Haiti, DR presidents meet for talks
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from December 1996.
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President Leonel Fernandez, inaugurated in August as the president of the Dominican Republic, spoke with Haitian President Rene Preval, who was inaugurated in February, for about 40 minutes at Fernandez's Miami hotel suite.
"In the first place, I want to say that we had a productive meeting," Fernandez told reporters. He called the meeting "a vote of confidence" in Dominican and Haitian officials who have been working to improve ties between the two nations, which share the Caribbean island Hispaniola but have a long history of chilly relations.
A meeting between Preval and Fernandez's predecessor, Joaquin Balaguer, last March was the first formal contact between the two governments in more than 60 years.
Long-standing racial and economic differences, immigration issues and abuse and deportation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic—including a massacre six decades ago—have created a distant relationship between the two countries.
The presidents said the issues they discussed included protection of their borders, immigration and commerce. Fernandez said he agreed to visit Port-au-Prince in March or April to sign a bilateral agreement encompassing such issues.
Preval also spoke warmly of the meeting, including in his remarks to journalists a holiday greeting, in Spanish, to his Dominican counterpart. "Feliz Navidad y Prospero Ano Nuevo," he said, wishing a Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year.
The two men were in Miami to attend The Miami Conference on the Caribbean and Latin America, on the region's trade. Later on Tuesday, Preval addressed an audience of business people attending the conference and reiterated his pledge to improve Haiti's ravaged economy and infrastructure, including pursuing privatisation of state-owned industries, building up light assembly business and boosting tourism in his country, the hemisphere's poorest.
