Crisis Holds Added Significance in Fla. Politics
Many in State Watch Turmoil in Haiti and Study Bush Administration's Reaction
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 29, 2004; Page A10
The growing chaos and misery in Haiti have given President Bush and his administration a new and nearby crisis with major ramifications for the politics of Florida, just as he is beginning his reelection campaign.
Bush has taken a largely hands-off approach as rebels have spread panic and looting across the island nation about 600 miles off Florida's coast, and his policy has been focused on preventing a mass influx of refugees. A variety of Haitian experts and activists said that appeared to be a response to public opinion in Florida.
Robert A. Pastor, vice president of international affairs at American University and a U.S. adviser during a 1994 mission to Haiti, said Bush is reluctant to become embroiled in an election-year intervention that could fail or explode.
"This has refreshed their memory of their aversion to nation-building," Pastor said, referring to the campaign position that Bush abandoned in Afghanistan and Iraq. "But the longer they wait, the more costly it will be."
Although humanitarian groups said two weeks ago that the administration was preparing to house fleeing Haitian refugees at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Coast Guard on Friday repatriated 537 Haitian boat people, including several infants, by leaving them on a dock near the capital of Port-au-Prince.
"This is a country that is on the verge of a civil war, and you're sending people back to those hellish conditions," said Robert Fatton Jr., a native of Haiti who is chairman of the politics department at the University of Virginia. "What Bush is trying to do is shore up his own political base, and the Haitian American constituency is, to put it bluntly, not a part of the political calculus. They are seen as poor and uneducated and black."
The Rev. Jonas N. Georges, pastor of a Presbyterian church in North Miami Beach that conducts a service in Haitian Creole, said Haitian immigrants feel that Bush's public statements amounted to his saying to his supporters, "Trust me, I won't open the gates to them."
White House officials say they are simply following the U.S. procedure of returning refugees intercepted at sea to their home countries. But advocates for Haitians, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic after settling in Florida, said they suffer a double standard from an administration that lavishes attention on Cuban immigrants, who vote heavily Republican and are being courted by the party as one of the keys to winning the Sunshine State by more than 537 votes this time.
Exit polls in 2000 showed that Vice President Al Gore carried nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, but Bush took about three-fourths of the votes of Cubans in Florida. The Republican Party, the Bush-Cheney campaign and the White House all have programs aimed at Cuban Americans. Bush traveled to Miami in 2002 to attend the 100th Anniversary of Cuban Independence.
Geoffrey Becker, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, said the party has begun reaching out to Haitian leaders as part of an effort to increase the 10 percent or so of the African American vote that Republicans typically garner in Florida. He said the affinity between the party and Cubans was a legacy of anti-communism but that the party was trying to move beyond that.
"We're not going to speak to one community at the expense of another," he said.
Haitian President Jean Bertrand-Aristide's "own actions have called into question his fitness to continue to govern Haiti. We urge him to examine his position carefully, to accept responsibility and to act in the best interests of the people of Haiti," the White House said in a statement last night, indicating its preference that Aristide step aside.
One twist in the politics of the Haitian crisis is that it has produced détente between the White House and the Congressional Black Caucus. After refusing for three years to grant an audience to the group, Bush met with the members -- all Democrats -- on Wednesday after they were admitted to the White House to meet with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice about Haiti, and then insisted on seeing the president.
The chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said the group had been feeling "dissed," but said that Bush was "very gracious" as he listened to the caucus's calls for increased humanitarian and military involvement by the United States. Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have consulted extensively with Cummings as they developed the administration response.
"We just want the president to synchronize his conscience with his conduct," Cummings said. Asked how Bush had done so far with responding to the caucus's wish list for Haiti, the chairman said, "The jury is still out."
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