11/14/2022 0 Comments Lose your marbles in haiti![]() ![]() Armed robberies, kidnappings and gangland-style killings have all increased. Poverty is unrelenting, the environment remains degraded, infrastructure, where it exists at all, is crumbling. To just about everyone, Tabarre, with its pool and gardens, is the place Aristide has retreated to while Haiti has fallen apart.Ī decade after Aristide won his historic election, life in Haiti has hardly improved. To his foes (some of whom have their own swimming pools), it's a symbol of his corruption, his abandonment of democracy, his hunger for power. To his supporters (many of whom must trudge miles for drinking water), the pool is the rightful reward for Aristide's willingness to confront the Duvalier regime, for his bravery in facing down one military junta after another and for his courage in leading the Haitian people to their first free and fair elections. Around this silence, a thicket of rumor, gossip and conjecture has grown. The man who once led his people from the altar of a poor man's church now lives in splendor in the suburbs the man who once never walked without being carried along by the crowd now hardly ever ventures out the man who would never shut his mouth in public now never opens it. Since he left office five years ago, the 47-year-old former president of Haiti has hidden himself away in his big house in Tabarre. The pool, like everything else about Aristide these days, is the subject of fevered speculation. He opens up his palms in a resigned gesture.Īs if to say: See? It's really just a pool. The pump is on, and the water is gurgling cheerfully. ![]() It's a particularly nice pool, with brick trim. We're walking through the broad gardens, where palms and banana trees grow and where guards lounge on the periphery. We've just left the air-conditioning of his office, and it's hot outside, as usual. he's talking animatedly about the weather and old friends and landscaping as he makes his way quickly around to the front of his imposing white house in the Tabarre suburb of Port-au-Prince. ![]()
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