A Haitian journalist is calling out the authorities for neglecting a strategic bridge in the country’s North, warning that patching a failing structure is no substitute for fixing a road network residents depend on every day.
Yandy Frantz Fidèle has criticized what he calls the de facto government’s handling of the deteriorating bridge that links Saint-Raphaël and Dondon — the span known locally as “Pont Limite.” Rather than build a new bridge across the river, Fidèle says, the North departmental directorate of the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Communications (MTPTC) simply patched the old one — a stopgap he warns will not hold.
He is using the moment to highlight another sore point: the poor condition of the road connecting the commune of Saint-Raphaël to Carrefour Ménard. With the town’s patronal feast approaching, he argues, time is short. “It is imperative that, before the patronal feast on October 24, the government, through the Ministry of Public Works, urgently carry out work on this heavily traveled road,” said Fidèle, a native of Mélène.
The patronal feast each October draws large numbers of residents and visitors to Saint-Raphaël, adding strain to roads that are already difficult in normal times — the kind of surge that turns a neglected route into a genuine hazard.
A new “highway” nearby, an old bridge left behind
Fidèle’s complaint lands against a backdrop of recent, high-profile investment elsewhere on the same corridor. On January 13, 2026, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé inaugurated a rehabilitated 43-kilometer section of National Road No. 3 (RN3) linking Hinche to Saint-Raphaël. That project, worth more than €58 million, was financed by the European Union and the French Development Agency (AFD), according to HaitiLibre.
For Fidèle, the contrast is the point: a flagship, donor-funded stretch of the RN3 is cut and celebrated, while a strategic local bridge on the same regional network is left to be patched. Independent reporting has echoed his underlying concern; the outlet Rezo Nòdwès has described Pont Limite as an aging but strategic structure whose decline exposes the fragility of the North’s road network.
Fidèle’s sharpest question is about a project that has been promised but not visibly started: the Saint-Raphaël–to–Carrefour Ménard bypass. When, he asks, will work on that road actually and effectively begin? The route matters, he argues, because it would let drivers avoid the notorious mountain stretch of Morne Grand-Gilles — a passage he calls a nightmare for anyone who has to cross it.
Taken together, his points describe a pattern familiar across much of Haiti’s provincial road system: visible ribbon-cuttings on the segments that attract international financing, and quiet deterioration on the local links — the bridges, bypasses and connector roads — that ordinary residents actually use to reach markets, schools, clinics and family. For the people of Saint-Raphaël and Dondon, Fidèle’s message is simple: a patched bridge and a promised bypass are not the same as a road that works.
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