Opinion: In Haiti, the Truth Is Often Prostituted

(Follow Emily Troutman on Twitter for the latest updates from Haiti)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --As Haiti's ex-President Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier turned out the lights in his room at the Hotel Karibe, Corline, an attractive 21-year-old woman, was working at the corner, a few minutes up the road.

That's one version. In reality, Corline is more of a prostitute than a "working girl." Just as Duvalier is more of a visiting dictator than an "ex-president."

But revisionism is part of history's game to fudge the facts, and this week in Haiti, more than ever before, mottled shades of gray are in favor.

Emily Troutman for AOL News
Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former Haitian president known as "Baby Doc," greets friends at the Hotel Karibe in Petionville. He returned to Haiti this week for the first time since he was forced into exile in 1986.

On Monday, friends and confidants of Duvalier streamed through the room to greet him. In another version, accomplices and sycophants came to stake their claims.

Today, Duvalier was led out of his hotel room by Haitian police, though there was no report as to whether he had been arrested. And people still have no idea why he came in the first place. Theories include imminent death, presidential ambitions and trouble making (on a grand scale).

The most popular rumor is about an ill-gotten coalition between himself, President Rene Prevail and the also ousted ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to overthrow the foreigners.

Monday's procession at Duvalier's hotel of "friends" was an aging, shabby who's who of has-beens and what once was. Phantoms of another era, dragging behind them the ghosts of thousands.

It was already a week to remember the dead in Haiti. Now, more.

For her part, Corline knows almost nothing of Duvalier. "I don't know him. I wasn't even born," she says.

She was going to school until the earthquake hit. She earns about $15 for every man she entertains. If Duvalier aspires to the presidency, she has one request -- a different job.

Corline lives downtown in a tent. A mundane detail these days, with an estimated 750,000 people making their bedrooms in the streets. Few acknowledge that thousands of the people in the tents are not homeless at all.

Some rented their houses to make money. Others came to Port-au-Prince from far away, after the earthquake, for aid and reconstruction jobs -- an increasingly implausible plan to better their lives.

But before they came, there were hundreds of thousands of others who had the same idea. And over decades they descended on the city. Port-au-Prince was built to contain 300,000 people and now has 1.6 million.

After the Duvalier era, Haiti never fully recovered from a system of governance that held power, opportunity and commerce in the palace, and nowhere else.

If they wanted to go anywhere in life, first Haitians had to come here. That's meant the slow death of communities in the provinces and the fast-moving overpopulation of Port-au-Prince, which many say contributed to the earthquake's incomprehensible death toll.

Urban planners call this "centralization," and its solution "decentralization." Both take generations to do and undo, of which the Duvalier family has already taken two. First the father, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and then the Baby.

The hope is that before he leaves, Jean-Claude Duvalier will see the consequences for himself -- the city that both his rule and his legacy helped destroy. So far, he has not left his hotel room. He arrived by plane on a cloudy evening and traveled from the airport, in the dark.

Baby Doc was president when he was only 19 years old. He never knew a life outside the palace until he was thrown out of it. His boyhood home is destroyed now. Haitians, too, have been thrown out of their homes this year.

And while it's the same sentiment that Prevail tried to convey after the earthquake -- "I lost my house, too" -- maybe Duvalier will do more to remember his role in it.

This week, Corline heard most of what she knows about Duvalier from her mother. Her mother is 59 and remembers her youth with fondness and nostalgia. This week she said many good things about the days when Baby Doc was still in power.

"I heard he might do something," Corline says, "for the country. The way they keep talking about him, he might actually do something."

Moliere, 33, a young man passing by, says, "If he does something good, I'd die for him."

Something. That's the refrain. Anything.

"We're looking for a solution," says Moliere's friend, Jean Marc. "Anyone with a solution, we're for."

Given the conditions, it's no small wonder that old and young people alike often shrug at the idea of a dictatorship. If it turns out Prevail is behind the stunt of Duvalier's sudden reappearance here, the textbooks should write it down as the most tragic, conniving plot of all time.

For those who remember the murders, the torture, the slow descent into a sea of rubble, which started years before the earthquake hit, Duvalier's presence reminds them: "It could always be worse." They are primed to take on any leader who promises, at least, the status quo.

For those too young to know what tyranny looks like, now, when it finally comes, the powers that be can say, "You asked for it."

People here like to put the future in the hands of God. But individuals are also harbingers of hope and change -- through compassion, action and, most of all, awareness. For Haiti to move forward, it has to know, too, when it's moving backward.

Corline has a young son of her own, born a year ago. He will never, ever know the Haiti she knew as a child. Just as she will never, ever know the Haiti her mother knew. In Corline's mind, 2009 was the good old days. For her mother, it was 1985.

That's one version. In reality, neither year was particularly good. The truest justice is knowledge.