In the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, life is a constant struggle. Roads and buildings throughout Haiti are crumbling, and most city dwellings are built of cinder-block walls and corrugated tin roofs.
Hardly any private indoor plumbing exists, and only a tiny percentage of homes have electricity -- not that it matters come nightfall, when power is cut off nationwide in an effort to reduce government energy costs.
This country of 6 million people boasts just 55,000 telephone lines. As the saying goes, many of those lines are out of service in years when it rains. The fact that a 28.8 modem is too slow to download a pirated copy of Duke Nukem off the Internet is rarely a significant concern.
All of which makes the success of the Cyber Café, located in Petionville, a tony suburb of Port-au-Prince, all the more puzzling. In a city where it can be an all-day challenge to simply connect a call across town, the Cyber Café offers customers a chance to surf the Web with surprisingly steady success.
Haiti hosts two ISPs. One of them, ACN, continues to accept new applicants, despite its limited number of phone lines. This means horrific waits for members, if they can log on at all. The other, CompaData, which now contracts service through MCI, refuses to overbook itself. Thus, until a customer drops service -- few do -- no new accounts can be opened. So many of Haiti's super-elite, rich even by American standards and with iMacs at the ready, are unable to log onto the Net.
That is, until Cyber Café hit town a little over a year ago.
Computer World, a small hardware and software reseller that imports most of its stock from Miami discount chains, struck a deal with ACN to use a direct microwave satellite connection to ACN's servers. Aside from not being stable enough to transfer data reliably, the ground lines tend to crash and burn about as frequently as Haitian presidents.
By skirting the spotty Haitian ground lines, the store's Cyber Café can offer fast and reliable Net connections.
"Email changes international communication drastically in Haiti," says Conor Bohan, a Massachusetts native who spent three years in in the country. "The phone system is abominable and expensive. Phones can be out for months at a time, and the mail is equally inefficient and incredibly slow. With the email at the Cyber Café, I was able to communicate daily with my family, make arrangements for vacations, and keep in touch with friends much more easily than I had done in the past."
The Cyber Café is really not a café at all, although cocktails and coffee are complimentary for customers. Its six computer terminals occupy an upstairs office at Computer World. The store's Internet offshoot is quickly taking over the building, however, with 10 more terminals set up in a back room formerly used to display merchandise.
The café has between 70 and 80 members who pay H$150 per-month -- or roughly one-third of the country's average annual salary -- pocket change to many of its wealthier customers. This includes 20 free hours online, plus an email account. The constant air conditioning -- a rarity in Haiti -- is a bonus. Classes are offered for Web novices, of which there are many. Up to 20 people per day utilize the service, at an average of an hour per person. Non-members can surf the Web for H$15 an hour.
A generator and a battery-powered inverter help to avoid electrical outages. "The inverter can last nearly two days, but sometimes the power's out even longer than that, you just never know," said assistant manager Ursilina Grammont. "You can't get stressed out over it, though. If you did, it happens so often that you'd just die.
"We never expected so many people to be interested in this place," she continued. "I can't say it's not nice to see, though."
