The Once And Current President

The U.S. and Europe are accusing you of despotism and have frozen half a billion dollars in desperately needed aid for your basket case of a nation. George W. Bush is mailing private letters demanding your "personal commitment" to shape up. The last thing you need is your supporters chasing your opponents into hiding and threatening to "turn their skulls into inkwells."

But that's exactly what Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has on his hands these days. In office for only three months, he insists he is trying to reform the nation; but political violence has left several people shot and a schoolgirl killed in a bomb blast--and new questions about whether Aristide is still the populist hero the U.S. saved seven years ago or a Creole caudillo who may send another tsunami of Haitian boat people onto beaches run by Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush. "Americans," says Aristide, 47, "ought to know that I am the democrat they remember."

Aristide has always been the Third World leader the U.S. thinks it ought to like but can't. He was the priest who helped topple the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986--and then the elected President whom thousands of U.S. G.I.s restored to power after a military coup a decade ago. Yet he is also seen as a mystic demagogue whose Fanmi Lavalas Party allegedly committed electoral fraud in last May's Senate races. Bush, as a result, sent no one to Aristide's inauguration.

What drives Aristide these days, however, is a fierce desire to sell himself abroad as a modernizer. Haiti certainly needs it. The country suffers 80% unemployment, and Colombian drug traffickers have begun using the island as a transit lounge. So, inside Tabarre, his heavily guarded Port-au-Prince residence, he is showing a new persona: nouveau Jean-Bertrand, a genial statesman-cum-Chamber of Commerce President. "Life is a daily dialectical movement for me," says the ex-priest in a rare interview with TIME. "I pay attention to the global economy now, and I have to be realistic. Haiti needs investors."

Asked if he is just another in a long line of tyrants, Aristide almost jumps from his chair. "I love it when they call me a dictator here!" he says. "That they can say it [freely] refutes it. That was not the case under a real dictatorship like the Duvaliers." He has offered to hold the Senate elections again and has brought the opposition into his Cabinet. He pledges to privatize such industries as electricity, plug the poor into capitalism by slicing red tape and breathe 4% growth into the economy.

"He is too ambitious and duplicitous to trust," says ally turned foe Gerard Pierre-Charles of the Democratic Convergence coalition, which has set up a rival government backed by the forces that sponsored the 1991 coup. Aristide aides accuse it of bankrolling street bombings. Convergence president Gerard Gourgue, 75, went underground for several days after Lavalas mobs attacked his offices last month.

Aristide recognizes that that kind of bloody vengeance doesn't look modern at all, and he has called for a fast truce, trying to pull the more extreme members of his party back into line. He's blessed by the fact that the Convergence has scant popular support--and that most Haitians are still betting on "Titid," as they call Aristide. But if he doesn't deliver, Haiti's weary may decide they too cannot love Titid.