Talk is cheap. But in this northern port city, where the black market is the busiest one going, nothing else is. Gasoline is approaching $25 a gallon.

Many of the 250,000 people here historically have eeked out a living selling what they grew or crafted. But high prices for limited goods and low wages have pushed up to 90 percent of them out of jobs and onto the street.

Why, they wonder, is the United States doing this to them? Why would the world's most powerful country stop the rest of the world from sending basic supplies to the Western Hemisphere's poorest country?

So they look for a reason. Perhaps God is evoking his wrath because of their widespread voodoo practices, one church youth director said.

"Every day we eat, it's a miracle," said Harold Jean, 31. "If we say stop the embargo, they won't listen to us. The poor people have no power."

The embargo is to pressure Haiti's military junta to allow the return of the country's freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, overthrown in 1991. The United Nations strengthened the sanctions in May, banning non-commercial flights and trade on all but food, medicine and humanitarian supplies.

Stafford Bourk, a New Zealand doctor, said even those supplies aren't getting through.

He has been waiting weeks for $3,000 worth of medical supplies sitting in a warehouse in South Florida.

"They say we're exempt from medical needs and food," he said. "I'm not getting my medical needs. I just find this very unfortu- nate. I work with the poor people, and it's hurting them."

A tragic turn

Health care, education, road and sewer systems have collapsed. Even if the United States leads a military invasion, as President Clinton is contemplating, international forces would have to remain in Haiti at least five years to get the country of nearly 7 million back on its feet, experts say.

"I think the embargo is a tragic thing," said Ernest Preeg, a former U.S. ambassador to Haiti. "It's destroyed the country's industry and agricultural business. You've thrown the baby with the baby water.

"I doubt the embargo will bring down the military."

There are 7,000 soldiers in Haiti, about 500 in and around Cap Haitien. With semiautomatic weapons, their olive drab or beige presence seeps from the police station, airport and harbor into the town, searching for Aristide supporters to beat or kill.

The military has defied the international embargo. The Clinton administration is planning this month to apply more pressure with a total ban on air traffic, including commercial flights, between Haiti and the United States.

CONTINUING DECLINE

Storm sewers run along the roads, once efficiently channeling the overflow of water. With garbage pickup halted, the pathways are clogged and waste festers in front of one-room, cement- block homes.

Trash is heaped along the coastline, with people and hogs rummaging through the muck. Residents cook alongside.

On the garbage piles, a man builds a boat -- a fishing vessel, he says, that will take a year to complete. Most people acknowledge that hundreds of people will board the craft, desperately seeking a better life by risking their lives to go to the United States or another nearby country.

Coffee, mangoes, bananas and cocoa are northern Haiti's main exports and aren't being shipped.

People sell just about anything they can curbside: charcoal, mangoes, peanuts, plastic jugs of gas. What little money they make is being squeezed, and merchants who thought they wouldn't be affected aren't sure if they'll remain open much longer.

The most devastating effect of the embargo is the escalating price of gasoline, up from $18 to $22 a gallon in three days. By week's end, it is expected to reach $25.

Before the embargo, a gallon cost $2.75.

The streets swarm with people peddling gas, and when a motorist stops, vendors shove jugs at the driver.

With the rising cost of fuel, it has become very expensive to make a 41/2-hour drive to bring cargo from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitien. Much of the food coming into the capital city stays there to feed the many poor.

Newly built service stations in Cap Haitien, such as Texaco and Esso, stopped selling gas in early December. That's when the black market kicked in.

Fuel generates electricity, which hasn't been available throughout Cap Haitien for more than two years. Some clinics, hospitals, businesses and homes use their own generators.

Francois Agnes and his wife, Morilia, had a small restaurant in downtown Cap Haitien, which they closed after the coup d'etat. Tables are pushed aside, and the floor is stacked with plastic jugs and barrels of fuel.

"Many people don't do anything else but sell gas," said Morilia, a mother of six. "This isn't a good living, but we just do it to find some little money to buy food."

SMUGGLING GAS

Many of the poor are getting severely burned by trying to ignite oil lanterns, which sometimes explode because they are mixed with other materials such as gas.

Gauze covers Eileen Dodien's scarred face, breasts, stomach and arm. The 55-year-old Haitian woman tried to light a kerosene lamp after church in early April. It blew up.

All the money she had, $1,500 in a wood box crammed in her mattress, went up in flames. She lost her few pieces of furniture, china and glasses, a mirror, television, radio, watch, clothes and family pictures inside her 18-by-20-foot cement home.

Now she depends on help from others.

"Everything is gone," said Dodien, a mother of two. "Sometimes I cry. Before, every day when my children came home from school, I had food prepared. Now when they come home, I have no food."

The hardships go beyond fuel. Tons of humanitarian aid once arrived on large tankers carrying tires, appliances and car parts to Cap Haitien and Port-au-Prince. With the sanctions, those large vessels don't dock as often.

HEAVY CONTAINERS

Tourism, once a big industry in Cap Haitien, is almost non-existent since the embargo. A large tourist market once had 140 sellers, with visitors from Europe, the United States and other areas buying mahogany carvings, paintings, dolls and other items. Now only 40 are open.

"Before the embargo, I can't count how many paintings I sold," said shop owner Emmanuel Telfort. "Now, God watches me and that's why I don't close. I have nothing to do, so I stay open and hope to sell something."

Michael DePui opened a grocery 14 years ago, and he expects to close it within the month if the embargo doesn't ease up. He drives to Port-au-Prince weekly to get supplies, and he can't afford the gas prices anymore.

Not many people can afford the items on his shelves. Toothpaste costs $12.50. A flashlight with two D-cell batteries is $32. Toilet paper is $9. A small package of napkins is $5.90. One quart of bleach is $6.80.

"I don't know why we have this embargo," he said. "Why do all the people have to suffer? I think it's better to close. I'm finished with this."

Rosemary Fry, a Catholic nun and nurse from Canada, worries whether supplies will keep coming in. She treats up to 300 homeless Haitians a day in a large but one-room cement building, a state-owned dormitory built for villagers who came from the countryside to sell their wares in town.

Fry sits across from an expressionless 16-year-old girl holding a month-old infant who has enough strength to occasionally open her eyes for a few seconds. The baby has diarrhea, a deadly disease here that dehydrates the body, causing the internal organs to shut down.

"I see this political drama played out there on a stage, and I see this baby who is sick," Fry said. "There needs to be a way to bring about change without all the posturing.

"Things have gotten a lot worse. It's difficult right now with the climate in the country and the cost of food. If they could buy a little food before, they can't afford anything now."

He hasn't had a steady job in two years. He isn't sure if he can feed his family even once a day. He can't afford to send his children to school. He doesn't have the money to rebuild his rotting home.

The politics of Haiti don't mean much to him; he just wants life to return to normal. He has been waiting for change.

It never comes.

"I have a hard life," said Jackson, 36. "I have two arms, and I want to work."

Jackson never made it past fourth-grade but still managed a decent living for 13 years building houses and repairing and selling bicycles. Both jobs stopped after materials became too expensive and nobody had the money to pay for his work.

He still must find a way to provide for his sons, ages 6 and 4, and daughters, 14 and 7. Jackson's 60-year-old grandmother lives with the family in a 70-square-foot home that cost $500 to construct 11 years ago. With a worldwide embargo catapulting prices, a new house costs $9,000. For now, torn pages of magazines and newspapers cover the decaying walls.

As politicians continue to posture about Haiti and more sanctions strangle the country, the poor like Jackson find it more difficult to live. Their faith wanes as conditions worsen.

"It's like beating someone with a stick, trying to revive him," said Lawrence Pezzulo, former U.S. envoy to Haiti. "You end up crushing his skull. When you embargo a country like Haiti, you affect everybody."

Many people don't have enough money to buy whatever food is coming into the country. So they rely on humanitarian groups, some of which are finding it increasingly difficult to come up with ways to bring in necessities.

Haiti was the poorest country in the Americas before September 1991, when soldiers overthrew elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftist former priest living in exile in the United States. Since then, the country has lost at least 120,000 private-sector jobs.

Soon after the coup, the United States and other countries began clamping down on the Caribbean country. Haiti is under a worldwide trade and oil embargo. At midnight Friday, commercial flights between the United States and Haiti will be banned.

Haiti's figurehead president, Emile Jonassaint, has declared a state of emergency. In a nationally televised address, he invoked voodoo deities and urged Haitians to fight to the death to resist foreign intervention.

Jackson still has hope that one day life will return to normal. He wants Aristide to return because he puts the people first. But he believes he gave the population too much power.

The exiled president refused while he was in office to denounce pro-Aristide violence that included burning and ransacking homes and businesses and publicly condoning the practice of "necklacing" opponents -- igniting a gasoline-soaked tire around the head of an enemy and burning the victim alive.

Now, Jackson said, the military government thinks "of their own pocket." The black market and drug trafficking are thriving and the military doesn't care that people are suffering, he said.

For now, Jackson survives by doing occasional jobs for a humanitarian group, most recently building a school addition and a water pipeline. He gets paid $200 monthly. His wife, Azeta, makes a little money cleaning for nuns.

"Sometimes I feel like I want to take a boat and leave the country," he said. "If nothing changes, I will go to the United States.

"I don't blame just political people. God wants this to happen, so he let it happen. I have to wait for God. When the embargo leaves, I will find something to do."

Beside him is another casket, blue-gray with black trim. With ornate silver hinges, handles and bars, it is morbidly elaborate against the bleakness outside.

While most people in Cap Haitien struggle to pay for basic needs, the coffin business is booming. People must be buried. With an increase in customers, somebody has got to do it. And families still try to scrape up enough money to buy a final resting place for their loved ones.

Competition is intense, with someone making caskets on just about every street.

"Now the people suffer, no food, no medicine, and more die," said John Joseph, 58, and father of 10. "I have to make coffins quickly now. I just stay here and do coffins."

Joseph, who learned the trade 30 years ago, has one employee. It takes three days to make a coffin, often laboring well after dark without electriciy and resting on Saturdays.

Business is tight, with the cost of supplies steadily climbing since the embargo. A $500 coffin sells for $1,200. A set of silver handles that once cost $70 are $300. A plank of wood has gone from $10 to $25.

Cheap coffins -- unpainted, crudely nailed planks -- sell quickly. Once $60 before the embargo, they now cost $200.

Those who can't afford any of them dig up old ones, throw the bodies back in graves and reuse the wooden boxes.

Some coffins Joseph gives away to people who don't have the money.

Much of his material -- including paint, primer and handles -- is smuggled from the Dominican Republic. Wood comes from Haiti.

"I could close also if there's not enough material to buy," he said. "If the embargo left, I would dance."

Less than a mile away is Albert France, 32, who has been making furniture and coffins for nine years. A long cement building is divided into sections for different phases of construction. Workers overflow into the street, sawing, sanding, painting, and carving intricate designs.

France has reduced his work force from 30 to 10 employees to offset the skyrocketing cost of materials since the embargo.

Nine coffins are crammed into one end of the building, one in black lacquer and the others unfinished. Green, gold, bronze and tan coffins with silver trimmings and lined in white satin are spread across another dirt-floored room. A thick film of dust covers them.

A photographer wanted to take a picture of France dusting a coffin, but he demanded money for a shot -- something Haitians are doing to survive.

Deluxe coffins that were $700 now are twice as much, France said, and the cheaper coffins don't bring much profit.

"It makes me sad to sell the coffins to younger people, but I do it anyway," he said.

"There's nothing else to do."

The child was so hungry he reached into a boiling pot of rice at home earlier that day, pulling out his scalded right arm and rubbing the sticky rice against his body. His mother, with no money to pay for a hospital visit, rushed him to the free clinic.

Wrapped in layers of gauze, the boy reached out his left arm to shake DeHart's hand and whispered "thank you" in Creole.

DeHart, co-founder of For Haiti With Love, is becoming an anomaly in Cap Haitien, one of a handful of people providing aid in the city since the military overthrow nearly three years ago.

A United Nations embargo expanded in May bans noncommercial flights and trade on all but food, medicine and humanitarian supplies. The goal is to pressure the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Beginning Saturday, the United States will restrict commercial flights to Haiti.

Supplies dwindle as medical workers try to keep up with the constant flow of people suffering from typhoid, malaria, encephalitis, tuberculosis, burns, AIDS and malnourishment.

"There's frustration and fear in the eyes of the people and hopelessness," DeHart said. "Here, people say Haiti is dying and Haiti is dead. This is the worst I've ever seen it."

The Palm Harbor-based humanitarian group provides medicine, food, schooling and housing to more than 5,000 Haitians.

He brought enough money from Palm Harbor last week for food and medication until mid- September. He has used Lynx International to fly in supplies, but that airline's last flight to Haiti is Friday.

Two Florida-based private airplanes hauling relief supplies to Cap Haitien must have every manifest checked by the United States and United Nations.

Many relief groups, missionaries and doctors have left Cap Haitien since the late 1980s, some fearing their safety or finding it increasingly difficult to get supplies because of the embargo. Others focus their efforts in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere.

The only state-run hospital in Cap Haitien hasn't received money for months from the government in Port-au-Prince, and fewer people can pay for services. The medical complex has run out of X-ray film and many beds don't have mattresses.

DeHart treats people who can't afford to go to the hospital or pay for medication.

A 1-year-old girl was carried into the clinic, burns covering her neck, face, and legs. DeHart treated her and waited the next morning for her return. She never came. She died during the night.

Some parents would rather let their babies die than starve to death, he said. Many mothers can't produce breast milk and can't afford baby formula, which costs about $8 in the United States per pound and $30 in Haiti.

"I feel extremely frustrated because I just can't right now see how we can continue doing what we're doing without someone easing up the restrictions," said DeHart, who has been helping in Haiti for 27 years. "Because of the embargo, I thought they would allow us to bring in more."

Seven to 10 babies are born every day in Cap Haitien's government-run hospital. Most are malnourished. Another 10 people die each day. Hospital staff often must bury bodies left behind by families unable to pay for the interment.

"It will become worse because there are no medical supplies, no beds, and the people don't have enough money," said hospital administrator Victor Cadet. "The country is sliding down, and finally it's going to crack."

The pungent odor of decaying bodies and formaldehyde saturates the medical compound. The morgue, next to the cafeteria, isn't refrigerated because the two working generators must cool food and medicine and provide electricity for surgeries.

The 250-bed hospital, with 30 doctors and 100 nurses, is half filled. Patients pay $2 or $3 for treatment if they have it, and many bring their own bandages and food. They use flashlights and candles at night. Drugs that aren't in stock are prescribed.

"To work in the conditions here is extremely hard," said one nurse.

A swinging door creaks as one of his eight children walks into the house. Steel pots clang as a woman cooks rice and beans over charcoal a few feet away. A car groans as it makes its way down a pothole-ridden street.

Blind, the elder smiles faintly at the sounds and continues shelling wild peanuts in a large wicker bowl. He has been content in his small world, but it's getting more difficult for him to live.

Berthieu Jean depends on his eldest son, Guyto, to help him financially. The burden is getting heavier for the 32-year-old man, who ran a tourist shop and a passenger bus service.

Guyto was the success in the family.

That has changed. His businesses have died and he depends on a humanitarian group for food and money. He can't get help from his father, whose income from making peanut butter is $20 a week.

"In my neighborhood, almost everybody lost their jobs," said Guyto, who has his own house but no running water or electricity.

"The situation is very, very bad for Haiti. There are too many poor people here."

Guyto's three sisters and four brothers live at his or his parents' house. Guyto left school 10 years ago to earn money for his family, and he hopes to finally graduate this summer.

His cousin taught him to carve mahogany, and Guyto opened a shop at Labadee, a private peninsula near Cap Haitien leased by Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. Ships moored twice weekly, and passengers spent the day on the oasis of beaches and shops, sunning and spending money.

Forming a cooperative, many local merchants rotated selling their artwork at the shops. Guyto bought his store for $2,500 and paid $4 weekly to the cruise line.

He closed his store just over two years ago, when ships stopped coming because of the U.N. embargo. For Haiti With Love, a humanitarian group, bought him another shop in Cap Haitien's tourist market, but business is very slow.

Guyto also had a taxi service, but his truck broke down and he doesn't have the money to fix it.

For Haiti With Love pays him $250 monthly to teach English at its free school and to do other jobs. The relief group also built his home.

Guyto's father and mother have lived in their two-room house for 35 years.

Inside, the home is crammed with discards of American society.

Clear plastic covers an orange-and-maroon flowered couch and three chairs. In the middle of the living room is a coffee table with a bowl of colorful plastic flowers. Displayed on a china cabinet is a mismatched set of mugs printed with Chicago, Bahamas, Texas and Coca-Cola.

Berthieu stretches out his arms to maneuver through the clutter, making his way to his worn wooden chair outside. He deftly continues shelling peanuts.

Like most other people in town, he hasn't had electricity for more than two years. He once made peanut butter with a small 15-watt machine. Now he has to pay someone with a generator to crush the peanuts, cutting his profits in half.

"I'm not political, and still I suffer," Berthieu said. "Sometimes I worry about how I am going to feed my wife and children."

He pauses, the faint smile leaving his face.