This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the Caribbean republic had changed after the terrible earthquake of 12 January 2010. This time, I would not be travelling by jitney, lorry or fishing boat, but in taxis and air-conditioned tourist coaches. Port-au-Prince, the capital, was as exhilarating and exhausting as I remembered it. The streets, thronged with pack animals and porters were a human ant heap. The smells I knew so well from earlier visits — sewage, burning rubbish — hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away.
I made a bee-line for the Hotel Oloffson, a magnificent gingerbread mansion made famous by Graham Greene in his Haitian novel The Comedians. Illuminated at night, the hotel was a folly of spires and fretwork. Hurricane lamps flickered yellow, showing white rattan furniture. I had not seen the Haitian-American owner, Richard Morse, since I proposed to my wife here in 1990 (I went down on two knees to Laura after a burst of machine-gun fire startled me). ‘Ian, it’s been too long,’ said Richard, laconic as ever. Not only had he kept the Oloffson open all these years, but he fronts a world-class Vodou rock band, RAM. The band played so well that night that I thought I would levitate out of my seat. Past guests to the hotel have included Nöel Coward, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger (who wrote ‘Emotional Rescue’ there); laughably a room had been named after my book on Haiti, Bonjour Blanc.
Port-au-Prince was still visibly damaged from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake. The death toll is uncertain but the official Haitian tally is 316,000. It remains one of the worst natural disasters in Caribbean history.
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