Skepticism geared toward new government
Sociopolitical sectors are expressing skepticism at the formation of new Prime Minister Fritz William Michel’s cabinet. The majority of the people making up the cabinet are of unknown personalities according to senator Pierre François Sildor who asks to wait to see which direction Michel’s general policy statement will go at the time of voting.
“What means will the new government use to solve the big challenges of the hour: the expensive life, the insecurity, the environment, the return to school and the socio-economic situation,” Sildor said.
“Haiti en Folie” festival takes over Montreal
Thousands of festival-goers attended Montréal’s Place des Festivals on Monday to attend the opening show of the Festival en Folie organized as part of Juste pour Rire, which runs through July 28. Musicians Emeline Michel and James Germain kicked off the festivities that commemorate the 215 years of Haitian independence and the 60 years of presence of Haitians in Quebec. Also involved the festival includes DJ’s Rock Steady, Buzz and Sweet Larock and on Friday, a tribute will be paid to the singer Cornelia “Ti Corn” Schutt, born in Haiti to German parents and raised in Cap-Haitien.
Artists struggle to save Haiti museum after 2010 earthquake
DÁnica Coto | APJuly 19
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Franck Louissaint sighed and frowned as he stepped onto his patio and flung aside shower curtains protecting a painting by a former voodoo priest who became a renowned Haitian artist.
The painting from the 1960s once depicted a seemingly joyous voodoo spirit known as a loa, but it warped into something that looked like a three-dimensional satellite image of mountains after it was damaged by rubble and waterlogged when a 2010 earthquake hit the museum where it was displayed.
“It’s like the skin of a crocodile!” exclaimed Louissaint, an artist who expects seven more months of work to fully restore the painting by Robert Saint-Brice.
It is one of dozens of well-known paintings that artists are still trying to rescue nearly a decade after the magnitude 7.0 quake killed an estimated 300,000 people or more and struck countless buildings, including the Museum of Haitian Art of St. Pierre College — one of the country’s top institutions. More than 600 other watercolors and paintings by prominent artists are still in storage and in danger of decaying as a small group of artists struggles to restore the damaged works.
While life has begun anew for much of Haiti since the quake, the museum has been shuttered for nine years and only recently opened a tiny room to display a small quantity of art.
On a recent day, 91-year-old museum president Louis Du Bois walked briskly through the building, pointing out the damaged roof and walls as he occasionally put on his glasses to inspect certain paintings.
“We have to reopen to the public,” he said. “All the great artists are here.”
The quake also devastated other public spaces dedicated to art across Haiti, with $30 million in losses reported at the Museum d’Art Nader, which had one of the world’s most extensive collections of Haitian art.
But the Museum of Haitian Art is one of the few worldwide to host Haitian paintings from the 20th century. The museum, which previously drew 9,000 visitors a year, was established in the 1970s by art lovers to commemorate U.S. painter DeWitt Peters and is tucked into the southeast corner of Port-au-Prince’s historic area. It features mostly donated artwork.
Fewer than a dozen paintings are currently on display, including one titled “Marriage of Interest” by Rigaud Benoit, who is considered a master of Haitian painting, and “Tower of Babel” by Préfète Duffaut, whose work was collected by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Both men also painted murals inside a cathedral in Port-au-Prince that was flattened by the earthquake.
The museum’s oldest painting dates to 1945 and is by seminal Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite.
The Smithsonian Institution has helped the museum restore some paintings, as has the Louvre, which also donated 1,000 copies of a catalog illustrating all of Hyppolite’s paintings so local officials could sell them to help generate money.
But the museum still has blank, white walls, with hundreds of works stacked in a narrow storage area exposed to heat, humidity and other dangers. They are taken out only for the occasional cleaning while the more than 30 earthquake-damaged works are being restored.
Among those needing attention is a 1960s lush jungle scene by Jean-Claude Toussaint, which is nearly ripped in half and also slashed diagonally. The painting remains rolled up with yellowed masking tape that has lost its stickiness.
Du Bois estimates that the museum needs $50,000 to reopen, noting the roof must be fixed and the electricity repaired before additional paintings can be displayed.
For now, he and others are relying solely on the restoration efforts of artists such as Erntz Jeudy of nearby Quisqueya University.
Jeudy recently sat in front of a 71-by-79-inch (180-by-200-centimeter) painting by Miami-based artist Edouard Duval Carrié titled “The Republican Army of Santo Domingo,” which was stripped down to blank canvas in certain areas.
“This means a lot to me because it’s the restoration of a very rich heritage,” he said. “It’s great to be able to work and transmit this to future generations.”
It’s a feeling familiar for Louissaint, who works up to 10 hours at a time to restore Brice’s painting. He said it makes him proud to have permission to touch such artwork.
“It’s the story of the old Haiti,” he said. “It starts to live again.”
Soles With Soul: Donna Karan and Kenneth Cole Are Collaborating With Artisans in Haiti on Summer Sandals
Donna Karan and Kenneth Cole: two iconic names in the New York fashion industry; a combined 70 years of experience between them; never collaborated! Until today, that is. (Let’s chalk it up to collaborations being a 2010s thing.)
Like most great ideas, this one started with a personal story: Three years ago, Karan purchased a pair of leather sandals with a plush rubber sole from Cole’s Gentle Souls line (which fuses performance technology with natural materials), and they instantly became her summer signature. “Everyone was constantly asking where I got my sandals,” she says. “They are seriously the most comfortable shoes in the entire world—they are beyond comfortable. I can’t even explain it!” That got her thinking about the leather sandals she was producing in Haiti through her label, Urban Zen, which sparked another thought: What if she could get these crazy-comfy, foamy soles into the hands of the artisans and create something totally new and modern?
She called up Cole, who has also been working in Haiti for nearly a decade, to discuss a potential partnership. (Another point of similarity between the two designers: Both immediately went to Haiti after its devastating 2010 earthquake and have aided health care, education, and cultural preservation initiatives ever since.) Cole and his team had been working with a group of artisans making shoes out of local materials, “but they were a little stiff and uncomfortable,” he admits. So Karan connected his team with Pascale Théard, a longtime Urban Zen partner and highly skilled local workshop owner. In January, Cole and Karan flew down to her shop in Port-au-Prince and finalized 10 designs, all of which merge Cole’s comfy soles with traditional Haitian leather-working.
The finished products are equal parts Cole and Karan: gladiator sandals with cushioned soles, fringed and embroidered leather uppers, and braided straps that wrap around the ankle. “You know when you try on a shoe and go, Oh, my gosh! It’s that kind of feeling when you put these on,” Karan says. “I always say, if you can’t sleep in it and go out in it, I don’t want it. [I want] things that go from day to night, with an artisanal hand, with a story, with a meaning, with a soul. I always say it’s never about me—it’s about we and who we work with.”
Following a low-key launch party in the Hamptons over the weekend, the shoes are arriving in Cole’s store on the Bowery, at Urban Zen in Sag Harbor and New York City’s West Village, and on both designers’ websites today, with prices starting at $325. “Hopefully it becomes an ongoing sustainable business,” Cole says. “If nothing else, it shines a light on a culture that deserves to be celebrated. We’re making these in very limited quantities to start. We want them to be a vehicle for telling the story of this community.”
Haiti's Notorious Gang Leader Arnel Joseph Arrested
WASHINGTON/PORT-AU-PRINCE - A wounded Arnel Joseph was lying on a stretcher, ready to be wheeled into an operating room at the Bonne Fin hospital of Les Cayes, a Caribbean seaport located in Haiti's southern region, when members of a special unit of the National Police Force's (PNH) swooped in to arrest him.
"We've captured Arnel!" the officers shouted angrily, then they fired their weapons into the air, in a video seen by VOA Creole.
The alleged gang leader, considered to be one of the country's most dangerous and wanted fugitives, was awaiting surgery on his wounded leg, when he was found and captured, according to National Police Chief Michel Ange Gedeon. The leg was wounded during a fire fight with rival gang leader Ti Sourit, Arnel told reporters as they snapped photos and recorded video of him after his arrest.
Police Chief Gédeon tweeted the news to a stunned nation.
"The gang leader Arnel Joseph (who) the national police force spent months trying to locate has been apprehended Monday at the Hopital Bonne Fin (Cayes). Thank you to our police officers and to the people of Haiti."
The police had been tracking him for months and suspected he was hiding out in the lush seaside of Artibonite in the agricultural region of the country.
Gedeon said the arrest "had been an obsession for the 15,000 police officers of the institution," during an interview with radio station Magik9 Tuesday morning.
In 2018, PNH had offered a $27,000 reward (2 million gourdes) for any information leading to Arnel's arrest.
Post arrest photos go viral
Photos of the tall, thin young man in his 20s, lying naked on a dirt surface as people shouted questions at him quickly went viral on Haitian social media Monday night. In one photo obtained by VOA Creole, the tan Timberland-style boot of a police officer wearing camouflage pants can be seen pressing down on his chest. Arnel looks up in bewilderment.
The image sparked questions about whether human rights activists and MINUJUSTH, The United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti would investigate the circumstances of Arnel's arrest and his treatment by police afterward. The special unit had decided to move in on Arnel before the surgical procedure, rather than waiting until after it was over to swoop in.
MINUJUSTH's stated mission is "strengthening Haiti's rule of law institutions, developing the Haitian National Police, and promoting and protecting human rights."
Who is Arnel Joseph?
The 20-something Arnel had been arrested and sentenced to six years in jail in 2011 for the murder of several policemen. He was released in May of 2017. Haiti's penal code is based on the French judicial system. It is unclear how his sentence was determined.
Arnel is accused of terrorizing residents of the Village de Dieu slum of the capital, and more recently of robbing trucks loaded with merchandise, raping, kidnapping and attacking motorists on National Highway #1, which links the capital and cities to the north.
In a conversation with journalists posted on YouTube, he said he considers himself to be a "representative" of the Village de Dieu slum of the capital, Port-au-Prince. "Our revolution is the Haitian people's revolution," he said.
Links to lawmakers
In April, the discovery of of 24 mobile calls between Arnel and Senator Garcia Delva roiled the nation. Senator Delva, who represents the Artibonite agricultural department of the country where the alleged gang leader had been hiding out, denied any wrongdoing.
"I only have one position on this," he told reporters. "If the commission finds that I, in my conversations with Arnel, ever agreed to associate myself with his (illegal) activities then I agree and accept to pay the consequences. For once, this country needs justice."
When journalists pressed him about why he was in contact with the gang leader in the first place, Delva responded that he "talks to everyone."
"Everyone knows my number, I've never changed it - so everyone calls me - anyone can call me. Anyway, I don't think I'm the only one who converses with him," Delva said. The senator refused to divulge what they discussed and alleged that prominent Haitian businessman and opposition leader Reginald Boulos recognizes Arnel as a community leader. He said Boulos confirmed that in a conversation with a local radio station.
How the phone calls were tracked remains unclear.
Senator Senatus told reporters the commission (Senate Commission for Justice, Security and Defense) had received information that led to them asking the National Telecommunications Council (CONATEL) to provide information about the calls made to and from Senator Delva's phone. But Jean David Rodney, the institution's executive director, denied ever receiving such a request in an interview with Haiti Libre newspaper. He said CONATEL has "no direct relationship with the Senate."
Former Senate leader Youri Latortue, who also represents the Artibonite region in the Senate, echoed his colleague Delva's claims about other prominent politicians being linked to the gang leader.
"I think there are a lot of other names on the list of connections to Arnel," Latortue told VOA Creole. "For example there's Vladimir Jean-Louis "Ti Vlad" who does security work for (former president Michel) Martelly - he's on the list too. We have to investigate the links between what they said exists (between) - the president and the thugs - because some people say it was the president who brought Arnel to Port au Prince.
Those allegations remain unsubstantiated.
Conditions to turn himself in to law enforcement
Prior to his arrest on Monday, Arnel expressed a willingness to turn himself in if the government met certain conditions.
His conditions were: finishing potable water projects, building roads, boosting agriculture and providing electricity to the population.
What's next?
Arnel's capture put an end to years of living on the lam, but the police investigation into his criminal activities continues, according to Carl-Henry Boucher, the administrative director of the national police force.
On social media, reaction to the arrest was mixed.
"Good Job" @michaljoseph9341 commented on VOA Creole's Instagram page.
User @albandywedson questioned why the police waited until he sought treatment to arrest him.
And @benaldo_paul was skeptical of justice really being served, commenting "jomo (President Jovenel Moise) and the honorable garcia delva will have him released."