Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  My rapid exits from Liberia and Sierra Leone were partly due to my inability to communicate. Although English was the official language of both, they spoke it in a rapid, high-pitched patois with Creole overtones that rendered them less comprehensible to me than Uzbeks.

  According to news I’d picked up from the backpacker brigade—often the most reliable source of travel tips—the Nigerians had not killed a visitor for at least three days, so I decided to give it a shot—and hope it didn’t give me one. I’d vacillated about whether to visit Nigeria on this trip out of concern about the risky security situation, the continuing conflict between its predominantly Muslim north and Christian south, the religious uproar over the staging of its Miss World contest, the anger over the inequitable distribution of its large oil income, most of which was lining the pockets of the governing class, and a widespread belief that this once-leading light of African economies was going to hell in a handbasket. But—again that tug-of-war between safety and desire—if I was able to get there on this swing, that would vastly simplify my future travel plans, because I’d then have visited every country in the northern third of Africa except Chad and every country on its west coast as far south as Angola.

  I flew into Lagos, the largest city in Africa, home to an estimated 21 million, and the only high-rise, glass-sheathed, Western-type city on this trip, and one of only three such on the continent. It combined the sweltering summer climate of Houston with the architectural ambience of Detroit, the exorbitant prices of Tokyo, and the hospitality of Turkmenistan. It had only two redeeming qualities: fast Internet with American-layout keyboards, and the best pepper pot goat soup that side of the Caribbean.

  Towering thunderheads had started massing above the coastline, leading to nightly bursts of precipitation portending the start of the rainy season, of impassable roads and insect infestations. I did not stay long.

  I’d had enough days of dirt, flies, open sewers, rotting fruit, and cold-water bucket baths; of kids with machine guns, kids with crutches, kids with missing arms or legs; the ubiquitous odors of unwashed bodies; of daylong drives down dusty, rattling roads in worn-out vans; bumbling bureaucrats; brownouts, blackouts, and blowouts; trying to converse in fractured French; unpasteurized dairy products; storekeepers so poor they lacked change for a single dollar; chronically late plane departures for invariably indirect itineraries; ultra-slow computers with unfamiliar French keyboards; food vendors who washed their dishes in the same bucket of dirty water all day; merchants who falsely promised to give you “a good price”; and dozens of daily confrontations with the poverty, suffering, deprivation, and misery of others. I’d had my fill of TIA.

  After so many weeks on the road, I was tired and homesick. I missed New York, my girlfriend, my cozy apartment, my bicycle, real ice cream, chocolates, sushi, salmon, Diet Sprite, the gym, hot showers, smooth sheets, NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, even The Economist, the stock market, the theater, movies, laundromats, bright light bulbs, English, and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Fifth Avenue, which I might still make if I got a move on. It was time to head home.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Do Not Kidnap Anyone Today!”

  I was not adequately prepared for my customs inspection when I landed in Houston en route to Miami after visiting Colombia in early 2009. Because I was arriving from a cocaine-exporting country, I presumed I’d be subjected to close scrutiny, and since I knew from my past experience with numerous strip searches that I fit the standard drug-dealer/terrorist profile to which the Department of Homeland Security was so rigidly and myopically attached, I’d diligently prepared for a thorough search. I’d made a list for customs of the eight places where I’d hidden cash from possible bandits, so the inspectors wouldn’t conclude I was laundering money or violating currency regulations. I’d carefully packed my powdered milk next to my whole-grain cereal so my inspector got the message that not all white powder is narcotic. And I’d listed on my customs declaration the copal and the emeralds in matrix I was bringing back from Colombian mines, so they wouldn’t think I was a jewel smuggler. I thought I’d covered every base.

  What I’d failed to consider was that a meticulous customs agent, with some time on his hands at five a.m., would go through every item in my luggage, including all my travel literature and papers, where he found my itinerary, which clearly stated, with the relevant dates, that I planned to “fly to Miami, fly to Haiti, tour Haiti,” and then—uh-oh—“visit Cuba for a week,” followed by “fly to Jamaica.” The Cuba trip was prohibited by U.S. law absent special authorization, which I lacked. This incriminating notation required a half hour of fast and convincing talking—not my forte at five a.m.—before I was finally released, albeit with a stern warning and a disbelieving scowl from the agent, after I’d lamely explained that “Cuba” was my nickname for an old Haitian girlfriend with whom I planned to reconnect for a week.

  On the main route from the capital of Port-au-Prince to the big city of Cap-Haïtien, the road was clogged with water, rocks, landslides, and garbage months after a big storm had hit. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and one of the saddest anywhere.

  Haiti was so awful that I quickly understood why the customs agent had been so incredulous when I told him I planned to spend more than a week there, girlfriend or not. To paraphrase General Phil Sheridan, if I owned both Haiti and Hell, I would try to rent out Haiti and live in Hell.

  Haiti is regularly ravaged by floods, tropical storms, and hurricanes. The weather can be wretchedly hot or bone-chillingly wet and cold. The thin chalky soil was now so depleted I felt sorry for the forlorn weeds trying to eke out a living there, although a few areas still retained the rich earth that had once made Haiti desirable as a colony. More than 90 percent of the terrain was too steep for sustainable agriculture, and the desperate attempts of poor farmers to cultivate it almost invariably resulted in erosion and environmental degradation. The country couldn’t grow enough food to feed its population of ten million. The trees had been felled for firewood ages ago, and Haiti had no other fuel resources. The one abundant natural resource was hydroelectric power from the swollen rivers rushing down the mountains, but that was itself a destructive demon.

  Haiti ranked near the top of the world corruption index, and its past rulers absconded with hundreds of millions. It languished at the bottom of the hemisphere’s Human Development Index, with half the population illiterate, few children receiving adequate schooling, much child slavery, open violence against women, and persistently high unemployment. More than 80 percent of Haitians lived below the poverty line of $2 a day, 54 percent in abject poverty, and the richest one percent owned 50 percent of the assets.

  It was the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and seemed to me the least happy. The Haitians appeared down and dour, with no time or inclination for frivolity. I heard not one laugh in a week, not even a giggle, saw no kids at play, not one happy face, although I was told Haiti has a culture rich with proverbs, riddles, jokes, songs, and games.

  As I entered the shabby capital of Port-au-Prince, all that was missing was Dante’s sign: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. Instead, the local Chamber of Commerce had strung a big banner across the road exhorting the locals, in Creole, to HELP HAITI’S ECONOMY. DO NOT KIDNAP ANYONE TODAY!

  Although seldom visited by American tourists, Haiti has had, I believe, a greater impact on our lives and history than any other noncontiguous country in our hemisphere:

  • Haiti is on the island of Hispaniola, and that is where Columbus landed in 1492, opening up the New World.

  • Inspired by the American and the French Revolutions, Haiti’s slaves rebelled in 1791. In 1804 it became the second colony in the Western Hemisphere to cast off a subservient yoke and proclaim itself a republic, the world’s first black-led republic, serving notice that democracy might have a broad future in the New World.

  • Its slave unrest and independence movement impelled Napoleon to abandon his ambitious p
lan to use it as a base for expanding his empire in the Americas, and motivated him to sell France’s extensive landholdings in North America to the fledgling United States—in what came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase—without which our country would have ended at the Mississippi River.

  • The successful Haitian uprising so terrified Southern slaveholders in the U.S. that they instituted harsher punishments for disobedience, which, in turn, fanned the fires of abolitionism in the North. And we all know what that led to.

  • In the 1980s Haiti was unfairly designated as one of the Four Hs then thought responsible for the AIDS epidemic along with homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs.

  • Haiti supplied a large part of the population of central Brooklyn, the only place in the U.S. where I’ve found a proper goat stew.

  Because Haiti had few safe hotels, I’d arranged, through a missionary friend who runs an outstanding charity there called Beyond Borders, to stay at the Methodist Church Guest House in Pétionville, high up the hill overlooking Port-au-Prince. About a dozen American lay missionaries with special skills passed through there every few days en route to assignments around Haiti, where they performed valuable volunteer service for two weeks, from running medical clinics to building schools to drilling water wells. Since many of them were female—friendly, generous, innocent Midwesterners—and since I was one of the rare nonmissionaries allowed to live in the Guest House, it was akin to giving the fox the key to the hen house. But even this ol’ fox was never able to put it in the keyhole because the lovely ladies were down the hall in a room of six and I was sharing a room of eight bunk beds with seven highly vigilant and protective male missionaries.

  I’d rented a car for ten days, planning to cross the island from end to end and side to side. My local contacts persuaded me that, because of the wretched roads, the language difficulties, and the theft of all traffic signs for use as firewood or shack building, I needed a native driver. They recommended a teenage orphan who’d been in their care and could use the income. I met him, liked him, and hired him. He just forgot to mention one thing: He didn’t know how to operate a car.

  He showed up for departure with a third man, a surly lout he had hired to drive, while he would translate and show me points of interest. I now had two extra mouths to feed and house, one a driver who did not know how to drive and the other a driver who drove like a jerk. I fired the lout after three days of dumb and dangerous driving, and I drove us to Cap-Haïtien while he sulked in the back and my guide desperately searched for points of interest to point out, of which there were none.

  After we returned to Pétionville, I dumped the lout and drove the orphan over the interior mountains to Jacmel for its annual Carnival. We stayed for two days with an American college dropout who was teaching the local women to weave handbags and change purses from discarded black garbage bags, one of the few items in plentiful supply on the island.

  We all went to Carnival in blackface, a common and inoffensive practice in Haiti. If you decide to do likewise, do not make the neophyte’s mistake of using motor oil or shoe polish for the cover-up. The preferred formula is a combination of powdered charcoal, clerin (an alcoholic beverage), and sugar cane juice. The flies love it, so add some DEET.

  The only tangible benefits I derived from my visit to Haiti are eight powerful paintings in traditional Haitian style with African overtones, and a bit of voodoo lore my good guide Godfried had somehow forgotten to impart to me: If you ever need to kill a voodoo priest, be sure to cut out his tongue and eyes so he cannot direct any retributive demons against you from the afterworld. How come you never told me about that, God?

  I had had high hopes for what I thought might be an exotic, offbeat, and un-touristed destination, but it turned out to be the worst dung heap I’d been in, which covers a lot of territory. Unless you love seeing poverty and misery, or have a calling for missionary work, or want to stock up on excellent paintings at low prices, I can’t think of any reason to visit Haiti. In fact, I can readily think of many reasons not to go. To list a few:

  • The Creole they speak is difficult to understand.

  • The roads are among the worst anywhere and make driving, even in towns, a torture. (The only worse roads I’ve driven are in the Gambia, CAR, northern Afghanistan, and a six hundred-mile stretch in Iran in 1965 that has surely been paved by now.)

  • People encroach on the roads everywhere, and the hundreds of what should be roadside stands come so far onto the surviving bit of concrete as to make driving a horror.

  • The natives were not readily approachable. Polite and friendly when you’re introduced by someone they know and trust, they generally present to strangers a dour, apprehensive, unwelcoming visage. It’s nothing personal; they’re just so beaten down by the daily grind of trying to stay alive that they don’t have the energy to be gregarious.

  • The locals were vocally opposed to having their pictures taken; they’d sooner throw a rock at you than pose for a picture (and if there’s anything Haiti has in abundance, it is rocks). Their attitude stems from some voodoo beliefs mixed with generations of having their dictators’ secret police spying on them, and their belief—not unfounded—that opportunists use or sell photos of the disadvantaged for their own advantage.

  • Aside from the fine views offered from mountain roads in the interior (which few would dare to drive) the island lacks physical beauty. Even its beaches are bland and unappealing.

  • The food available to travelers had little variety and was almost always fried. There are few restaurants because the people are too poor to eat out.

  • Because Haiti is not self-sufficient in much and has to import virtually everything, prices are inordinately high, especially if they know you’re a tourist.

  • The governing elite did nothing for the people; it only put money in its own pockets. Six months after two hurricanes hit the center of the island, streets in the cities still were blocked with piles of mud and debris, and many of the washed-out roads had not been repaired, forcing me to make lengthy, arduous, detours.

  • There was not much to do. The only legal diversions I saw the locals engaging in were wagering at Lotto, playing awful music at ear-shattering levels, shaking their booties, and rooting for any African or Latin American soccer team that was opposing France.

  • Above all, the future here seemed—and may well be—hopeless. The nation survives, but barely, on international handouts. No large industries functioned there, no minable mineral resources enriched the land, no agriculture flourished (some sugar cane, rice, a few tropical fruits). Several million children were attending school, to graduate to a job market suitable for maybe a thousand. Decades of mistreatment by a succession of despotic, self-serving rulers have left the populace dismayed, distrustful, and beaten down.

  It’s hard to enjoy a holiday in a land so poor that parents sometimes give away their children to wealthier people to provide them with a chance for a better life, where the bodily organs of deceased disaster victims may be sold to medical shops, and where newly orphaned kids have been abducted after natural disasters and sold into slavery or sexual bondage.

  To be fair to Haiti, I admit I may have what sociologists call a “roadside bias.” Their theory is that some aspects of living get better the farther one goes from the asphalt, that the more isolated residents are generally kinder, more hospitable, helpful, and unassuming. This may be true, but many important services diminish the farther you get from the roads, including access to good health care, education, entertainment, and food variety. Any way you look at it, it’s a sad, sad place.

  And that was the situation a year before a 7.0 earthquake killed around 200,000 in 2010. Before the deadly cholera epidemic. Before the challenged election. Before the return of dictator Baby Doc. And before Tropical Storm Isaac and Hurricane Sandy hit.

  The New York Times summed it up in November 2012: “They had little, had endured much, and now need more.”

  Help by don
ating to CARE, UNICEF, Save the Children, or Beyond Borders. But spare yourself the visit.

  CHAPTER 14

  Your Man in Havana

  As I was waiting at Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture Airport to board the aging Ilyushin airliner for my clandestine flight to Havana, the officials shepherded about 50 Haitians past me and onto the plane. They were mostly middle-aged and so gaunt and frail I wondered why they were flying. It was not until I was inescapably strapped in my seat among them that I found out they were heading to Cuba for medical treatment. For tuberculosis! (Ever try holding your breath for 90 minutes?)

  I arrived in Santiago de Cuba misguidedly thinking I’d be welcomed as a Hero of the Revolution for defying the U.S. embargo and being one of the rare Americans to fly into Cuba without the official exemption granted by the U.S. to medical and missionary workers or attendees at a professional conference. Instead, I aroused their suspicions. They assumed I was CIA.

  They asked my occupation, but doubted that I was “retired”; nor did they buy my story about trying to visit every country. They were skeptical of why I was carrying $4,000 cash, even after I explained I had six more Caribbean countries to visit. (They’d have been far more distrustful if they’d found the additional $4,000 hidden in my belt, boots, and a hollowed-out book.) My bulging 50-page passport led them to believe the Agency was sending me around the globe to foment trouble. And I’d walked off the plane carrying a copy of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which didn’t help. But would a real spy have the cojones to do that?