In the autumn of 1997, I headed down the stairs to exit an American Airlines flight from New York and touched down, for the first time, on the soil of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. It was the beginning of a relationship with the Western Hemisphere’s second-oldest republic that by this point has lasted 27 years and encompassed dozens more visits and several years spent living there.
What I found on that first visit was an extraordinarily seductive and challenging place. The sinuous konpa and driving rasin music that pumped out of the ebulliently decorated public camionettes (known as tap-taps), the beautiful poetry of the country’s national Creole language, the good humor and gentleness of its people living in circumstances of grinding deprivation, the byzantine pantheon of vodou spirits (called lwa) and their significance, the glittering output of the country’s literary and visual arts. Even in the ramshackle and often squalid capital of Port-au-Prince, so different in many ways than the rather more sedate and scenic climes of areas along the coast such as Jacmel or the agrarian life of the Plateau Central, one could detect a certain appeal around a certain hour. Jacques Stéphen Alexis, one of Haiti’s greatest writers, described Port-au-Prince in his 1955 book Compère Général Soleil as a place where:
Towards three o’clock in the afternoon the wind picked up suddenly, galloping and roaring through the city. The pelicans over the port whirled endlessly. The sea put on its fancy green dress and donned shawls of lace foam.
Over the years, I saw time and again the extraordinary courage and resourcefulness - born out of dire need - of the Haitians. I watched as high school and university students took to the streets against the tyranny of then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (and watched how his government savaged them for their trouble). I saw how honest police officers stood up to the country’s often-criminally minded politicians and sometimes paid for it with their lives. I spoke with peasants who fought back valiantly to reclaim their land from natural disasters and listened to residents of the communities where Haiti’s illegally armed groups - many then in the service of political or economic actors - proliferate, struggle with great dignity to place their communities on another path. I spoke with some of the leaders of those very armed groups, who spoke with a striking lucidity about the grave problems facing the country even as they themselves contributed to them. I saw again the courage of the people as they once more took to the streets and demanded their government take responsibility for stolen and squandered funds that should have gone to Haiti’s long-suffering people.
Throughout all of these experiences - protests in Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve, long tap-tap rides to Jacmel (where on weekends I would recharge my batteries at a small cottage facing the tumbling surf of the Caribbean), vodou pilgrimages outside of Cap-Haïtien and Gonaïves - I was never treated with anything other than respect and hospitality and unfailing good humour, despite my foreignness, despite my whiteness, despite the fact that, even on my very modest journalists’s income, I was earning exponentially more than the average person I met there. Through the many years of my relationship with their country and with great warmth and patience, the Haitians taught me far more about life than I could ever teach them.
[On a side note, Haitian food is amazing. If you ever have a chance to sample lambi creole, pintade with djon djon, diri ak pwa or any other Haitian delicacy, jump on it. They also produce what is for my money the best coffee (Café Rebo and Café Selecto) and the best rum (Barbancourt Cinq Étoiles) in the world.]
All of which makes the slurs and slanders hurled at the legal Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio by convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and failed putschist Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, even more dishonest and repellent.
Echoing online conspiracy theories first promoted by far-right activists and neo-Nazis, Vance tweeted falsely on 9 September that “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” During his 10 September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump lied that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Vance, whose political career was funded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and who himself comes from a family whose members struggled with drug addiction, alcoholism and homicidal ideation, continued to enthusiastically spread the baseless claims and, in an interview with CNN this weekend, proudly admitted that he lies in order to “create stories” that will advance his political agenda. The slanders were, of course, enthusiastically disseminated by the detestable racist Elon Musk, himself an enthusiastic drug abuser whose own daughter hates him, even as the woman behind an early Facebook post that spread some of the initial claims about Haitian immigrants eating local pets in Springfield now admits that she in fact had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with “regret and fear.”
Trump and Vance even helped to inspire the terrorizing of the residents of Springfield (in Vance’s case, as a Senator from Ohio, against his own constituents) which have so far led to violent threats against local schools that led to the evacuation of students, a bomb threat that led to the evacuation of the town’s city hall and the appearance of raving white supremacists at a city commission meeting from which they were ejected.
The reaction of local residents and politicians in Springfield and elsewhere in Ohio to Trump and Vance attempting to crank up the engines of political violence have been instructive.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who I actually met in Haiti when he was a U.S. Senator and I was the Reuters correspondent there, has pointed out that “the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal [and] came to Springfield to work…Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in [and] Haitians came in to work for these companies” and also called Vance’s claims “garbage” and stated that “there’s no evidence of this at all.” Springfield’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, weighed in, saying that “Any political leader that takes the national stage needs to understand the gravity of the words that they have for cities like ours...We’ve had bomb threats [and] we’ve had personal threats and it’s increasing...[But] we are a wonderful city.” In a report featured on PBS Newshour, Jim McGregor, the CEO of the local company McGregor Metal, told reporter William Brangham that “our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine and they’ll achieve their numbers. They’re here to work.”
Glorying in human misery as always, Trump and Vance even forced the father of an 11-year-old boy killed last year when a minivan driver struck his school bus in Springfield to plead with politicians to stop despoiling his son’s memory as part of hateful statements toward Haitian immigrants, asking that “the incessant group of hate-spewing people..leave us alone.”
I have now lived among and worked closely with Haitians both in Haiti and the United States for nearly 30 years. One will never find a group of people with a better work ethic, who place more value on family or who would be a greater credit to any community they choose to join. Trump - who remains the country’s foremost purveyor of the rhetoric of political violence - the disreputable charlatan and opportunist Vance and the MAGA GOP - more Jonestown death cult than modern political party - are to put it simply, depraved racist liars with nothing to offer our country beyond endless scapegoating and division.
As news filters out of what might have been another plot against Trump’s life (again, by a white man, not an immigrant), my message to Trump, Vance and the rest of the Republican Party would be this: You can't spend your life inciting violence and bloodshed - much of it against some of the most defenseless people in the world - and then act shocked when it recoils upon you at some point à la the swamp adder in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” That’s not an endorsement but a simple statement of reality.
You’re all adults. You know what you’re doing and the forces that you are letting loose upon the land. You can either rein yourselves in (which I doubt they will ever do) or you can work enthusiastically to take the country over the cliff with you and into the abattoir in which you - not us - clearly wish to wallow. In the meantime, the rest of us will care for our neighbors and reject this division and try to live up to the ethos of “the least of these my brethren.” To any Haitian immigrants to the United States reading this: You are our neighbors, you are welcome in our communities and we are glad you’re here.
L'union fait la force.