REMUSOV - Vaudreuil
Vaudreuil is located on the northern edge of the municipality of Cite Soleil, in the Ouest department in Haiti. Cite Soleil is infamous for its urban center, which has long been affected by political and gang-related violence. But few people know that the northern half of the municipality of Cite Soleil is in fact a quiet rural area, filled mostly with farmland and soccer (football) fields.
Vaudreuil is bordered on its northern side by the Grey River, which is what makes its position so ideal for agricultural production. It also puts Vaudreuil at risk for floods, and the community has been damaged in the wake of several hurricanes and tropical storms over the past decade.
Vaudreuil was founded on what once was a vast sugarcane plantation, run by the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO). Many migrated from the countryside to cut the sugarcane for HASCO to earn a small bit of money. Starting in the year 1990, HASCO began to diminish its operations due to political instability in the country, and by 1994 had completely fled Haiti. The peasants who were working the land now had no one to pay them for working, and so they decided in 1997 to reclaim the plantation land to plant food crops. They had no support from the outside, only a passive approval by the Haitian government that they could indeed plant. The town of Vaudreuil was reclaimed and reestablished as a pleasant farming village of around 260 families
This is an old HASCO sugar mill located in southern Cite Soleil; this is where sugarcane from what is now Vaudreuil was taken to be processed before it was shipped overseas. Photo from Haitianphotos.com