South Florida Haitians
Achieve Political Clout
By Ken Thomas

North Miami: When he mopped floors and started a small business in Brooklyn 30 years ago, Haitian-born Jacques Despinosse watched Jewish-Americans achieve political power in New York.
When he moved to Miami in the late 1970s, Despinosse saw Cuban-Americans carve out a political foothold in South Florida.
Josephat Celestin, center, the new Mayor of North Miami, Fla., is joined by councilmen Jacques Despinosse, left, and Ossman Desir, at St. Paul's Church in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami Thursday May 24. The three now form a Haitian-American majority on the five-person North Miami city council. And during the 1980s, the community activist began playing radio host - "The Voice of the Haitian-American" - and urged his listeners to become politically active.
"Why not copy from them? If it worked for them, it could work for us," Despinosse said. "Now we're beginning to see the fruit."
Despinosse, 55, was recently elected to North Miami's city council, part of a coming-out party that has firmly placed Haitian-Americans on the city's political stage.
In front of 600 mostly Haitian onlookers this week - some carrying red-white-and-blue Haitian flags and singing the national anthem, "La Dessalinienne" - Josaphat "Joe" Celestin, 44, was sworn in as mayor of North Miami, Miami-Dade's fourth-largest city.
With a population of nearly 60,000, the city is now believed to be the nation's largest city with a Haitian-American as mayor. Celestin and Despinosse join the city's first Haitian-American council member, Ossmann Desir, to form a Haitian-American majority on the five-person council.
"After today, those in the elected offices, those sitting in elected office can no longer afford to take our vote for granted," Celestin said, his voice heard by another 500 people who listened attentively through loudspeakers set outside the city's armory.
Celestin, a builder who immigrated to the United States in 1979, won 53 percent of the vote to defeat Arthur "Duke" Sorey, an African-American former council member.
In the past two years, voters in northeast Miami-Dade have elected a Haitian-American to the Florida Legislature and a Haitian-American majority city council in El Portal, a Miami suburb of about 2,000 people.
The Haitian population in South Florida is estimated at 150,000.
North Miami, which calls itself the "City of Progress," once welcomed Polish, Italian and Greek immigrants. But according to 2000 Census figures, the white population dropped by one-third to 35 percent from 1990, while its black population more than doubled to 55 percent. Census figures fail to specify Haitian-American counts.
Analysts call it a significant step for an immigrant group that fled political turmoil during the past two decades. Many Haitians said they once focused their energies on problems back home and eyed the possibility of returning. Now, they call Celestin's election symbolic of their interest in raising families, buying homes and contributing locally.
"I don't think they're going to call us 'boat people' anymore," said Fritz Montinard, 31, a local car dealer who left Port-au-Prince nearly 20 years ago. "They're going to call us 'vote people.' We're voters."
By concentrating on local crime, traffic problems and flood insurance policy, Despinosse said Haitians here can pragmatically carry weight back home, just as Jewish-Americans help shape Middle East policy and Cubans in Miami helped dictate the U.S.'s stance on Cuba.
"This is a solution to our problem: become a citizen and then you can influence lawmakers," he said.
In the city, even those who forgo local politics derive a sense of pride from the election.
"In high school, you didn't want to be known as Haitian," said Betty Cerenord, 26, who helps manages her family's two Creole restaurants, famous for its fried chicken, plantains and hot slaw. The family expects to open two new locations this summer. "Now it's like I'm proud to be Haitian. Look at what I've got. I got a business."
Speaking in both English and Creole, Celestin acknowledged the need to bring a postelection unity following a campaign that locals described as nasty.
Only hours after his election, Celestin told police he received more than 15 harassing calls on his cell phone, prompting police to assign a plain-clothed officer while he made postelection rounds.
Police and community officials said they remain optimistic that the community will make a smooth transition as Haitians take a more prominent role in local politics.
Mike McDearmaid, 52, a lifelong resident, stresses that "we're all rowers in the same boat" and says the Haitian influence is just the latest to come through town.
"I think we're going to look back 10 years from now and we're going to see North Miami still diverse," McDearmaid said. "Ten years from now there might be another ethnic flow through North Miami. Won't it be funny when the Haitian people say 'who are those people?'"         
                                                                                                             (Associated Press)

Away From Haiti, Discovering the Politics of the Possible 
By Dana Canedy
As a child, Josaphat Celestin never thought much about voting, much less becoming a politician. In his native Haiti, he said, the stakes were too high for anyone on the losing side of a political fight.
"In Haiti," Mr. Celestin said, "I never had an interest in voting, simply because if you vote for the wrong candidate - and by wrong I mean the losing candidate - you have to leave town; I mean you have to leave the country for that matter."
"But when I came here to this country," said Mr. Celestin, who arrived in 1979, "and I saw the need for Haitian-American representation, I said, 'Look, Joe, you're going to have to try to see what you can do to help your people.' "
As he became more politically astute, the Haitian-American community in South Florida grew larger and more politically involved.
"Haitians love Haiti, so ultimately when we came to the United States we all had something in mind that we're here temporarily, that we eventually want to go back home," he said. "So most of us said we don't want to become American citizens."
"But after the Duvalier regime," he said, "we saw what was going on in Haiti and we determined that, after all we love America and we're going to make this place our home. So we decided to start getting involved in American politics."
And so in the 1990's, Mr. Celestin and a handful of other Haitian-Americans began conducting voter registration drives and running for office - for schools boards or city councils - in pockets of South Florida cities with growing Haitian strongholds.
Mr. Celestin was defeated twice in races for the Florida Legislature and in his first bid for the North Miami mayor's office, in 1999, when he was defeated by the last mayor, who did not seek re-election. His defeats led to a change in strategy, and it worked. Finding that the Democratic Party preferred to back established African-American candidates, he switched parties and ran as a Republican, expecting a solid Haitian vote.
Though heavily Democratic, many Haitian-Americans were willing to overlook Mr. Celestin's party affiliation during the mayoral race to put one of their own in office.
"They voted ethnicity," said State Representative Phillip Brutus, a Democrat and also a Haitian-American.
"You couldn't talk to me about the Republicans years ago," said Mr. Celestin, 44, a builder who is divorced and has four children. But the Democratic Party, he contends, has taken blacks' loyalty for granted. "They have no incentive to do anything for us," said Mr. Celestin, who has an engineering degree from the University of Haiti."