Hotel Oloffson is ruined – and so is Haiti

Spectator

5 days ago

Earlier this month, in Haiti's tatterdemalion capital of Port-au-Prince, armed gangs burned down the Hotel Oloffson. As news of the attack spread, both Haitians and foreigners mourned the loss of one of the most beautiful gingerbread mansions in the Caribbean. Thinly disguised as the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians, the Oloffson had served as a meeting place for writers, journalists, actors and artists of every stripe and nationality. Past guests include Nöel Coward, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger (who wrote 'Emotional Rescue' there). Laughably, a room had been named after me as the author of a book on Haiti.
The manager, Richard Auguste Morse, had been overseeing the hotel remotely from the United States since 2022 until it closed to guests two years later because of escalating gang violence. Rumours had long circulated that it was under threat of arson but news in Haiti is always haphazard: often there is only the teledyòl, Creole for 'grapevine'. So Richard didn't know what to believe when he heard the hotel had burned to the ground. 'I did what I usually do, which is call someone who has drones and have them go take a look,' he said. 'This time, when they called back, they said, 'Take a seat.' I knew then that this wasn't like the other times.' Two policemen were killed in crossfire while the fire raged.
The hotel's destruction is emblematic of the destruction of Haiti's history and culture. Over the past two decades, the country has degenerated into a gangland tyranny where cocaine smuggled from Latin America has made the shanty-town drug kingpins ever more violent, unpredictable and powerful.
The Oloffson was built in the late 1880s as a private residence for the Sam family who would supply two Haitian presidents over the next 30 years. It was a fairytale folly of spires and conical towers, with lacy white grille work on the eaves and balconies, and pomegranate and breadfruit motifs painted on the clapboard ceilings.
The murder of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by an enraged mob in July 1915 provided the US government with an excuse to invade Haiti. Throughout the 19-year occupation that followed, the Sam mansion was a military hospital. After the Americans left, a Swedish sea captain called WernerGustav Oloffson converted it into a hotel. Hidden beneath a rug in the bridal suite was once a drain for sluicing the tiles; the suite had been an operating theatre. A succession of eccentric hoteliers followed, among them the American stockbroker Maurice De Young, who raised a species of cayman in the swimming pool and drank endless rum cocktails with Malcolm Lowry, the dipsomaniac author of Under the Volcano who was seen to walk fully clothed into the pool still holding his glass.
Richard, a Princeton anthropology graduate, ran the Oloffson for almost 40 years. His mother was the glamorous Haitian danseuse and folklorist Emérante de Pradines. With his Haitian wife Lunise, he performed in a world-class Vodou rock band named RAM, after his initials. Tall and lanky, he seemed to regard the business of managing a hotel in beautiful, bedevilled Haiti as something of an amusement.
Most nights he could be found reading a book by the light of a storm lantern in his cubbyhole of an office. 'There's another power cut as you've probably noticed,' he would say, 'and the telephone lines are down. It's the same old, same old.' Papa Dog, the hotel's resident mongrel, liked to flea his rump in the driveway while emaciated goats strayed in for morsels of food. Beyond the Oloffson the roads were clogged with buses known as tap-taps from the noise of their vintage engines.
One day in the hotel I met the Haitian journalist Aubelin Jolicoeur, a cane-twirling Firbankian gadfly who appears as the gossip columnist Petit Pierre in The Comedians. Jolicoeur delighted in his fictional counterpart; on the author's death in 1991 wrote: 'I was grateful to [Graham] Greene to have enhanced my legend to such an extent that some fans kneel at my feet.' The hotel staff nicknamed Jolicoeur 'Jolifleur' – pretty flower (his full name actually translated as Littledawn Prettyheart). Dapper in a white linen suit and paisley ascot, Jolicoeur was inseparable from the hotel's history.
In 1990 I proposed marriage in the Oloffson, going down on two knees to Laura after a burst of gunfire outside startled me. Thirty–five years on, we're still married. The Oloffson had survived military coups, dictatorships and earthquakes. Now it has gone, and Haiti is plainly ungovernable.