Haiti has always been an awful place, but not as bad as it is. now. I have an old picture of my parents there, part of their Caribbean Cruise honeymoon. The look on my. mother’s face, so sad and full of compassion when they were there, says it all.
Haitians that came over to Florida from Haiti in little boats in the eighties were mostly polite and worked hard at menial jobs. We could sometimes hear their voodoo drums in their neighborhoods. Spooky but harmless.
I bought a fabulous oil painting by a Haitian painter at the Haitian art gallery at the Caribe Hilton inn Puerto Rico decades ago. Probably worth far more than the $100 I paid for it then.
I don’t dislike Haitians, have no reason to. Voodoo is weird, but I think harmless. Could be wrong about harmless.
I lived in Miami, very near to a small Coconut Grove community graveyard.
Now and then, the graves would be dug up nights to gather the necessary bones: skulls being the most sought-after.
If you were a witness in a criminal court case against a Haitian, nearing the courthouse, one had to step carefully over precisely aligned dead guinea fowl and corn kernals.
I asked a police detective why a clothing iron was collected in a home-invasion robbery/extortion case. He said the offender used it against the flesh of a victim to torture information out of them.
The subjects were former Haitian “Ton-Ton-Macoute”.
But polite.