The leading whore house in Portau-Prince is the Flamingo, where the girls are black, but the guests are white and American.

You enter the dark, friendly reception, choose a girl, and take her outside to drink and dance in the warm Haitian night air. Time passes, the rum flows, voodoo drums throb in the distance. Then two men from Westport, Conn., come outside. They flaunt their bellies in gaudy Hawaiian shirts and walk heavily, because they are already drunk. Each sits down with his whore.

One of the men belches, and then laughs. The hot sweat trembles on his face. He closes his eyes as the whore lays soft kisses on his neck and strokes his hair.

In a way, the scene was an apt symbol of Haiti and the Americans who go there in pursuit of the crystal-white, palm-fringed beaches, sparkling blue water, and hot Caribbean sun. Tourists marvel at the dramatic color of the Haitian landscape, its coconut, papaya, and mango trees, its high jagged mountains, and its sharp cliffs and quiet coves. They drink Haitian rum, watch the colorful folklore shows, and swing at night to the fast rhythms of the Haitian music. And most take a curious look at the native culture and its black primitivism.

Beneath these trappings of beauty and romance the life force of Haiti lies untouched. The people are desperately poor, they are uneducated, and they live in the small huts and villages of the countryside--where the only signs of modernization are telephone wires strung along the rutted and tortuous roads. Most peasants work small plots of land for their food, live in thatched huts or rusted tin shacks, and try to raise pigs or chickens for trade in the city marketplaces.

Much of the land is mountainous and semi-arid. There was a drought in the north last fall, and there will be a famine this spring. CARE is presently mobilizing to send emergency health teams with food supplies to the area, but several thousand people will probably die of starvation.

Education is sporadic and backward. At the most five to ten per cent of the people are literate. One teacher was proud of her class of 40 students because after a year of lessons each had learned to write his name.

The cities, particularly Port-au-Prince with its 250,000 inhabitants, are the most sordid parts of Haiti. In the sprawling market places, you have to breathe through your mouth to avoid the smell and clench your teeth so the flies can't get in. Beggars are everywhere and swarm around you. Children follow you holding out their hands for money. A cripple throws himself in your path, clinging shakily to his crutch, and without saying a word expresses the horror of human degradation.

Women sit by great kettles of food, or display brightly-colored cloths, or guard piles of oranges, bananas, and mangoes. Throngs of people crowd the markets and mill in the little shops where shoes, mahogany products, straw hats, sisal baskets, and old French grammar books are sold. There is movement and excitement in the streets--but the energy has no focus, it leads nowhere.

The harsh reality of this market place economy is stagnation. There are no signs of progress, and most American officials see little hope of it. American corporations have invested $55 million dollars in Haiti, but their effect on the economy has been negligible. Only a flour mill, which imports its wheat from the States, sells in the Haitian markets. The other products--coffee, bauxite, and sugar--are all for export.

Moreover, American businesses are currently in the process of disinvesting in Haiti, either by selling their land or by refusing to cover depreciation costs. Whatever part the U.S. might have played in aiding Haiti with job-training, education, and industrial development seems to have been squandered.

One need not ponder the imponderables to discover what lies behind Haiti's stunning poverty, its stagnation, and the withdrawal of American money. The answer is easy: Dr. Francois Duvalier, self-declared president of Haiti for life, the notorious "Papa Doc."

At one time a country doctor, Duvalier came to power in 1957, emerging as president after months of political upheaval, rioting, executions, and military rule. He modeled his regime after that of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and enforced it with his secret police, the famed Tonton Macoute.

It is to the credit, however small, of the U.S. government that it finally terminated its aid to Duvalier. Friction developed during the dictator's early years when members of the American AID mission--which between 1945 and 1963 poured $105 million into Haiti--often woke to find that their Haitian workers had taken the American trucks to drive to Portau-Prince for one of Papa Doc's military parades.

Events reached a climax in 1963, when Dulavier ordered the American military mission, a single company of Marines who were training the army in police work, out of the country for "interference" in Haitian politics. A force of Haitian exiles, supported and armed by the new president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, stood poised on the border. Invasion forces were thought to be arming in Cuba, and a story circulated that Duvalier had reservations on a plane to Paris and was ready to flee the country.