Don't count Haiti out, UCI professor writes in newspaper editorial

Amy Wilentz, English and literary journalism professor, is familiar with Haiti’s politics and culture and the resolve of its people. She lived and traveled in the island nation in the 1980s and wrote “The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier,” a first-person account of the toppling of the country’s dictatorship. In a Los Angeles Times editorial published Friday, Jan. 15, Wilentz urges the world not to count earthquake-devastated Haiti out. “The capacity of this people for survival and, indeed, for greatness in the worst of conditions has been demonstrated for more than two centuries,” she writes. “These are the descendants of people who overthrew an indecent, inhuman, overpowering slave system.”