Note: This was taken from a book written in 1998, 26 years before any discussion of Haiti in the recent presidential election—and the author points out that the events took place five years before that.
I can see the boats in the distance, headed out to sea again. The Haitians always do this, set sail when they see us sitting out here in our Coast Guard ships. They believe that we will take them to the United States, but they are actually going to be taken back to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. We will burn their rickety, homebuilt boats and then head back to our station, ten miles off the coast of Haiti in the Windward Passage.
I participated in this series of actions over and over while I served aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bear, five years ago.
When I enlisted in the Coast Guard, I thought I would be helping to prevent illegal aliens from entering the United States. In fact, however, we were there to prevent the Haitians from an assured death at sea; there is less than a one percent chance of making the 120 mile voyage from Haiti to the United States through the Windward Passage, the most violent body of water in the Caribbean Sea. I also had a problem with the Haitians personally. Why didn’t they stay in their own country? Why come to my country? I really didn’t understand them at all, even to the point of holding a resentment toward them. I felt this way right from the beginning, even before I enlisted.
Everything changed for me, however, in the summer of 1991 during my first Alien Migration Interdiction Operation. This was when I first met a Haitian immigrant.
It was my turn to assume the duty as smallboat engineer, and armed with an M16, I felt tough: no Haitian would think twice about messing with me. I already knew about Haiti—the overpopulation, the famine, the rampant diseases that ravaged its people: cholera, dysentery, AIDS. The children have a 30 percent chance of dying before they reach adulthood. These were simply trivial facts to me; I had a duty to perform.
I saw the simple wooden sailboats as we approached. The boats, measuring from twenty to thirty feet in length, were built from two-by-fours and scraps torn from buildings. They were overloaded with an average of seventy-five people, all yelling about going to America. As we drew close to the first boat, I found myself wondering what would drive so many people to such extreme measures to “invade” my country. Then we started to load these people on our smallboats and transfer them to the ship. There were hundreds of people, all of them emaciated and sick. They were pitiful, having no personal possessions and being too weak to climb the ladder up to the ship. When we approached their boats, they would get so excited trying to climb into our smallboats that they would capsize their own. These were the people we were defending our country from? And with guns?
The first person I pulled into the boat was a young woman. She was soaked, as were all of the Haitians, wearing some tattered rags, and she looked weak and worn down. But when I looked into her eyes, I saw a brilliance and clarity that told me she thought she was going to America. I, however, knew her true destination. By nightfall we had to leave our patrol area to offload the 450 Haitians we had intercepted that day. Being on a 270-foot ship, we were dangerously overloaded. We had no food or facilities to support all the Haitians: so many people, and there were five other Coast Guard ships still picking up more.
On that first night, as we headed into Port-au-Prince, I realized what I had failed to see previously. The Haitians were a people with absolutely nothing except what they wore and each other. They simply wanted a chance to live, instead of the grim existence they had on Haiti. This was a chance that they would never have at home, so they would risk everything, including their lives and their children, to journey to America, to have the same chances that I have had. That night the Haitian people earned an enormous amount of respect from me and at the same time made me question my beliefs. Who are we to determine the fate of these people? Why shouldn’t they have the same chances that we have? Have we forgotten that the United States is a country of immigrants?
Goudy, Robert Lee. “The Haitian Exodus.” Model Student Essays, Prentice Hall, 1998, pp. 58-60.
Goudy was a student at Harrisburg Area Community College, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he wrote this.