THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407100056
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 154 lines
The images of a desperate exodus off the coast of Haiti are now familiar: ramshackle boats overflowing with black faces and orange life vests, Coast Guard crews with latex-gloved hands cradling emaciated babies.
But there was a time when America threw up no blockades and welcomed Haitians to its shores.
When Virginia Beach's Brunet Jean-Gilles decided to leave Haiti in 1959, there were no refugee-screening centers or crowded tent cities.
He was a medical student who was in such demand that he lineed up a position at an American hospital without ever leaving his island.
``If you had any degree, you could get a job from Haiti,'' recalled Jean-Gilles, a cancer surgeon who has lived in Virginia Beach for 19 years.
``Several of us were even offered immigrant visas on the spot, and we refused them,'' he said.
The number of Haitians immigrating to the United States exploded from 911 in the 1940s to nearly 35,000 in the 1960s, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service records.
Riding this wave were many who might have held the keys to the blighted island's future.
Medical students, engineers, writers and artists poured out of the country and scattered across the United States, Canada, France and French-speaking Africa.
Now, unable to bring home the expertise they have cultivated abroad, this core of professionals watches helplessly as a military dictatorship refuses to recognize the country's elected president, and as America decides whether to launch an invasion of their country.
``Our generation, we were the plane people, not the boat people'' said Michel Laguerre, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who was part of that influx. ``We used our visas, not our bare hands and feet, to get across.''
Though there is no way of knowing how many of Haiti's talented elite live abroad, Laguerre laid out a political and professional landscape of Haiti in the 1950s that was ``ripe for everyone to depart.''
``At that point, Haiti had basically become a training ground for physicians for the U.S. market,'' said Laguerre, whose 1984 book ``The American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City'' tracked the first wave of Haitian flight.
``That was the contribution of Haiti to the country that is now doing whatever it can to keep us out.''
At the same time, Laguerre said, the tightening control of a semiliterate secret police force, known as tonton macoutes, turned Haiti's top universities and seminaries into militarized zones.
Despite the promise of money and security, most of Haiti's intelligentsia said they never envisioned a stop in North America or Europe as their final destination.
But the 14-year government of then-Haitian dictator Francois ``Papa Doc'' Duvalier not only encouraged the emigration, but shut the doors behind those who left.
``This was a regime whose sole purpose was to throw away the professionals,'' said Jean-Claude Icart, president of the Office of the Christian Haitian Community in Montreal. ``Because the people who can think are the people who can dissent.''
Icart only planned a five-year stay when he left Haiti in 1967.
``I had a Haitian professor here who said he had to take action because he had been here for 10 years, and I laughed at him,'' said Icart, who has now lived abroad longer than he lived in Haiti.
``I don't laugh at him anymore,'' he said.
Icart estimated that 300 Haitian-born doctors and twice as many professors work in Canada.
Jean-Gilles, who has a private practice in Norfolk, was so sure of his return to Haiti that he married his wife, Andree, before leaving the country. He promised to rejoin her after completing his medical training.
Instead, she followed him to New York City in 1965.
``In my generation, no one, no young Haitian wanted to leave the country altogether,'' said Jean-Gilles, waving a list of more than 500 Haitian-born doctors practicing everywhere from Norfolk, Va., to Norfolk, Mass. ``There was a lot of patriotism in those days,'' he said.
Like many of his compatriots, Jean-Gilles spent years ``checking the situation'' across the ocean for the possibility of a return home.
``I always compare the situation with other immigrants from Europe and Asia,'' said Marlene Apollon, a poet living in Baltimore. ``They knew that they were leaving for good. But we, we were always waiting to go back.''
Though she and her family were forced to leave Haiti for political reasons, Apollon thought she would only be gone a few weeks at most when she arrived in New York at age 18.
In the 30 years since then, she has seen much of Haiti's potential elite mature into ``some of the absolutely superior minds'' of their adopted countries.
Although these minds have prospered, they left a gaping hole in Haiti, where they might have laid the foundations of development and investment. Today, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
``As a group, it was a hemorrhaging of Haiti's talent,'' said Jean Talleyrand, 54, a pathologist at the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, N.J. Of the 45 students in his medical-school class in Haiti, only three remained in the country after graduation.
Before joining his peers in 1968, Talleyrand was the only source of medical care for a rural population that stretched along nearly half of the country's southern coast.
The exodus of professionals hit hard in a nation the size of Maryland, with about 6 million inhabitants.
``In a small country like Haiti, that was an enormous loss,'' Laguerre said. ``There was no way to reproduce occupational structures. It created an emptiness . . . and a precedent for the best to move to New York.''
For Dr. Fritz Daguillard, an immunologist who teaches at George Washington University Medical School in Washington, that emptiness was literal.
``I remember I gave a lecture at the medical school,'' said Daguillard, who returned briefly in 1984 as a research consultant with the World Health Organization. ``On one side, you had the people who were 70 - people who had been my professors. On the other side, you had the students who were 20.
``There was nothing in between, because all the in-between had disappeared.''
The frustration of watching events in Haiti from the outside evokes conflict in many of the expatriates.
``When I saw the Haitian flag, I literally felt ripped apart, because I was so proud and I was so enraged,'' said Mimi Barthelemy, a performing artist who attended a festival of French-speaking countries last week in Paris. Barthelemy, whose politically charged performances have at times been banned in her native Haiti, has lived in France since 1957.
``It's a perpetual wound to see how we mock the principles of democracy,'' she said.
``Precisely the generation which could have made the difference has been eliminated,'' said Gaston Vilaire, 48, of Philadelphia, who has studied the history of Haitian art and literature.
``We had sensed the directions we had to take, but that was exactly what made us targets for expulsion.''
Many Haitians who feel stranded outside their island are not waiting for a call from home to take action. Instead, they have formed networks to find ways of solving problems from beyond the borders.
``I would always participate to help my people,'' Jean-Gilles said. He and his wife helped organize Operation Reach, a $1.5 million effort in which 50 physicians and nurses took equipment, supplies and their skills to a hospital in the northern coastal city of Cap-Haitien. The Virginia-based organization was sponsored in part by a donation from the Christian Broadcasting Network of Virginia Beach and supported by Norfolk Councilman Joseph N. Green Jr.
But the volatility of Haiti's political cycles has made long-term efforts almost impossible to sustain.
Still, expatriates reject economic embargoes and a U.S. invasion as solutions.
``I personally don't believe an invasion will change very many things in Haiti,'' Vilaire said.
``You see that your country cannot hold its head above water, and the whole world is asking what happened to us,'' he said. ``The confusion and loss is just overwhelming.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
BILL KELLY III/Staff file
Brunet Jean-Gilles speaks at the 1986 Operation Reach mission in
Haiti. He and his wife helped organize the $1.5 million effort,
which brought supplies and doctors to the city of Cap-Haitien.
KEYWORDS: HAITI by CNB