How Haitians Helped Bush in Florida
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A majority of Haitian-American voters at South Florida responded favorably to their wooing by the Republicans, who have forged a strong alliance with a large sector of the Haitian community. The victory of President Bush is considered their victory, too.
Although there is no official tally of the Haitian vote, there is no mistaking their contribution to Mr. Bush’s decisive victory in the Sunshine State. More than half of the Haitian vote went for Mr. Bush, an American citizen of Haitian ancestry, Marie Bell, said. A week before the election, she exuded confidence about a Bush victory. Ms. Bell, who helped organize the Haitian community for the Republicans, told me: “Look, it’s not going to be any 537-vote margin as last time. Haitians alone will give the president thousands of votes. You’ll be surprised how there won’t be any challenge this time around – not in Florida.”
The Republican strategists targeted a dozen press and broadcast venues, especially radio and television programs geared to Haitian audiences in several cities in South Florida. The Haitian-American who was named consultant for the Republicans, Hans Mardy, bought commercial spots that aired immediately before and after popular programs, some of which are staunchly pro-Lavalas, the party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed president. The slogans were devastating for the Democrats and quite flattering to the Haitians. Here’s a sample: “Haitians prefer opportunity to charity. Haitians are hard workers like the Republicans.”
The Protestant churches went heavily for Mr. Bush, said the director of Radio Planet 17 in Miami (WJCC, 1700 AM), Ed Lozama. He added that the “moral values” embraced by Mr. Bush appealed to the churchgoers, who voted overwhelmingly for him. “Haitians don’t believe in men marrying men and women marrying women,” he emphasized, and they think a President Kerry would have turned America into Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Democrats took the Haitians for granted and spent very little on ads targeting them. Only in the final week of the campaign did they run a few ads, which failed to arouse their base.
Another powerhouse in the corner of the Bushes – both the governor and the president – is Lucy Orlando, who, unabashedly, dubbed herself “the Other Mrs. Bush.” An early Bush supporter, she preached and displayed the Bush message. During the Republican National Convention in New York in late August, she wore illuminated attire that turned her into a walking Bush poster. She wore a Bush hat and a Bush family watch. She was constantly on her cellular telephone urging friends, relatives, and acquaintances to “get on the victory bandwagon before it’s too late, darling!”
On Tuesday, Lucy was shuttling back and forth among three voting precincts at Miami’s Little Haiti. She told me, “I had to watch these unscrupulous Lavalassians,” as the supporters of Mr. Aristide’s Raging Flood party are called. “They were poised to inject fraud in the voting,” she said.
In effect, Mr. Bush won the majority of the Haitian vote last February, when his administration finally paid attention to the plight of the Haitian people who were demanding the departure of Mr. Aristide. Instead of dispatching Marines to shore up the Haitian president, as Senator Kerry said he would have done, the president teamed up with President Chirac of France to facilitate the departure of the Haitian leader. Late on February 28, the Security Council of the United Nations put its seal of approval on the action when it received Mr. Aristide’s letter of resignation.
The situation in Haiti earlier this year had become a threat to Mr. Bush’s re-election. The New York Sun had brought the matter to the attention of the administration. At the top of the front page of the January 30 issue, the editors of the Sun ran a color picture of Mr. Aristide with a provocative statement: “Why this man could hurt George Bush in November. See page 7.”
The headline chosen for my column that day asserted, “Bush’s inaction in Haiti may cost him in November.” The column went on to express the dissatisfaction of Haitian-American voters in Florida with Mr. Bush, who appeared to be ignoring the situation in Haiti. In an interview, Gerard Latortue, then the host of two shows on Haitian Television Network, asked: “Can you imagine what would happen if President Bush failed to act in Haiti?” Mr. Latortue, who is now the prime minister, went on to say, “The Haitian-American citizens now know the value of their vote, and they are ready to use it to effect change back home. Unfortunately, President Bush hasn’t met their expectations.”
The opinion of Mr. Latortue was shared by thousands of Haitian-American citizens, who demonstrated in South Florida against the mayhem instigated in Haiti by the Aristide regime. “We are 80,000 registered voters in Dade County,” some placards trumpeted at a demonstration in Miami. Similar messages appeared at a demonstration at Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County, where registered Haitian-American voters were estimated at more than 100,000.
Then, prominent Haitian-American voters such as Carl Craig, a registered Republican from Coral Gables, began a letter-writing campaign to Mr. Bush. In a letter dated January 28, after recalling that he voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, he wrote: “I would do it again, but the seemingly hands-off attitude of your administration, as it relates to the corrupt, criminal, and undemocratic situation in Haiti is forcing me to reconsider my choice during the next presidential election.”
Apparently, the rumblings of dissatisfaction in the ranks of Haitian-Americans reached the ears of Governor Bush. What happened next is history. In exactly one month, Mr. Aristide resigned under pressure from all sides. The Craigs of the Haitian-American community returned to the fold and worked enthusiastically to re-elect the president.
This week, Lucy Orlando summed up the feeling of most Haitian-American voters when she said, “We feared that a President Kerry might have been influenced by the Black Caucus just as Bill Clinton was in 1994.And who knows, he could even have entertained the idea of returning Aristide to power to assuage him and his terrorists.”
Now that Mr. Bush has been re-elected, the Haitian-Americans who supported him expect him to finish the job he began last February. That would mean full support to the Latortue government, at a time when the prime minister is facing all sorts of threats from the terrorists in Port-au-Prince who are receiving orders and funds from Mr. Aristide, now exiled in South Africa. Mr. Latortue’s meeting today with Jeb Bush and other American officials in Coral Gables is a good omen for sustained interest in Haiti by the new Bush administration.