Haiti, Snubbed

Mea culpa. I have just done it myself. I snubbed Haiti. I left it out of the list of countries at the end of my April 2009 blog about my TransAtlantic Cruise.

I feel quite ashamed about that because during the cruise I had made a mental note to protest how Haiti had been treated in the information by the cruise line about our port there and worse, by a certain shipboard incident.

The first port of call on the itinerary was scheduled to be Labadee. The literature gave the impression that it was some sort of autonomous privately owned territory, an island(?) owned by the cruise line. That Labadee is geographically and politically a part of Haiti was downplayed.

But much worse was an announcement aboard the ship that although there is a time difference of one hour between Labadee and Miami, the port from which we had sailed two nights and one day earlier, our ship would not bother with that technicality, would ignore Haitian time, and that the times of our arrival and departure there would be based on Miami time.

There was some specious excuse that it was because we wouldn’t be there long. Well, our stop there would be just as long, or short, as any of the other stops along the way, but local time was always observed at the other ports and if necessary, a time change made during the night before arrival. This has been done for every port on every cruise I have taken and I believe it’s the normal practice.

Not only that: Maritime navigation has always been known to rigorously observe Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or local time, even in the once odd case of Singapore that until fairly recently used a time that was only 30 minutes, not the usual one hour, different from adjacent time zones. Our ship meticulously adjusted its clocks as we passed through several time zones out in the Atlantic even when it wouldn’t have been noticed or mattered for the daily schedule of meals and activities and no ports would be involved.

Haiti may be an abysmally poor, undevelopped country, but surely that condition does not warrant such a cavalier slight of its sovereignty or suspension of long-standing universal protocols.

Was it some kind of retribution that all shore activities, including the highlight, a barbeque, with food, drinks, equipment and entertainment to be brought to the beach from the ship, were rained out?


P.S.
I wrote the item above back in April 2009 but didn’t publish it and overlooked it until now, almost a year later. Perhaps reflecting on the recent catastrophic earthquake in Haiti jolted my memory and prompted me to retrieve it from my files.