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Life beyond the beaches

The plight of Haitian sugar-cane workers in the Dominican Republic gets scant attention from Quebec tourists flocking to sun-kissed resorts

Thursday, December 27, 2007

The masses of Quebecers who hit the beaches of the Dominican Republic during the winter are ignoring a larger reality only kilometres away: The slavery-like conditions of hundreds of thousands of undocumented Haitians who work the country's sugar-cane fields, a Montreal aid group says.

To raise awareness among the all-inclusive crowd - and perhaps also to prick their conscience a bit - the group has come up with something to remind Quebec tourists of the workers' plight: a 2008 wall calendar.

Four Quebec trade-union federations donated the money to print 1,000 copies of the $5 calendars, which are movingly illustrated with a dozen black-and-white pictures of Haitians in the "bateyes" (shantytowns in the sugar plantations) by Montreal photojournalist Jean-François Leblanc.

The calendar marks the 20th anniversary of the Comité québécois pour la reconnaissance des droits des travailleurs haitiens en République dominicaine.

"We're saying to vacationers, go to the beaches but also take the time to see what's behind the beaches," said Pérard Joseph, the project's volunteer co-ordinator.

"There are 250 bateyes all across the country with maybe 300,000 Haitians and descendants of Haitians working ... in extreme poverty and with no official status," said Joseph, a Montreal psychiatric hospital nurse whose father was a Dominican refugee in Haiti.

"We can help people see the bigger picture if they go down there. They can be tourists, but they can also be responsible tourists."

Along with Cuba, the Dominican Republic is one of the most popular winter vacation destinations for Quebecers.

The country shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas. Some 800,000 Haitians are believed to live in the Dominican Republic.

The plight of the sugar-cane workers is well-known among Haitian immigrants in Canada, most of whom live in Montreal. It has also become a cause célèbre of local social-justice groups; the subject was featured in September at the 3rd Montreal International Haitian Film Festival.

Haitian migrants have been crossing into the Dominican Republic since the 1920s to work the cane fields. Though the industry suffered in the 1980s, Haitians kept coming, often finding work in other sectors, including construction and in the hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists. Many also found work as domestics.

Most, even children born in the Dominican Republic who are of Haitian descent, are undocumented, since the country has refused to give them citizenship, according to a report last March by Amnesty International. Tens of thousands of Haitians - many of whom have lived in the Dominican Republic for decades - are also summarily deported every year.