"I took over the hotel in 1987, formed a band in 1990 and stopped counting governments in 1996." He remembers a time in the early 1990s when coups and counter-coups gave the country three governments in 12 hours. Morse, a Haitian-American educated at Princeton, is not hopeful about the current state of affairs in his adopted country. He says the lines between the old military regimes and Lavalas are getting fuzzier.

"They're trying to set up a system where there's no opposition, and they're willing to try any methods necessary to attain that," he says. He disagrees with the Organization of American States' qualified approval of the election results. "The OAS is saying, 'There were some discrepancies, but everything's OK.' Well everything's not OK. They're killing people. They're killing people and people are going into hiding."

Lavalas essentially terrorized the opposition into hiding until two weeks before the elections, Morse believes. Then, with a statement from Aristide calling for peaceful elections, the violence miraculously ceased and the opposition was told to field their candidates in what was to be a competitive election.

Morse thinks that the OAS is trying to pretend an election is valid despite obvious fraud and unfair voting practices, as they are currently accused of doing in Peru. Critics say the OAS is lowering the bar for what is acceptable in democratic elections under the philosophy that some movement forward (i.e., the holding of elections at all) is better than no movement forward.

Reiterating Manigat's sentiment, Morse stated flatly: "The precedent has been set that if you want to be involved in politics in this country, you've got to get your guns together ... Nothing's changed, the teams have changed but not the modus operandi."

Before we switched to music and New York, he punctuated our political conversation simply. "You can get killed here for saying the shit I just said."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Yvon Neptune and I sat around a table inside the house where he keeps his offices in downtown Port-au-Prince. An intense man with his beard and hair going gray around the edges, Neptune is the spokesman for Fanmi Lavalas who recently defeated Manigat to become a senator in the Haitian parliament.

The room was cool and quiet, away from the noise of the street. Cabinets were arranged around the room, lined with books in several languages. A bird chattered away from somewhere in the garden out back.

"The Haitian people are pleased" with the results of the election, he said. "The majority of the voters are pleased, because the elections have been an opportunity for them to state their position on the situation in Haiti."

Over the course of an hour, Neptune spoke of the policy of agrarian reform begun under President Aristide and continued under Preval, and also about encouraging the private sector, local and foreign, to invest in Haiti. He alluded to the pending approval of agreements with the IMF and World Bank by the new parliament, and of the necessity of modernizing the administrative infrastructure of Haiti.

Asked about Lavalas' commitment to democracy, and about the violence preceding the election, Neptune commented that "we continually stated our position on violence in Haiti: denouncing the violence, condemning the violence. We encourage everybody, everybody," he continued, "not to let themselves be intimidated and to come out and vote. And that's exactly what they did."

When questioned about the attacks on the opposition headquarters, specifically the arson of Espace de Concertation's offices, Neptune shifted blame back to that party's leaders, and their supporters, whom he characterized as party "cronies."

"It is difficult to accept the value of the opposition, the weight of that opposition, because it is practically nonexistent except for a few politicians who would use the airwaves to make accusations," he said. "They often commit violent act [sic] or delegate people to commit violent acts and they go as far as posturing as Fanmi Lavalas partisans. It is very easy for them to do that."

The fire, he implied, was probably set by Espace themselves. "That particular organization failed to pay the rent on that building for almost five years."

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