to say about the former president who now lives in exile in Durban, South Africa. “The propaganda is that Aristide was kidnapped, but sad to say, that’s not what happened,” said Joseph, who gave a blow-by-blow description of the events leading up to Aristide’s departure from the presidential palace on Feb. 29, 2004. “On the Saturday night [before his escape], Aristide called the American Embassy and asked for help to leave the country. The U.S. took him to a plane they prepared for him. If it’s true he was kidnapped, I say he was complicit in the kidnapping,” the ambassador charges. In the years since Aristide’s departure, Joseph insists “there’s a new spirit in the country thanks to Préval, who has tried to do something I have not seen in recent Haitian history. He’s going back to the idea that in unity, there is strength, [even though] he won with only 51 percent of the vote.” Joseph said that new spirit was even evident during the April food riots. “The riots brought down the government, and even though the House of Deputies tried to save [Prime Minister] Alexis, the Senate gave him a vote of no confidence,” Joseph said. “In the past, the prime minister, the president and others would have been on the first jet out of Haiti, into exile somewhere.” Now, he said, Alexis and other ministers are helping the government transition to new leadership, a sign “that Haiti is on the road to democratic development.” Another promising sign, Joseph added, is that Préval is working to unite political forces in Haiti and plan a 25-year development program. “What-ever you hear about Haiti these days, this is the most important thing happening, where the president is using his office to reconcile the country.” The ambassador also noted that in recent years, the Haitian Diaspora in the United States, which sends critical remittances back home, has begun investing in Haiti once again. “In 2006, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, Haitians abroad sent home $1.6 billion in remittances. Were it not for that Haitian Diaspora, these people could not live as well,” Joseph said. “As Haiti modernizes its laws and becomes more and more secure, investors will find Haiti fertile ground for tourism again. Secondly, just passed on the back of the U.S. farm bill is legislation to encourage investment in textile and apparel manufacturing.” And one of the biggest foreign investors in Haiti today is Digicel, a Jamaica-based mobile phone giant present in 23 Caribbean markets. Digicel now boasts more than 6 million subscribers, including 2.2 million in Haiti. That gives the country a mobile penetration rate of nearly 26 percent — not bad when compared to neighboring Cuba, whose mobile penetration rate is under 2 percent. “Digicel is doing a very good business in Haiti, and we in the Diaspora are paying for a lot of the phones you see there. Even some of those rioting over food had two or three cell phones on them,” Joseph said. The real business opportunity, however, lies in tourism, “because Haiti has so much more to offer than other Caribbean islands,” the ambassador says. Joseph pointed out that in the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba and Haiti were the top Caribbean destinations for U.S. tourists. “But in 1957, a right-wing dictatorship took power in Haiti, and in 1959 a left-wing dictatorship took power in Cuba, so tourists started looking elsewhere,” he said. “If our government pays attention to tourism and refurbishes La Citadelle and all the other fortifications that were built to resist the French, Haiti would become a mecca for African Americans looking for their roots,” Joseph insists. “They will want to see what their black brothers and sisters did 200 years ago to bring about freedom. Marketed the proper way, Haiti will be a major tourist attraction again.” Larry Luxner is news editor of The Washington Diplomat.

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