American foreign aid is returning to the scene of one of its greatest disasters - Haiti. In 1963, the Agency for International Development (AID) closed its mission in Port-au-Prince and suspended most American aid there. The U.S. Government was at last fed up with the corruption, repression and harassment of the strange and tyrannical regime of the late President François Duvalier, better known as Papa Doc.

Papa Doc died three years ago, and Haiti is now ruled by his 22-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who, like his father, bears the title of President-for-Life. Last year, AID sent a chief of mission down to Haiti for the first time in a decade. Plans have been made, and agreements have been signed. Now Haiti will have an American aid program about as large as it used to be before the United States gave up on Papa Doc.

U.S. officials have persuaded themselves that the regime of the son will be easier to work with than that of his father. They believe it is less corrupt and tyrannical and more efficient. Some even insist that Papa Doc's rule wasn't as bad as painted by Graham Greene, the movies and the American press. In any case, they say, something must be done to help the people of Haiti, who are among the poorest in the world.

There is some truth in some of what they say. The terror of Papa Doc and his Tontons Macoutes is gone. But what his son presides over is hardly a model or even rational government. No outsider is even sure that he, rather than his mother or sister or friends or army officers, really rules. Moreover, there is no sign that he is any more solicitous for the Haitian masses than was his father. More than fifteen years ago, when François Duvalier first came to power, American officials blinded themselves to what he was and rushed to support him, simply because he was not a Fidel Castro. Now, they are deluding themselves about his son and rushing to the young man's side simply because he is not a Papa Doc.

Attracted by cheap labor, American businessmen have also come to Haiti. They have set up almost 200 small plants that assemble exports to the United States from materials that come originally from the United States. Baseballs are the most famous product. Hundreds of Haitian girls stitch together baseballs from American cowhide and Puerto Rican cores. “Haiti,” says William Johns, general manager of Tomar Industries, one of the baseball plants, "is the world center of baseball, and no one plays it here." Tomar pays the girls 38¢ for every dozen baseballs sewn; on the average, that works out to $1.33 to $1.52 a day.

There is no doubt that Haiti needs outside investment and foreign aid. The only question is whether the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier cares enough about its people to make the aid and investment count. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. It is a country of 4.5 million people, mostly peasants, on a third of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The gross domestic product of the country averaged out to $87 a person in 1972.

Before its independence in 1804; Haiti was the richest French colony in the world. The exports from its plantations in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, were almost double the value of Haiti's exports now. Today, its economy is stagnant. According to the latest figures from the Inter-American Development Bank, its gross domestic product declined at a rate of 0.2 per cent a year from 1960 to 1971, during the reign of Papa Doc.

In a country where 80 per cent of the population is rural, agricultural production has been in decline. According to the latest statistics, exports of coffee, Haiti's main source of foreign exchange, dropped in 1970. Farmers are hampered by lack of roads, great erosion of Haiti, the minuscule size of farms, and their own illiteracy. On top of this, the government has slapped an export tax on coffee that discourages producers.

At least on paper, the American aid program is designed to meet these obvious needs. In the major aid contract so far, the United States is loaning Haiti $3 million and granting it $500,000 a year to help maintain roads. At the same time, the Inter-American Development Bank is loaning Haiti $22.2 million to help build a 97-mile southern highway and the World Bank is planning to loan about $10 million to help build a northern highway. The U.S. Government contributes a good deal of the funding of both banks.

According to AID officials, the United States also is close to signing an agreement to loan Haiti $6 million to stimulate coffee production. Several other new programs are under discussion, including a Peace Corps program, military training for search and sea rescue operations, help in family planning, and pilot agricultural schemes. On top of this, the United States will continue several programs that, for humanitarian reasons, were never halted under Papa Doc. In the current fiscal year, these included $1.2 million for disease control and eradication, a $500,000 community development program administered by CARE, $50,000 for small self-help projects, and $1.8 million worth of surplus foods under the Food for Peace Program.

In the old days, aid to Haiti was always the subject of sharp debate in Washington. Some policy makers believed that the United States should have nothing to do with Duvalier's repressive dictatorship. But others felt that, bad as he was, Duvalier was still the only alternative to communism in Haiti. At that time, Washington greatly feared the exportation of communism from Cuba.

In the end, Duvalier, himself made the aid program almost impossible. He wanted money, not programs and technicians. And the United States gave him a good deal, shoring up his budget with $7 million cash in 1960 and $6 million in 1961. But U.S. officials also wanted projects that would help the Haitians and not just fill the pockets of the President and his cronies. These projects, however, became more and more frustrating. The corruption and the Haitian Government's lack of concern for the peasants were so pervasive in those days that doctors for the private American organization, Medico, refused to turn over food to orphanage directors, for fear they would sell it and let the children go hungry.

By 1963, the excesses, especially the torture and murder of Haitians by the Tontons Macoutes, had reached a point where aid was hard to justify even in the name of anti-communism. AID pulled out that year, though the United States continued the few humanitarian programs.

In their discussions now with an American newsman, officials of the U.S. Embassy at Port-au-Prince and of AID express a good deal of optimism about the resumption of aid. They insist that the pitfalls of the past can be avoided. In their view, the new regime is genuinely concerned about the plight of the masses of peasants. In addition, U.S. officials insist there are safeguards now to prevent a recurrence of the old embarrassments.

But the optimism does not seem supported by a close examination of the plans and of some of the American projects already under way. Several American organizations, including Church World Services, have been in charge of the distribution of American surplus foods under the Food for Peace Program. The organizations usually encourage small projects in the rural interior of Haiti by using the food to pay workers. In the last fiscal year, for example, Church World Services distributed 643,865 pounds of food in exchange for labor.

A tour of some of these projects can be encouraging. Church World Services, using the surplus food, has stimulated communities to build roads, irrigation systems, dikes, nutrition centers and terracing systems to prevent erosion. The terracing, in fact, has been so successful that some communities have continued it even after the American organization has stopped paying workers with food.

But there is one great lack in the program: there is little evidence that the Haitian Government is involved in the program. According to a Church World Services worker, almost all Haitian officials assigned to the program are paid by the American organization, not by the Haitian Government, In some cases, the salaries are supposed to be paid jointly by Haiti and Church World Services, but, according to the American, the Haitian share of the salary never seems to show up.

For one project the Haitian Government did assign an engineer who was paid by the Ministry of Agriculture, but, according to the American who worked with him, "he never did any work. All he cared about was visiting his girl friends in the area. We finally had to ask for his removal." After much persuasion, the Haitian Government has agreed to pay some of the transport costs for Church World Services but, according to the American, this amounts to a token payment of $1,000 a month.

In short, for all practical purposes, this Food for Peace Program is a self-contained project of the Church World Services, a situation that contradicts most theories about foreign aid. The consensus seems to be that foreign aid shows meager results unless the country receiving it contributes a good deal itself. Otherwise, foreign aid becomes a form of charity, not development.

The elaborate plans for road improvement show the same kind of lack. In a well-ordered road-building program, a foreign agency like AID or the World Bank usually lends money if the country shows that it can and will maintain the roads. Haiti's record of road maintenance during the Duvalier dynasty was woeful. All roads have deteriorated. The government did have a road maintenance department but, according to an American official, “they left people on the payroll but no money to do anything. It was awfully close to no road maintenance.”

The foreign aid agencies are trying to surmount this sort of problem now by doing everything for Haiti. The Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank are not loaning money for roads on the assumption that Haiti will maintain them; they are doing it on the assumption that the U.S. Agency for International Development will maintain them. Haiti’s contribution on road maintenance is a pledge to spend $750,000 from its budget to augment the AID project. Presumably, if Haiti reneged on its pledge, the aid agencies could then halt their disbursement of funds for the roads. That is one of the safeguards, but it would be a very difficult and delicate decision to make.

An outsider might have more faith in the ability of American officials to make hard choices if he did not see Habitation Le Clerc, Haiti’s newest hotel, which was built by Americans with help of a loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a U.S. Government agency. It is one of the world’s most opulent hotels. Its owners, who describe their hotel as elegant, exotic, erotic, lascivious and decadent, charge $150 a day, almost four times what a Haitian peasant earns in a year. [See “‘Underwriting the Multinationals: Socialism for the Rich” by Rep. Les Aspin, The Nation, September 14.]

The loan was not part of the AID program. OPIC, authorized by Congress in 1969, is an independent agency within the executive branch. It is run by an eleven-man board of directors, six from private business, five from the federal government. One of its major goals is to encourage American private investments that make “substantial, long-term contributions to developing nations” - like Haiti. It insures investors against the risks of expropriation and revolutionary war damage. It also can make loans to private businessmen planning to invest in these poor countries. All this is financed by Congressional appropriations.

In the case of Habitation Le Clerc, the board of directors approved the loan of $415,000 at 12 per cent interest on April 24, 1972. This represented 24 per cent of the project’s total investment of $1.7 million. Once the hotel opened, the publicity about its opulence in the midst of some of the world’s worst poverty troubled many people interested in Haiti. At the request of Rep. Les Aspin (D., Wis.), the office of Elmer B. Staats, Comptroller General of the United States, investigated the loan.

Staats concluded that “OPIC properly approved the project under its rules, did not violate its authority, and did not misuse appropriated funds.” But Staats, the accounting overseer for Congress, is more concerned with ledger books than with policy. An important U.S. Embassy official in Port-au-Prince shook his head over the loan and told me recently, “To emphasize luxurious decadence in this country is bad taste.” He said that if the loan had been his responsibility, it would not have been made. Many U.S. officials in Haiti make it clear to a visitor that the loan came from OPIC, not from the Agency for International Development.

But the State Department cannot escape blame so easily. Although an independent agency, OPIC is supposed to operate under the policy guidance of the department. Staats, in his report to Representative Aspin, said that “the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince approved the project as being consistent with local economic and social development priorities.” Officials at the Embassy now are vague about this, but admit that OPIC probably did consult with them. It is likely that Embassy officials, euphoric because American aid and investment were returning to Haiti, did not examine the hotel project very carefully.

That, of course, is the point. It seems clear that the United States is resuming a large foreign aid program to Haiti with little evidence that either the Haitian Government is ready to help itself or that U.S. officials are ready to make the kind of close analysis and hard decisions that are necessary for a rational foreign aid program in that sadly deprived land.

Stanley Meisler, a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, is now stationed in Mexico.