Whither Haiti

The proto-primates on the political right have been floating their none too subtle racial theories on why Haiti is so backward. On the left liberals and progressives wring their hands and shrug their shoulders offering no explanation why Haiti is such a poor and miserable place. The answer lies in Haiti's long and tortured history.

Overcoming the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, and the divisions between themselves, the slaves, mulattos, and free Blacks came together to fight their common enemy. In 1804, Haiti became an independent nation. Yet Haitians had to continually struggle to maintain their security and their freedom: The hostility of the world's powers formed insurmountable obstacles to the establishment of a healthy nation. The new rulers drawn from the gens de couleur and Black military leaders wanted to establish a profitable economy based on commodity production for export; many tried to reestablish plantations. The majority of former slaves wanted freedom from the humiliation and hardship of plantation labor, and the right to subsistence farming on their own plots of land.

Meanwhile, the world powers, led by the U.S. and the Vatican, would not recognize Haiti's sovereignty. In 1825, France finally agreed to recognize Haiti, but at a price: Haiti was to pay 90 million francs as an indemnity to the French planters who lost their land in the revolution. This saddled Haiti with a debt that crippled its already foundering economy and increased Haitian dependence on France. The U.S. refused to recognize Haiti until 1862 then continued it’s embargo on trade and political relations with this lone Black nation. By the late 1800s, principle and interest on the debt payments made to France amounted to 80% of the Haitian budget.

The new Black nation also faced the constant threat of invasion by the world powers. Haitian writer Michael J. Dash writes of how the U.S. before the Civil War, fearing that the example of a successful slave rising and independence struggle might spread, used its influence in Haiti to promote internally repressive, externally obedient, regimes. In fact the Haitian Revolution did inspired the planned slave revolt in South Carolina of Denmark Vesey in 1822, the slave revolt of Nat Turner in 1831 and militant abolitionists like John Brown and Frederick Douglas. Thus it was no accident that the internal policy of slavery followed by Jim Crow segregation in the United States mirrored U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti. That foreign policy tended for two centuries to favor any regime which reduced Haiti to an impoverished, peasant community.

In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt began to flex the United States' new found muscle. He "asserted that the Monroe Doctrine carried 'the exercise of an international police power' in the Western Hemisphere." This assertion was quickly recognized as the Roosevelt Corollary and was often cited to exonerate intervention throughout the Caribbean. The Caribbean Basin would become known as "an American lake." If the Caribbean was an American lake, Haiti was to become America's beachfront property.

From 1915 to 1934 the U.S. played a long and devastating role in Haiti, including a brutal nineteen-year military occupation,. Writes Historian Mary Renda: “While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation, one more favorable to foreign investment. In a series of speeches in his 1920 campaign for Vice President, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that he, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-1920), wrote the constitution which the U.S. imposed on Haiti in 1915. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized customs houses, took control of Haitian finances. U.S. Marines went straight to the Haitian national bank and removed its gold reserves to Citibank in New York City. Meanwhile, marines waged war against insurgents (called cacos) who for several years maintained an armed resistance in the countryside, and imposed a brutal system of forced labor that engendered even more fierce Haitian resistance. By official U.S. estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians were killed during this period; a more thorough accounting reveals that the death toll may have reached 1 1,500.

The attitude of the U.S. government toward the Haitians can best be summed up by the following observations made by successive American Secretaries of State. William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) infamously said of the Haitian elite "Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French." Secretary of State Robert Lansing (1915-1920) believed that "the experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government.

The U.S. withdrew it’s troops in 1934. Before leaving, however, the U.S. government made a deal with Stenio Vincent, the new Haitian leader. Known as the Executive Accord of August 1933, in exchange for withdrawal of troops and a loan, the U.S. government would maintain supervision of Haitian finances until all outstanding American bonds expired in 1952.

From 1957 until 1986 Haiti was brutalized by the U.S. supported and incredibly corrupt Papa Doc/Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorship. In 1985-86 a powerful uprising swept Haiti again, forcing the U.S. to rescue Baby Doc and fly him to the French Riviera, in order to preserve their basic control of the country through the Haitian Army. A series of military governments followed, known to Haitians as “Duvalierism without Duvalier.”Under the Duvalier dictatorship, between 1973 and 1980, Haiti's debt increased from $53 million to $366 million, while the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty increased from 48 percent in 1976 to 81 percent 1985. Loans were contingent on an economic orientation on agricultural exports and the assembly industry-"The American Plan" which explicitly aimed to cut the ground out from under peasant agriculture by large-scale imports of cheaper U.S. goods, driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into the cities and shantytowns, desperate for work in U.S.-owned assembly plants being set up by the likes of Disney and Kmart, which paid workers 11 cents an hour to make pajamas and t-shirts. The American Plan proved an economic disaster. Official unemployment increased from 22 to 30 percent between 1980 and 1986, and in the same period economic growth showed an annual 2.5 percent decline.

Since the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship the United States continues to interfere in the internal affairs of Haiti. The popularly elected Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown by the American client Emmanuel “Toto” Constant nine month after his election in 1990. For the next three years a wave of terror was unleashed on the people of Haiti. Duvaliers death squads known as the Tontons Macoutes came out of hiding and began to rip up the networks of mass organization, especially in slums like Cite Soleil, that were Aristide’s base of support. Thousands of his supporters were killed, up to 300,000 went into hiding, and another 60,000 fled the island in makeshift boats many to Florida.The United States again invaded Haiti in 1994 with 20,000 troops. Aristide was brought back to power but only after President Bill Clinton forced Aristide to privatized electricity and phones among other state own businesses.This "deal" was known as the Governors Island Accords.

Another coup overthrew Aristide on February 29, 2004 instigated by France, Canada, and the United States after Aristide tried to undo the Governors Island Accords and simultaneous demanded France pay back, in 2004 value, the 90 million francs Haiti had to pay France in 1825. Again the United States President George W. Bush sent in 1,000 marines to occupy the country. The U.S. military literally kidnapped Aristide and his family and put him on a plane to the Central African Republic, where he was kept as a new regime in Port-au-Prince was consolidated. By March 1, hundreds of U.S. Marines again controlled the capital, and new waves of attacks, often by U.S. soldiers, were unleashed on the people. In June they were replaced by a force of 7,000 UN troops (mainly Brazilian) who have been cited by Human Rights groups as widely practicing “Summary Executions.”

When the former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz said a century ago: “Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States”, he did not know that he would speak for Haiti. Despite the countless natural resources of Haiti, the combined effects of American Imperialism and a predatory Haitian ruling class have conspired to reduce the vast majority of Haitians to unimaginable poverty.

While liberals blind themselves to Haiti's "Danse Macabre" with the United States and Conservatives quote history from John Wayne movies, the people of Haiti, in utter contempt for their tormentors, will continue to fight on. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort!”

January 2010