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.
The White House issued a tough statement last night making it clear that Bush believes Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide must resign, and underscoring Bush's position that the United States military will not save him. The statement, accelerating a policy shift that began Thursday, said the White House would support a "multinational interim security force" to deliver aid and ensure stability after a political settlement. The Pentagon is prepared to send 2,200 Marines.
Until the past few days, Bush had taken a largely hands-off approach as rebels spread panic and looting across the island nation about 600 miles off Florida's coast. His policy has been focused on preventing a mass influx of refugees, and a variety of Haitian experts and activists said that appeared to be a response to public opinion in Florida.
Robert A. Pastor, vice president for international affairs at American University and senior adviser to a 1994 mission to that led to Aristide's return from exile, said Bush appears reluctant to become embroiled in an election-year intervention that could fail. "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 University of Virginia politics department. "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."
The Rev. Jean Fritz Bazin, pastor of a church of Haitians in Miami, said his congregants feel the United States automatically returns Haitians seeking asylum while looking for ways to allow Cubans to stay.
White House officials say they are simply following the long-standing policy 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 Cuban Americans 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 the GOP typically garners in Florida. He said the affinity between the party and Cubans is a legacy of anti-communism but that the party is trying to move beyond that. "We're not going to speak to one community at the expense of another," he said.
One twist in the politics of the Haitian crisis is that it has produced a 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 -- Wednesday after they were admitted to the White House to talk to 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 he added 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 has done so far on the caucus's wish list for Haiti, the chairman said, "The jury is still out."
