COMMENTARY The gang burning of one of Haiti's most iconic landmarks is more brazen destruction not just of the country — but of Haitians' self-esteem, which President Trump has also assailed.
In the wake of Haiti’s apocalyptic earthquake in 2010, my colleague Kathie Klarreich wrote a much needed dispatch of hope from Port-au-Prince.
While the rest of us were fixated on the vast and deadly concrete ruin there, Klarreich pointed out that in neighborhoods like Bois Verna and Pacot, hundreds of wooden houses had somehow withstood the destruction.
A key reason: they were products of Haiti’s late 19th-century “gingerbread” architecture movement, built during a halcyon period of national pride and prosperity.
Haiti’s gingerbread structures aren’t just arrestingly lovely — a French-Victorian-Caribbean fusion, as Klarreich wrote, of “fret and latticework, shiplap siding and ornamental vodou patterns.” They’re also extraordinarily durable, their four-sided roofs making them more hurricane-resistant, their masterful carpentry rendering them less earthquake-vulnerable.
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They are, in effect, a reminder to Haitians and the world of the remarkable promise that resides in Haiti, despite the natural and political disasters that have relentlessly throttled the country since the days those gingerbread houses were crafted.
That's why it was so devastating this week to learn the violent criminal gangs that are now Haiti’s de facto government burned down what was arguably the most famous of those historic buildings — the iconic Oloffson Hotel.
Granted, the satanic suffering the gangs have visited on Haitians — the more than 5,600 murders they committed last year alone, the thousands of women and girls they’ve raped, the more than a million people they’ve forced from their homes — matters more than the loss of a charming inn.
But there’s something about last weekend’s wanton destruction of the Oloffson that makes the gangs’ bid to destroy Haiti itself feel even more definitive, more inexorable.
You can wreck a country — but tearing down its imagination of itself is the coup de grâce. Haiti's gangs and Trump want to raze that gingerbread house.
Like the Taliban's demolition of cultural treasures in Afghanistan, it seems another nihilist gut punch meant to leave little if any trace — the kind that even the 2010 earthquake left intact — of the Haitian identity, self-esteem, potential or hope that existed before the rule of the gang confederation known as Viv Ansanm.
You can wreck a country — but tearing down its imagination of itself is the coup de grâce.
Ransacked patrimony
Anyone who cares about Haiti now, especially after recently watching the gangs ransack other wellsprings of patrimony like the National Library, should take the torching of the Oloffson as a warning: if and when the gangs are ever subdued, rebuilding the country may well require the doubly difficult work of restoring its memory.
So the Oloffson’s demise, on top of the murders, rapes and refugees, lays new urgency before the international community.
It's an added spur for the U.S., the U.N., the Caribbean Community and France — which still owes Haiti almost $30 billion it extorted from the country two centuries ago — to finally step up and do more to rescue Haiti than send in a few hundred brave but overwhelmed Kenyan cops.
(Oh, my apologies, we’re supposed to call them the Multinational Security Support mission.)
It's also a new reason for Haiti’s interim leadership, the so-called Temporary Presidential Council, to rise above its corruption and dysfunction and start proving to the international community that the country’s democracy can in fact be salvaged.
And it’s one more reminder of how absurd if not sadistic it is to strip deportation protections from half a million Haitians in the U.S. and send them back to Haiti, as President Donald Trump is pressing ahead with.
Nothing’s a bigger falsehood than Trump’s assertion that conditions have improved enough in Haiti that Haitians no longer need the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, that has allowed them to remain here legally since the earthquake — and especially since Viv Ansanm all but took over the country a few years ago.
(Viv Ansanm, btw, means “Live Together” in Creole — a name as diabolically paradoxical as Taliban, which means “Students” in Pashto.)
Actually, there is one equally large lie: the racist tale Trump told last year during his presidential campaign about Haitian migrants killing and eating people’s pets in Ohio.
In fact, that perhaps helps explain why Trump believes the gang nightmare in Haiti really isn’t that bad. He and Viv Ansanm, after all, think alike in one crucial respect: they both look cruelly determined to burn down Haitians’ dignity.
They both appear resolved to raze those gingerbread houses of self-esteem and hope.
