Mr Gerard Latortue may, at long last, be coming to an understanding of the ways of politics and power relations, and the importance to small countries of community.
Or at least he is beginning to take counsel other than his own, or responding to the 'advice' of those with the authority to tell him what to do.

But whatever it is, it is a mark of progress, and hopefully maturity, on the part of Mr Latortue with his recent, at first halting and tentative, attempts to reach out to the Caribbean Community (Caricom).
Not long ago, it was a bombastic, self-assured, to-hell-with-them-they-are-bit-players interim prime minister who was looking down his nose and scoffing at Caricom, declaring it to be an institution of little worth or value to Haiti.

He even insulted the Jamaican prime minister, Mr P J Patterson, by wangling an invitation to come to Kingston to lay out a case for the recognition of his administration, then not turning up. Simultaneously, Mr Latortue announced that he was withdrawing Haiti's ambassador to Jamaica.
Mr Latortue adopted this puerile and diplomatically comical posture to protest, he claimed, Jamaica's decision to host for 10 weeks, ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Caricom's demand for an international investigation into Mr Aristide's claim that he was essentially kidnapped and bundled out of Haiti by the United States. The Americans rejected Mr Aristide's assertion.

Mr Latortue's behaviour was especially curious for the fact that he either missed, or chose to ignore - which, either way, was appalling - the very nuanced development of Jamaica's and Caricom's policy on Haiti after the Western troika of the United States, France and the new Canadians had sidelined the community's initiative that offered a constitutionally cleaner and democratically more palatable solution to the Haitian crisis.

Mr Patterson had not only gone out of his way to welcome Mr Latortue's appointment, but to declare him a respected and capable individual. Further, Jamaica and Caricom had begun to refer to Mr Aristide as former President Aristide, conceding to developments on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

Mr Latortue preferred to trod heavily and talk loudly and to embrace convicted killers and human rights abusers and current coup leaders and to declare them heroes and freedom fighters.
In March, Mr Latortue, perhaps beginning to understand the hash he was making of relations with Haiti's potentially important supporters, sought to wiggle out of the miasma of his own creation. But very inelegantly.

He claimed it was all a misinterpretation on the part of Jamaica and Caricom. He never said all those bad things about the community - even when he said them in English. Bad translators had garbled his statements that were made in French and Creole.
It seems now, that Mr Latortue is ready to come clean. Recently in Washington he spoke of Haiti's need for help from Caricom. Judging from the remarks of the US ambassador in Kingston in an interview published in yesterday's Sunday Observer, Mr Latortue may have had some pertinent advice in the US capital.

Now, we have been told, Mr Latortue has written to Mr Patterson, in terms that the Jamaican prime minister finds acceptable and forward-moving, expressing his regret at the state of relations between the two countries and declaring his wish to have a Haitian ambassador again posted in Kingston.
Having an ambassador here should not be problematic and is quite practical. Jamaica and Haiti will have to have conversations on a range of issues, not least the presence of nearly 600 Haitian refugees in this country.

But it is another matter - the formal recognition of Mr Latortue's administration and allowing it to take Haiti's seat in Caricom - which is the aim of the interim prime minister. Mr Latortue, if he is serious, should not only write, in similar terms as he has to Mr Patterson, to Caricom's chairman, Mr Baldwin Spencer.
He must also repudiate the gunmen he describes as heroes, set out a clear, viable timetable for a return of democracy to Haiti and eschew the actions that sidelined Mr Aristide's party and continue to polarise Haiti.

Executive Class

Gardens with Gravel

Death to the Mullet!