To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

For the second time in seven months, TIME's Edward Barnes, Cathy Booth and Bernard Diederich are in Haiti waiting for the Americans to arrive. Last October the U.S.S. Harlan County, trying to land with a U.N.-sponsored team of military and police advisers, turned back after anti-U.S. mobs demonstrated at the port. This time Barnes, betting things will be different, has rented a room in a "strategically located" brothel with a roof that should command a good view of the first attack. Miami bureau chief Booth spent several days % last week at the army's decrepit general quarters, trying to glean what plans the country's military rulers might be making -- either to avoid an invasion by finally stepping down or to organize their troops to resist. Diederich touched based with longtime sources in and around Port-au-Prince, looking for cracks in the army's support.

TIME's team has traveled hundreds of miles within Haiti and talked with dozens of Haitians over the past five weeks. Barnes slogged by foot and dugout canoe in the south, tracking down rumors of whole villages that had perished as desperate people tried to flee by sea. Booth set off for the ruggedly beautiful north coast, looking for Haitians who had reportedly organized a resistance movement in support of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "The divisions are as profound in the countryside as in Port-au-Prince," says Booth. "It's hard to see how the pro-military and pro-Aristide groups will ever find a middle ground."

Amid their grueling daily rounds, in which comforts are few and harassment of foreign journalists is growing -- friskings are common, and Barnes has twice been detained by police -- the reporters feel a dispiriting sense of deja vu. "For older Haitians," says Diederich, who once ran the newspaper Haiti Sun, "the current crisis is like a rerun of an old horror movie." Diederich had just been expelled from Haiti when "Papa Doc" Duvalier thwarted President Kennedy's attempt to remove him from power in 1963. "The lesson of Papa Doc's defying the U.S. has not been lost on those who hold power in Haiti today," adds Diederich. Barnes, Booth and Diederich have all reread Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians and, says Barnes, "are amazed at how little things have changed." Duvalier's feared secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, may be called attaches now, but Haiti itself remains Greene's "evil slum floating a few miles from Florida," where dead bodies discovered along the road are more than an occasional occurrence.