After a long drive from New York in an old caravan, Viter Juste arrived in Miami with his wife and six children in the 1970s.

“There were only about two or three Haitian families living within several blocks in a predominantly white neighborhood,” said Juste’s son, Carl, now an award-winning photographer at the Miami Herald.

“It looked like a tropical paradise,” he said. “Each home was different-none of that cookie-cutter stuff you see today in South Florida.”

The political oppression and economic hardship of François Duvalier’s rise to the Haitian presidency in 1957 period drove many Haitians of all social classes from their home to seek greater opportunity in the United States.

Most of the upper and middle classes moved to New York where job opportunities seemed more available, said Dr. Alex Stepick, an expert on Haitian immigrant relations from Florida International University’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the director of FIU’s Immigration and Ethnicity Institute.

But when Viter Juste, called “The Father of Little Haiti” in the Haitian community, moved his family to Miami, many Haitians in New York followed suit.

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Carl, 45, said his father encouraged many middle-class Haitians he knew in New York to move to Miami because of the opportunities he saw for the community in this area.

“Everywhere he went, my father was always connected to the Haitian community and people always respected him,” Carl said. “He was like a shepherd to the sheep.”

Viter Juste, now suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, founded Little Haiti’s first book and record shop, Les Cousins Books and Records, on Aug. 4, 1973.  He wrote for a small community journal called Bulletin de la Communaute Haitienne and published an article translated as “Let’s Have a Dream.” In the article, he referred to the community as “Little Port-au-Prince,” intended to allude to “Little Havana.” The area, known now as Little Haiti that spans nearly 200 blocks on NE 2nd Ave., was then officially “born.”

Carl said in the late ’70s and ’80s, when a large influx of lower class Haitians began immigrating to the United States by boat, his father did everything he could to keep the community of Little Haiti unified.  He even helped with immigration papers.

“He was not a preacher to the community,” Carl said. “He was literally the community’s father.”

He said his father saw opportunities early on, but it was not easy for Haitians to establish an economic credibility in Miami.

“Unlike the Cubans, Haitians had no chance here,” he said about their initial arrival in Miami. “We were black.”

Today, with the help of community pioneers like his father, there are organizations throughout Miami to help Haitians with health, tax forms, immigration and jobs.  One of them is Sant La, run by director Gepsie Metellus, a close friend of Viter’s.

Metellus founded Sant La in December 2000 to address the Haitian community’s lack of understanding and awareness about available resources in South Florida for immigrant families.

“Little Haiti has always been, and still is, a transient place,” Metellus said. “When Haitians come here, they go where there are other Haitians-where they feel most comfortable. Once they obtain a bit of economic stability and get their feet on the ground, they tend to move out of Little Haiti.”

Yves Colon, a Haitian journalism professor at the University of Miami School of Communication, agrees.  He said most middle and upper class Haitians do not live in Little Haiti anymore.

“The more economically and socially they move upward, the more they move geographically up,” said Colon, referring to the migration of Haitian families to the area above 125th St. on NE Second Ave. and Biscayne Blvd.

Viter Juste is now 85 years old and has recently lost his wife of 60 years, Maria.

“My mother was Cuban,” Carl said, adding that this was a factor that helped bridge the gap between the two feuding immigrant communities in Miami in the 1970s.

Maria and Viter met in Haiti, where she went to school, and the couple had six children together.

Carl knows that the Haitian community in Miami is still very much a part of his father’s life, despite his current health condition.

“My father would never retire,” Carl said. “You don’t retire from social justice work. It was something that chose him, he didn’t choose it.”