On 7 July 2025, an aerial photo of a burned-out building began to circulate online. Fire had blown off the roof, leaving a patchwork of ashy white rectangles. The most storied hotel in Port-au-Prince lay skeleton-bare, a carcass picked dry. Without its gables and turrets, finials and fretwork, the Oloffson was almost unrecognisable. High, elegantly arched frames gaped where doors once hung; the swimming pool was murky, perhaps with soot. Apart from a few singed palm trees by the entrance, the grounds looked eerily lush and green.

Since the assassination of the US-backed president Jovenel Moise in 2021, armed groups have gotten a stranglehold over much of Haiti, filling the vacuum where a state was meant to be. A coalition of these militias now controls 90% of the capital; for months after its demise, the only pictures of the Oloffson were taken by drones. The gangs have ransacked the national library, set radio stations ablaze, and pillaged universities and lycées. Massacres have become a recognisable tactic for gaining or keeping territory. On Christmas Eve 2024, a gang shot up a reopening ceremony for the city’s largest public hospital – which had been closed, thanks to the gangs, for almost a year – killing two journalists. In August, gang members killed 47 in Kenscoff, a village outside the capital, including 22 people sheltering in a church. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced across Haiti; more than half the population faces acute food insecurity.

Even amid this vast conflagration, the burning of the Oloffson was a searing loss. Constructed in the late 1880s, the building had withstood coups, US occupation, Duvalierist terror, murderous paramilitaries and natural disasters. It was a paragon of gingerbread architecture, beloved by jetsetters like Jackie Onassis and three generations of writers trailing in the footsteps of Graham Greene, whose 1966 novel The Comedians is set in a fictionalised version of the establishment. In the 1990s, the cultural events hosted by its proprietors, Richard and Lunise Morse, (including frequent performances by RAM, their hugely popular ‘house band’), made the Oloffson a redoubt for artists, intellectuals and militants. After the catastrophic 2010 earthquake demolished some of the capital’s most iconic buildings, including the National Palace and the National Cathedral, it took on extra patrimonial weight, as a rare piece of Haitian heritage that remained open to the public. Preservationists studied it; journalists favoured it. Almost to its end, the Oloffson remained a place of encounter unlike any other in Haiti.

It is not hyperbole to say that a thousand and one romances began at the Oloffson – and that at least as many betrayals took place on its dancefloor. Over the years it spun a net of affection across the globe; wherever its clientele travelled after they left, or were forced to leave, they took memories of the Oloffson, and its destruction prompted an outpouring of shock and grief. Photos and tributes clogged social media. Chat groups of Haitiphiles roused themselves to commiserate. Western publications heralded the loss, in their fashion: “Landmark Hotel in Haiti Falls Victim to Violence” (New York Times), “Haiti Hotel That Hosted Jagger, Brando, Burns Down Amid Gang War” (Bloomberg), “Hotel Oloffson is Ruined – and So Is Haiti” (The Spectator).

Condolences from prominent Haitians were compiled in Le Nouvelliste, the country’s oldest daily newspaper, which had lost its offices downtown to gangs who pillaged even the printing presses. (The paper is now a website.) “Today my eyes are like two faucets,” wrote poet James Noël. The photographer Daniel Morel described the Oloffson to me as a “sacred place”; the dancer Steeven Labady compared it to a muse.

For their part, the Oloffson’s proprietors took pains to put their tragedy in perspective. Richard Morse, the Haitian-American musician who had run and lived in the hotel since the late 1980s, told Magik Radio 9 that he hoped talking about the arson would raise awareness of the perilous conditions under which ordinary Haitians lived. Then he seemed to break down in tears. “I’m not the only person who has lost,” said his life and creative partner, Lunise, on Radio Tele Haiti Inter. So many others had “lost their houses, lost their families, lost all that they worked to make.”

The chorus of lament was interrupted by the eminent writer Lyonel Trouillot, whose brusque dissent lobbed a Molotov cocktail onto the fire’s last embers. “Westerners loved it. Or perhaps they loved the memory it held of their presence,” he began, dryly, in a column for the news site Ayibopost. At its best, he argued, the Oloffson purveyed a fake bohemian culture to privileged fake bohemians – and even that version of the hotel was a relic: incurious civil servants and functionless functionaries on hazard pay had long since usurped the artists and ethnologists. Well before the fire the Oloffson had become “a dead place, a symbol of a dead time”.

Trouillot’s polemic sparked debates among Haiti’s chattering classes, now largely based in the diaspora. Some agreed, and inveighed against the “selective outrage” of mourning a building amid a grave humanitarian crisis. It was especially bourgeois to care about an international hotel that, by definition, catered to rich outsiders. Many residents of the surrounding neighborhoods couldn’t have afforded a coffee on the terrace, let alone cover for a RAM concert.

Others defended the Oloffson. In an otherwise exclusionary city, it was an open space for political dissidents, nonbinary people and Vodou adherents. Haitians cherished it as much or more than expats, they argued. One widely circulated riposte, by the commentator Yves Lafortune, went ad hominem, portraying Trouillot as an embittered nihilist too hardened to express the grief he surely must have felt.

Arguments about authenticity can be as bourgeois as any building, especially when they’re conducted online and in French. Yet to its partisans, the Oloffson was far more than a building. It was a hallowed place. It had survived – nay, grooved through – decades of tumult. It had invited visitors, both local and foreign, to both enjoy and create Haitian culture. And as the fog of crisis settled on the capital, the Oloffson sometimes seemed like a beacon, pointing towards the future, its very existence promising to make good on the popular post-quake motto Ayiti pap peri, “Haiti will not perish”.

There was an irony in Trouillot’s comments. To debate the hotel’s significance and legacy – if only to dismiss it as a rotting corpse – was to assert that Oloffson remained a going concern. I suppose that’s why some in the diaspora, scattered to the globe’s four corners, found the ensuing discussion so precious. “If we can have arguments like this,” said a friend who fled in 2024, “it means we’re still alive.”

To a certain kind of foreigner in Haiti – blan, we’re called – the Oloffson felt like home. The whitewashed fantasia sat in centre-ville, downtown Port-au-Prince, less than a mile from the Champs de Mars and government ministries, and close to the sea and the bidonvilles that hugged its coast. Downtown was often deemed off-limits to blan who worked at large NGOs, which gave it an aura of rebellious, even dangerous glamour. The area was still rich in architecture, but the actual rich had long ago fled to suburbs like Pétionville, up in the hills, to sip Champagne in peace.

Yet the hotel was also an oasis from the city. Set back from the workaday hubbub of Avenue Christophe, with its sherbet-coloured houses, uniformed schoolkids and lottery kiosks, the Oloffson perched at the end of a long drive that wound through thick tropical gardens. Its façade was obscured by foliage – shaggy palms, high-gloss Ficus, explosions of hibiscus and birds-of-paradise flower – as if lying in wait. Looking up from its veranda, the building resembled a giant’s wedding cake: layers upon layers of lacy fretwork, balconies, gables and turrets. A ridiculous pile, a Gothic folly.

I was drawn to the Oloffson during my first trip to Haiti, in January 2005. That afternoon of my visit there were no other customers. The hotel had an air of fragility and decline that lent poignancy to its beauty, made it possible for me to register its beauty at all. I ate a cheese sandwich on the veranda, eyeing the pool.

When I moved to Haiti in 2007, I beelined over. The gate was usually open. Dining was on the veranda; a high awning kept off sun and rain but the air was fresh and, at cocktail hour, the birds chattered over everyone else. The lobby, such as it was, was various; I remember a portion with a sofa and armchairs arranged around a coffee table. The bar was a long slab of polished mahogany that faced a mirror whose silvering had worn out in vitiligo patterns. It was flanked by twin papier mâché busts of the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines, each in a bicorne hat. A bewilderment of Haitian art covered the walls: subversively naïve works by painters like Gerald Fortuné; the bold, trippy shapes of the San Soleil school; ironwork tableaux and sequined Vodou flags. A five-foot-tall statue of the Vodou spirit Bawon Samdi guarded the entrance, jaunty in his top hat, already laughing at you.

The Oloffson was also a scene, I soon realised – the crossroads of several intersecting scenes. Depending on the season, you might find politicos machinating, missionary groups debriefing, henchmen intimidating, Peace Corps volunteers nursing hangovers, Vodou priests pontificating, local historians schooling expat acolytes, musicians wooing, groupies fawning, dancers vamping, blan reporters learning to distinguish the sound of gunfire from a backfiring car.

Thursday nights were for RAM, the hugely popular house band Richard created with his divinely voiced wife, Lunise Exume Morse, whose songs featured heavily on the soundtrack of Haiti’s torturous and unfinished transition toward democracy. Its weekly show ran more-or-less continuously from 1992 until the onset of the Covid pandemic, recessing only for political upheaval, major catastrophes and foreign tours. Though it became something of an international sensation, RAM never strayed far, or for long, from the stage deep inside the Oloffson’s lobby. Its “Vodou rock” became a pillar of a larger movement of mizik rasin, roots music, which incorporated elements of ritual and religion long suppressed in Haiti. Its songs were political, if oblique; at times they were censored.

For several years after the earthquake, which brought thousands of aid workers to Haiti, the Oloffson basked in the West’s newfound fascination with the country’s prospects – not least because it was still standing. Hollywood people, hipsters and looky-loos crowded the veranda, and its 21 rooms were often booked. Yet the foundations of Haiti’s recovery soon proved slapdash. President Jovenel Moise was foisted into office with tacit support from the US after elections where turnout barely managed to hit 20%. He was hardly the only politician to use armed groups to secure power, but it was on his watch that the balance tipped in the gangs’ favour. Tourism peaked in 2018 – in retrospect an inflection point, after which the state steadily ceded more power and territory in the capital.

The fall came swiftly, and the Oloffson was at the vanguard. Gangs based in nearby Martissant and Village de Dieu choked off access to downtown – there were shakedowns at roadblocks, kidnappings for ransom, and random violence. By January 2020, the hotel had shed so many staff that Richard himself was serving the coffee on the near-empty veranda. After Moise was assassinated in July 2021, amid the pandemic, the Oloffson’s neighborhood became a ghost town. The Morses and the musicians of RAM decamped to New Orleans in the autumn of 2022, intending to return when the violence subsided – which it never did. 

Last July, when the Oloffson burned, I messaged condolences to Richard; it had been a decade since our last real conversation. For generations of parachuting journalists, he had served as a ‘bridge character’, sitting for profiles so often that I imagine it became difficult to separate memory from the memory of the telling. A tall, light-skinned man who wore his graying hair in a snaky braid, he had the easy mien of the aging hipster, and though he looked laconically cool, he was quick to laugh. Like countless blan, I became friendly with him. He put up with my clueless questions and I put up with his enigmatic answers. “Then again, I’m just an innkeeper,” he’d say, after hinting at some intrigue. “What do I know?”

Now I learned that he was mourning more than the hotel: the previous year, he and Lunise had separated, both matrimonially and musically. They are performing in different bands; there is a dispute over rights to RAM’s name.

Marriages end; musicians disband. But news of the Morses’ breakup, which preceded the arson, shook me more than the arson itself. It was a stark reminder that when your country falls apart, there’s no escaping the fallout, no matter who you are or what bit of safety you may have found elsewhere. Much that Haitians have lost these past eight years will never be recovered – loved ones, relationships, health, homes, time. The 330,000 Haitians stripped by the Trump administration of Temporary Protected Status, which allowed them to live and work in the United States, have lost even a place from which to rebuild.

What can be recovered or renewed, I hope, is the sense of possibility that the Oloffson represented. Over the past three decades, as the country jounced along a transition that never went the direction it was supposed to, the hotel had played host to visions of alternate Haitian futures. On its premises, people of different stations and allegiances were jammed up against one another and forced to mix, something impossible to imagine in the elite- and expat-dominated clubs of Pétionville. Strangers bought one another drinks, danced together, belted out the lyrics to the same songs; they argued grandly over the efficacy of foreign aid and squabbled picayunely over who’d pick up the check. On a good night, with the drums reverberating in my chest, Lunise’s voice beckoning up to heaven, Richard leading a single-line parade through the veranda, and the right amount of rum in my system, I could believe that Haïti Chérie would turn out all right.

Like Haiti itself, the building that became the Oloffson emerged into a hostile world order. It was commissioned as a private family villa by a son of President Tiresias Simon Sam, at the turn of the twentieth century – a time of American conquest in the Caribbean. In 1904, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine asserted US authority to intervene in countries whose instability made them vulnerable to foreign occupation – conditions that had long obtained in Haiti. In 1825, its president had agreed to compensate French planters who had lost “property” – that is, the people they had enslaved – in the revolution. To pay the indemnity, Haiti borrowed money from France, and then the United States, at usurious rates. In 1909, two American banks bought out the Banque National d’Haiti from the French and commenced turning the screws.

By the time Vilbrun, another of Tiresias’s sons, became president in 1915, Haiti was bankrupt. Vilbrun felt forced to make a deal with the Americans, something his political rivals vehemently opposed. Panicking in the face of growing rebellion, his government executed 167 political prisoners. Shortly afterward, President Sam was hauled out of hiding from the French legation, dragged into the street, and torn limb from limb. The USS Washington sailed into harbor that same day.

During the 19-year US occupation, Marines requisitioned the Sam family villa for use as a military hospital. They added an annex where the wives of its personnel gave birth. Right up to the end, Rooms one through 10 of the hotel were referred to as the “maternity ward.”

After regaining ownership, the Sams leased the property to a German-Haitian family, the Oloffsons, who turned it into a hotel, before transferring the lease at the end of World War II. The next 40 years saw three leaseholders, all Americans. The first was a New York stockbroker who raised caimans in the swimming pool and was said on at least one occasion to serve them at dinner. The second, from 1954, was Roger and Laura Coster: he a French-Russian émigré who photographed covers for Life magazine, she an American-educated Haitian who had been Thurgood Marshall’s secretary. They were a glamorous pair with a genius for marketing. Roger proclaimed the Oloffson “the Greenwich Village of the Tropics” and had the connections to make it so. Visitors included John Gielgud; Richard Avedon; Charles Addams, who created The Addams Family in his New Yorker cartoons; and the communist Lillian Hellman, who was reportedly so enraptured that she forgot her jewels in the hotel safe.

Coster was a Jewish refugee who had barely escaped a concentration camp; his parents and sisters did not. I imagine he had a keen sense of authoritarian danger. In 1960, three years into Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s presidency, the Costers transferred the lease to Al and Suzanne Seitz – in the taxi on the way to the airport, goes one story.

Graham Greene stayed at the Oloffson when the Costers were in charge, but he wrote and published The Comedians during the Seitzes’ tenure, when the brutality of the Duvalier regime was at its most public and grotesque. The book is set at a barely glossed version of the Oloffson called the Hotel Trianon.

With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the New Yorkers. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.

The Comedians is relentlessly moribund. Its protagonist, Mr. Brown, is a middle-aged European as drab as his name, whose arc begins with defeat: he’s on a steamship to Haiti from New York, having failed to offload the now unprofitable hotel – Duvalier’s terror has repulsed the foreign hedonists. When Brown arrives, there’s a corpse in the swimming pool to greet him – that of a government official who has committed suicide to avoid capture by the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier’s henchmen. The novel tells two overlapping stories: of a coup attempt that is bound to fail and the disintegration of a romance that was joyless from the start. Not to put too fine a point it, Brown ends life as a mortician.

Duvalier made the novel more famous by banning it and its author from Haiti. He couldn’t, however, prohibit Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton from starring in a movie adaptation (filmed, for obvious reasons, not in Haiti but in West Africa). When Duvalier died a few years later, the Oloffson saw an influx of Western tourists eager to see the haunted mansion, the lurid brothels, maybe even a sun-glassed Tonton Macoute. Celebrities like Onassis and Brando paid visits; lore has it that Mick Jagger wrote “Emotional Rescue” in one of the rooms.

Papa Doc’s successor, his callow 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, toned down the garishness of his regime’s abuses, opened the economy for plunder (many foreign sweatshops were established), and squirreled away millions in Swiss bank accounts. Washington was pretty happy with him. The Seitzs’ Oloffson did all right until the early 1980s, when official falsehoods linking HIV and Haiti gutted tourism, until then a major sector of the economy. The US withdrew its support from Baby Doc in February 1986 and escorted the dictator, his family, and their Louis Vuitton luggage out in an Air Force jet.

“Moun fèt pou mouri,” as the Haitian saying goes, People are born to die. But for generation upon generation the Oloffson died to be reborn. Its most successful incarnation appeared not long after Baby Doc’s ouster, when Morse finagled the lease. He was 29 years old – which, incidentally, was almost how long the dictatorship had lasted; and just as Haiti was remaking itself, so was he.

Richard’s middle name, Auguste, honored his maternal grandfather, Auguste de Pradines, aka Kandjo, the most celebrated composer and singer of the occupation era – the man who, the musicologist Gage Averill has argued, “largely created the archetype of the Haitian troubadour”. Kandjo’s signature was the resistance merengue, a danceable tune with a disguised pwen, or political point. The lyrics of his “Angelique O,” from the late 1920s, described a love affair turned sour, which did not have to mention the US by name:

Go home to your mama’s house
Go home to mama’s house, dear
Don’t come here to bother me
The girl doesn’t know to wash or iron

Kandjo’s daughter kept up the family line of work. In the early 1950s, Emerante de Pradines Morse became the first Haitian singer to sign an international record deal; in the US, she gave concerts and taught folkloric dance. She had met Richard’s father in New York City, where she was studying with Martha Graham; he was a graduate student at Columbia. They married in 1954, when at least 27 states prohibited interracial marriages; the bridegroom’s family briefly disinherited him.

Richard, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1957, grew up surrounded by Haitian musicians, but learned nothing about Haiti or musicians. His mother “was always singing,” he recalled, “but I didn’t know what she was singing and I didn’t know what she was saying.” His older half-brother, Jean-Max Sam, was a professional folklore drummer. If Richard knew that Jean-Max was a scion of the Sam dynasty he did not register the significance of these facts for another 20 years.

Like many immigrant parents, Richard’s had “made a decision to bring me up, me and my sister, as Americans.” He could also pass as a white, which made him privy to the nasty things white Americans sometimes said about people who looked like his mother, sister and half-brother. He attended an elite boarding school and studied anthropology at Princeton. What he loved, he realised in his early twenties, was music: writing lyrics, playing the bass and, though it was not his strong suit, singing. He started a New Wave band with his college buddies in New Jersey called Groceries – “not ‘The Groceries,’ and not ‘Grocery’” – which achieved modest success. They played a regular gig at King Tut’s Garden City, in Trenton, and sometimes headed out to CBGBs or Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan. They may have been on the cusp of their big break when, Richard said, his bandmates unceremoniously kicked him out – largely, it seems, because he insisted on being the lead singer. (He wrote most of the songs.) There followed joblessness and despondency, and a period of intense songwriting: “How much time is it going to take / How long will I have to wait?” 

Around this time, ‘world music’ was gaining purchase as a genre; musicians Richard admired, like David Byrne and Peter Gabriel, were exploring its territory. One producer urged Richard to visit his mother’s homeland and absorb its sound. One afternoon in 1984, he headed uptown to Lincoln Center. In the library, he found two of his mother’s records – which he had never heard. Her voice tumbled into his ears, an operatic, refined soprano singing Kreyòl words he couldn’t understand. Soon, Richard was crying.

When Richard washed up in Haiti in 1985, speaking barely any Kreyòl, opposition to the Duvalier dictatorship was simmering. But laid low first by dengue and then by what sounds like a standard-issue blan existential crisis, he largely ignored the political drama. All he wanted was to gather “Vodou rhythms” and bring them back to the new wave/post-punk scene. Like many plans hatched in the north, his mission probably sounded better in New York. “See, I went there to find Vodou rhythms,” he told me, “and I didn’t know what Vodou rhythms were.”

Richard says he arrived in Haiti oblivious to his powerful family connections. His mother installed him at a charity school she supported in Martissant, where he became reacquainted with his cousin, Michel Martelly, who would go on to become a famous musician and, later, Haiti’s improbable post-quake president. At the ripe young age of 24, Richard says, Martelly was trying to siphon off bags of donated USAID rice from the school and sell them on the market. Richard was disgusted.

As for his half-brother’s father, Richard didn’t give him much thought. Max Sam was born at the family villa in 1912, well before it had a maternity ward. He had been a leftist activist in the 1930s and 40s, was then appointed ambassador to Italy and, by the time Richard got there, was a patrician opponent of the dictatorship living at the Villa Creole, an elegant hotel in Pétionville. When I met him a couple years before the earthquake, he was in his mid-90s, with cloudy irises, unfailing courtesy, and a habit of greeting ladies by kissing the tops of their hands.

Max Sam came into Richard’s focus through a piece of gossip; he heard the Oloffson’s future was in doubt. Suzanne Seitz, by then a widow, was demanding a lifetime lease to the hotel, which was not a far-fetched ambition – she was cozy with the Duvalier regime. But Baby Doc’s ouster shifted the balance of power in Sam’s direction, if not quite decisively. For Max Sam, then, Richard’s appearance may have provided a graceful way of blocking the de-facto expropriation. A convoluted series of events – which Richard remained sheepish about decades later – culminated in a septuagenarian, three-piece-suited former diplomat sprinting towards Richard’s apartment and thrusting a brown paper bag full of keys at him.

The hotel re-opened in November 1987, three weeks before Haiti’s first democratic presidential election was scheduled. He had help from his American girlfriend, Blair Townsend. “We told investors – Blair’s dad – that if the election goes well, we'll have tourists, and if the elections go poorly, we’ll have journalists,” Richard recalled. The business plan didn’t contemplate atrocities that would send even the journalists sprinting for the exits. On voting day, Tontons Macoutes and paramilitaries murdered 34 people, according to the official count; unofficial reports claimed it was closer to 200. The Haitian Armed Forces were implicated in the violence, which included attacks on radio infrastructure so that the news couldn’t get out. Journalists staying at the hotel and around town spent the night in the lobby, their eyes on the back doors, before fleeing the country as soon as they could. Blair left; Richard stayed. In the Oloffson he’d found a raison d’être.

The main political conflict was between a military-led provisional government, backed by local elites and Washington, and a radical democratic movement rooted in liberation theology. As tensions intensified – coups and attempted coups, CIA machinations, postponed and rigged elections – the Oloffson provided Richard not just a listening post, but a soapbox. He developed political attachments, possibly for the first time, which he then married to his musical investigations.

In 1988, Richard’s cousin Michel launched his career in kompa, a smooth style rooted in merengue and close-partner dancing, calling himself “Sweet Micky”. His nightclub in Pétionville would become a hub for the elites and the military. Richard threw in his lot with pèp la, the people, and roots music, a style that grew out of Vodou ceremonies and parades known as rara or bann a pye (marching bands). The Oloffson became an incubator of the emerging roots-music movement, mizik rasin, hosting legendary bands like Boukman Eksperyans and Foulà, along with weekly, tourist-oriented folklore shows.

It was in this context that he met Lunise Exume, a 17-year-old dancer with Shango, a folklore troupe that regularly performed at the hotel. Though born and raised in Haiti, she too had grown up estranged from Haitian culture. At home, anything overtly connected to Vodou was forbidden – the family went to church twice on Sunday – but there was evidence of rituals: hidden cabinets with stones and perfumes, aunts singing mysterious melodies. Eventually Lunise learned folklore dance in secret, concealing her whereabouts when she attended rehearsals and performances.

Many Haitians looked down on Vodou and its associated art forms as artifacts of the primitive countryside. Even the Kreyòl language consigns the countryside to the margins; the literal word for it is andeyo, “outside”, and people who hail from rural areas are moun andeyo, “outsiders”. Some Haitians considered Vodou to be devilry or witchcraft, and believed that listening to mizik rasin would cause possession. “They didn’t want to see people writhing on the ground,” Lunise said.

Richard was mesmerised; it was a coup de foudre. He took the troupe out for post-performance dinners, dropped each member home, and left Lunise for last. One night, when the gate at her house was locked and no one answered, he brought her back to the hotel. Lunise confirmed Richard’s version of the story, after a bit of bashful laughter – she, too, had fallen in rapturous love. The pair were married in January 1989.

The tempo was set. They soon had two children: Isabelle and William. Lunise had taken Richard to Vodou ceremonies, from where they recruited drummers. They planted fruit trees in the garden: mango, lime, soursop, cherry. After rehearsals, Richard would gather a few of the musicians, including the drummers André Thelus and Milo Pierre, for jam sessions, hoping if not expecting to form a band. They played around with mizik rasin, combining ceremonial drumming, metal horns, sacred melodies and chants with electric guitars and synthesizers. They called this “Vodou Rock”.

On New Year’s Eve, 1991, RAM gave its first performance, at the Oloffson. The band was not an overnight success. Lunise recalled that, because of its connection to Vodou, “People were a little ashamed to come at first.” The first wave of RAM fans were expats: the French, the Americans. Only later did locals begin peeking in, charily.

Lunise experimented with costumes. She first dressed like a Vodouisant in a mouchwa, or headscarf, and long, voluminous skirts that billowed when she twirled – a look that discomfited Haitians. She shifted to jeans and a t-shirt, then to a leotard and short skirt, which “they seemed to accept a bit.” Over time, she snuck back in Vodou elements, like the mouchwa and fuller skirts, which eventually became popular, even adored. Later, Richard would perform in the top hat and black garb associated with Bawon Samdi, a leading Gede spirit. He became a Vodou initiate.

RAM’s first hits were released soon after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a military coup in September 1991, less than eight months after taking office. For several days the army and paramilitaries terrorised the capital, killing as many as a thousand people in poor, pro-Aristide neighborhoods. International sanctions and trade bans followed, the brunt of which fell on the lower and middle classes. Somehow, the junta and its backers never wanted for gasoline or whiskey.

“Ambago” captured the on-the-brink, ready-to-explode energy of the time. It’s a snaky, spiraling, high-tempo song, all the more hypnotic for being acoustically recorded – thanks to the titular embargo. As with Kandjo’s resistance merengue, the lyrics were simple enough to have plausible deniability:

Embargo, ay,
Haiti’s taken in an embargo, ay.
Where are the people? I don’t see anyone.

Other mizik rasin bands had fled the country, fearing reprisals from the junta, but it was assumed that Richard’s US citizenship, among other attributes, was a protective shield; besides, he had a hotel.

It was “Fèy”, on which Lunise sang lead vocals for the first time, that thrust RAM into the center of the cultural resistance. Richard told anyone who asked that it was based on the songs his “grandmother’s grandmother” used to sing and that it had no political message, which is hard to believe.

I’m a leaf, see me on my branch
A bad storm passed, knocked me off
The day you see me fall is not the day I die
…
I only have one son
They made him leave the country.

The junta banned “Fèy” from the radio and the Oloffson’s reception rang off the hook with death threats. Cassette recordings circulated in the markets, unlabelled; people were arrested for singing it in public. But RAM continued to play the song at its weekly shows – the main game in a shut-down, terrorised town. Journalists filed in, believing something would befall Richard or the band to trigger an American invasion. They had to settle for regime attachés, who came to harass and bully; one show ended when a henchman lifted all 6’ 4” of Richard off the ground.

RAM had just released its first album when the director Jonathan Demme called to ask if he could put one of its tunes on the soundtrack to Philadelphia, alongside Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Sade. The members of the band were unimpressed, having heard only of Sade, but Richard was exuberant, vindicated. He’d written some of the lyrics of the song during his post-Groceries despond in New York.

How much time is it going to take
How long will I have to wait
Hoping that it’s not too late
Till dreams come true
Ibo Lele my-o, Ibo Lele

In 1994, Aristide was returned by 20,000 US troops to finish out his moth-eaten term. The Oloffson benefitted from something of a tourist boom; it also became popular among Haitians. Haitian food like fritay, aransò (preserved herring) and poule pèyi (roast country chicken) was added to the menu. The fruit trees planted years before had matured, and their harvest was pressed into fresh juice for customers. When RAM announced an annual bash for Fet Gede, the Day of the Dead, some Haitians urged them to market the celebration as Halloween-oriented instead. But the band persisted. By 2018, its Gede celebrations were so popular that the Oloffson was able to host a weeklong international “Gede Fest”.

RAM’s first international album, Puritan Vodou, was released in 1997 on Jimmy Buffett’s label, Margaritaville Records. The band’s politics of resistance, forged in opposition to military rule, did not map neatly onto Haiti’s fledgling democracy. Richard, like many Haitians, was skeptical of elected leaders. When the government of Aristide’s successor, René Préval, asked RAM to play at Kanaval in 1998, Richard felt it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. The evening ended in death and disaster when the driver of RAM’s float plowed into the crowd, killing eight people, including Gerard Laforest, RAM’s security guard. Richard remained suspicious of Préval, though he supported his successful bid for president in 2006.

Through the 2000s, RAM performed almost exclusively in the back half of the Oloffson’s lobby, whose rear wall was bare limestone rock. The acoustics were incredible. While other rasin bands were at the government’s mercy when it came to paying gigs, RAM didn’t need to compromise. The Oloffson provided a venue, while cover charges, hotel guests, the restaurant and the bar provided revenue. “There were times that RAM supported us, there were times when the Oloffson supported us,” Richard said.

The 2010 earthquake was the Oloffson’s last big hurrah. Hordes of foreign reporters and aid workers paid $15 a night for a mattress on the lawn; no one dared sleep inside, lest an aftershock take down the whole pile. RAM’s first gigs after the quake were in tent cities where 1.5 million newly homeless people had pitched up. Richard became a Twitter personality and the Oloffson veranda became once again a place to spot celebrities. Without even trying I saw Sean Penn packing heat, Jimmy Buffett in the parking lot, Arcade Fire playing at sweating distance.

As presidential elections loomed, Richard was looking to be more than an innkeeper, or even the frontman for a resistance band. He was close to two of the frontrunners: Mirlande Manigat, an old family friend, and his cousin Michel Martelly, who had shocked the punditry and fans alike by ditching his ribald Sweet Mickey persona for good suits, spectacles and a business-friendly platform. One afternoon, Richard asked me who I thought should win. It struck me as an odd question – as if my opinion mattered – but in retrospect I guess he was trying to figure out which candidate was more palatable to someone like me.

Richard and his cousin Michel had diverged in almost every respect. One of Sweet Micky’s biggest hits, “I Don’t Care,” was basically a praise song for the junta that RAM had excoriated. (“I don’t give a shit. If you don’t like it, get the fuck out.”) And yet, as Martelly amassed support – importantly, from the US State Department – Richard came to believe joining his team would be his best chance to make material change.

With clumsily overt help from Washington, Martelly won; Richard became his special envoy to DC. He resigned within two years, concluding that his cousin’s corruption was intractable and fully tolerated by Washington. (Martelly was sanctioned by the US for drug-trafficking in 2024.) Pressure from Lunise may have played a role, too. “I told Richard that if he continued down that path, it would become a serious problem between us,” she said. “I was prepared to divorce him over it.”

Richard returned to the Oloffson, which soon faced stiff new competition: Martelly’s “Open for Business” campaign lured two major chains to the capital, including a 12-story Marriott just up the street, which offered reliable air-conditioning and fast internet at comparable prices. Conversely, the Oloffson came to rely on local audiences. Having rented from the Sams for 30 years, the Morses finally purchased the property.

Unbeknownst to them, the bottom had already begun to fall out. In the summer of 2018, the filmmaker Richard Sénecal arrived at the Oloffson to teach a month-long filmmaking workshop. He ended up staying for five years. Sénecal told me the hotel never hosted more than a few guests at a time, and the six-tops on the veranda were often empty. RAM continued its weekly shows; the weapons checks it instituted at the gate turned up larger and more fearsome armaments.

Mornings, Sénecal would jog laps around the courtyard. This ended when he started tripping on spent bullet casings: “At some point, we started to hear guns every day.” Kidnappings rose; RAM concertgoers made perfect targets. When Covid struck, Richard quarantined the hotel. After President Moise’s assassination in July 2021, Richard, Lunise and the band moved to New Orleans. Operations at the Oloffson were scaled back, with only a few caretakers remaining at the property. Sénecal left a year later, at 6 PM on a cool September evening, after a shooting outside the gate. “I packed my stuff. I didn’t know where I was going. Actually, I didn’t have another place to go.”

RAM bided its time in New Orleans, Isabelle told me, foreseeing an eventual return. “I think everyone was just like, ‘Okay, three more months. Okay, maybe, like, just two more months,’” she said. “I don’t think it was a forever thing.” A local college, Xavier University, arranged for the musicians to conduct workshops in drumming and rara. Isabelle began booking shows locally and in places like Miami and Brooklyn. In November 2023, RAM played three Gede shows in Haiti – though not at the Oloffson. The gangs were too near, and the hotel was virtually shut down.

That Thanksgiving, back in the United States, Richard had a seizure. He was taken to hospital and diagnosed with multiple aneurysms. The doctors inserted more than 30 coils into weak blood vessels in his brain to forestall rupture. He lay in limbo, plugged into machines, for six weeks. When he returned to consciousness, he had to learn again how to eat, brush his teeth, walk and talk.

To my surprise, Richard told me he was grateful for the stroke because it had prompted certain revelations. Months of recovery had allowed him to see the truth of his situation: his family no longer wanted him in the band, which they were in fact stealing away from him. Isabelle disputed her father’s account. After Richard’s stroke, the family was inundated with medical bills, as well as expenses for the six band members they “had convinced to leave their home”. There was no choice but to start playing again. (As she spoke, I remembered Richard’s profound hurt after being sidelined from Groceries.) Later that year Richard unilaterally declared on X that RAM no longer existed. He added a bittersweet tribute to his estranged wife: “Thank you to Lunise, the biggest musical talent his country has ever seen.”

The first time I remember registering the statement “Ayiti pap peri,” Haiti will not perish, was in the aftermath of the quake. The graffiti artist Jerry Moise Rosembert, whom I sometimes met at the Oloffson, spray-painted the phrase on walls all over town. He illustrated the words with cheerful images – a map of Haiti that also resembled a heart, for instance. As Haiti’s fortunes have declined, the phrase has become more pervasive. “Ayiti pap peri” is the name of an NGO, the title of a documentary film, at least two kompa songs and a sculpture. It is also a common hashtag for those posting about Haiti on social media. (“Ayiti pap peri” pap peri.) Sometimes I hear the phrase as it is presumably intended, a message of determination and solidarity, a refusal to give up, a fierce insistence on life itself. Of late, though, amid the has destruction and death, the phrase often sounds tragic – it has too much to protest.

Though it never achieved the former’s hashtag status, another iconic phrase circulated prior to the earthquake: “Pa gen Ayiti anko”, There is no more Haiti. It is also the title of a deeply sensitive 2019 ethnography of Port-au-Prince by the anthropologist Greg Beckett. Beckett argues against interpreting the words as fatalistic, not least because in much of Haitian culture “death is a transformation of the self, not the end of the self.”

The Gede spirits and their leader, Bawon Samdi, are commonly associated with death; less well known are the ways they subvert death – through sex, jokes, healing, birth, rebirth. If the repeatedly reborn Oloffson had a patron saint, it was of course Bawon Samdi, whose statue stood in rakish guard over the hotel entrance. The day I began reporting this story, Richard sent me the aerial photo of the Oloffson grounds, captured by a drone in the weeks after the fire. It showed the trickster spirit in perfectly impish form, quite unscathed. “It was just odd to me,” Richard said. “The whole thing had been cleaned out, and Bawon was still there.” 

The doors opened at 8 PM, so my friend and I arrived at 11 PM, around the time we’d have gone to the Oloffson on a RAM night. Since his recovery and the band’s split, Richard had played a handful of shows, all in small clubs in Haitian neighborhoods in the suburbs of New York and Boston. The LK Lounge, in the farther reaches of Flatbush, Brooklyn, was billing the performance as “Roots and Culture” night, tied to the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend.

But our timing was off: the LK Lounge was almost dead. Nothing had begun. The lights were still up and the empty dance floor made the club look bigger. We chose a circular booth in the back. Its upholstery was shiny and slick, heavy-duty vinyl presumably chosen for its resistance to stilettos and stains. A half hour later a manager ordered us out of the booth – reserved for bottle service patrons – and we moved to seats at the edge of the dance floor. No one took our place. My friend and I wondered if people had stayed home because of the cold or because they feared a sudden immigration sweep. Temporary Protected Status was due to expire soon (the termination would be stayed by a district judge a few weeks later), and in Minneapolis, officers were brutalising immigrants and bystanders.

I chatted with a Haitian American nurse who’d come solo. It was her first time seeing RAM. When she was a teenager in Port-au-Prince, her mother had forbidden her from going to the band’s concerts “because she thought it was Satanic”. She didn’t want to miss what might be her last chance. A Haitian DJ spun kompa and the vibe got jollier; some people danced in their seats, legs mostly still, the bopping from the waist up. The DJ played Sweet Micky’s “I Don’t Care”. My friend thought the song inappropriate, but we still danced in our chairs.

RAM took the stage at 2:30 AM. Richard wore sunglasses and a pale blue mochwa for the Vodou spirit he serves, Agwe. He occupied centre stage alone. There were nine other band members, including a trio of female singers and percussionists who doubled as players of the long metal kone horn. Richard’s son William was on electric guitar.

The dance floor filled up though it never got crowded. Some people wore winter coats; others stood still, phones aloft, recording. Richard kept touching his right ear and grimacing; the next morning he told me that none of the vocalists could hear themselves. His voice was not as easy as it sounds in RAM’s earlier recordings. But at 68, he could still play an hour long set in the wee-est hours of a bitingly cold night. He could still make people dance.

At the end of the set, Richard came down from the stage to lead a little rara, or parade. He passed a woman supine on the floor, her black dress riding up as she spasmed in the throes of possession. Richard did a double take, and then kept dancing.