Kinam Hotel

In the final days of the occupation, a Hollywood director came to Port-au-Prince as a special guest of the National Palace to celebrate the great success of democracy and the inauguration of the new president, swept into office by an election free and fair in which no one felt inspired to actually vote. The director, whose work had earned him an Academy Award, had loaned his celebrity to Haiti’s cause; he had championed the refugees washing ashore in Florida, lobbied Congress, raised funds, advised the president-in-exile, spoken out at rallies in Boston and New York and Miami, and, with his documentaries, shown the world the reason for his outrage and his broken heart—the brutalities of the tyrants, the blood of the innocents. His crusade had been noble and for that he was welcomed and loved in the wasteland, and Tom Harrington himself had admired him, and still did.