According to the IMF 'The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola and are broadly similar in terms of geography and historical institutions, yet their growth performance has diverged remarkably. The countries had the same per capita real GDP in 1960 but, by 2005, the Dominican Republic’s per capita real GDP had tripled whereas that of Haiti had halved'. Since then things have got worse. It seems getting rid of the army, which is what happened in 1995, wasn't such a good idea. The plain fact is an island with involuted agriculture can only become a 'developmental state' under an authoritarian leader with an Army which slaughters gangsters while they are still in their teens and haven't yet gained the patronage of a Drug Cartel and thus access to automatic weapons.
Kenan Malik, with typical stupidity (or unconscious racism) thinks Haiti was 'doomed to end in anarchy' because it had been 'plundered and corrupted for 200 years' even though this plundering and corrupting could only have been done by dark skinned Haitians. This is because, Haiti became independent in 1804. A slave rebellion had succeeded in getting rid of White rule. But the rebels were soon slaughtering and raping their own people, not just the White or 'half-caste', with the result that the Dominicans revolted. They tended to support the 'mulatto' against the pure Black. But they still ended up level pegging with Haiti in terms of per capita Income till Papa Doc Duvalier came to power in Haiti on a 'black power' platform.
The racial politics of the Caribbean is complicated. But Malik doesn't do complicated. Why be nuanced when you write for the Guardian?
Successive foreign governments plunged it into unpayable debt
Lenders don't plunge people into debt unless they can be repaid. That's why Haiti, a basket-case, has external debt equal to only15 percent of GDP while the Dominican Republic is at 40 per cent. Japan is at 100 per cent.
On the other hand, it is true that successive foreign governments have been plunging poor blek peeps like me into sex-addiction by continually giving us blow-jobs and then lending us billions of dollars. I was warned not to interview Christine Lagarde for this blog because she might mistake me for the island of Haiti and plunge me into unpayable debt. Alternatively she might think I am a hobo and rape me with her mouth. I have faced racist oppression of this sort all my life.
and left its citizens in penury
Haitians used to be very rich. Then lots of foreign governments turned up and kept giving them money and sucking them off. Naturally, they can't repay those debts. Constantly being drained of jizz has left them weak and anemic.
In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In August 1914 the Germans invaded Belgium. It had to borrow money to do reconstruction after two World Wars. That is why Belgians are so poor.
Eight US marines disembarked, sauntered to the Banque National de la République d’Haïti (BNRH), removed $500,000 worth of gold belonging to the Haitian government– $15m in today’s money – packed it in wooden crates to carry back to the ship and thence to New York, where it was deposited in the vaults of the investment bank, Hallgarten & Co.
Hitler did worse. That is the reason France is so fucking poor.
The BNRH was Haiti’s central bank.
Back then, even Mexico didn't have a 'central bank'. I think Peru was the first Latin American country to gain one in 1922. The other big Central and South American economies gained reserve banks over the course of the Twenties and Thirties.
It was also a foreign private corporation. Originally set up in 1880 through a concession granted to a French bank, pressure from America brought in US investors. By 1920, the BNRH was wholly owned by the American National City Bank. Haiti’s central bank it may have been but the Haitian government was charged for every transaction and the eye-popping profits spirited off to Paris or New York.
Whereas the Germans simply stole everything they could lay their hands on in France or Belgium. Plenty of countries were fucked over by invaders of various sorts. The Dominican Republic was occupied by the Americans between 1916-24. The last major American intervention there was in 1965-66. The Americans took about 350 casualties while the locals suffered 6 or 7 thousand.
Political turmoil in Haiti in the 1910s led to Wall Street demanding action to protect its investments. Washington obliged, sending in the marines. A year later, the marines returned in force, remaining there for the next 19 years, in an often brutal occupation. “I helped make Haiti… a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” Maj Gen Smedley Butler, a leader of the American forces in Haiti, wrote in 1935.
He and his ilk did it in plenty of other countries. This did not explain why Haiti alone has seen its per capita income decrease- that too by 50 percent!- in the last 60 years.
The almost forgotten story of the bank robbery organised by the US state department is a small but illuminating moment in Haiti’s history.
No. It didn't matter in the slightest. Had America not intervened, the Germans might have been able to set up U-boat stations on that island.
The forced resignation last week of prime minister Ariel Henry, the collapse of civil life and gang warfare on the streets have returned Haiti to international headlines. To make sense of the latest events, we need to understand not just where Haiti is today, but also how it got there.
No. We only need to understand what is happening there today. The fact that White Capitalists were once very nasty to it does not matter in the slightest. Why does Dominica has ten times the per capita income of Haiti? History and Geography explain maybe thirty to fifty percent of the divergence.
The history of Haiti is one in which the nation’s governing classes have exhibited a contempt for the masses extraordinary even by the standards of the global south.
Haiti got rid of slavery and White rule in 1804. But they maintained it in territory they conquered. The Haitians favored pure Blacks over the mixed race while the opposite happened in their neighbor. But mixed-race people did rise in Haiti. Duvalier defeated one such wealth businessman in the Fifties in a democratic election. But his own son was of mixed race heritage. This meant that Aristide could attack him on racial grounds.
It is also one in which foreign powers have never shrunk from repression and bloodshed,
like Belgium and France which the Germans didn't shrink from fucking over
or straightforward theft, in pursuit of their aims, sometimes in alliance with local elites, sometimes in opposition to them.
The Dominican Republic has elites. So does Belgium. That is why it is so poor.
Haiti is now the poorest nation in the Americas and among the most unequal in the world.
Haiti is unusually unstable. This means that if you want Haiti to rise you should back the most ruthless killer, but one who will protect SEZs where girls can work 12 hours a day, 6 hours a week in giant factories. The good news is that they won't get raped. Most will save up enough money to get married and raise one or two kids properly by about the age of 25 or 30.
The tragedy of Haiti is not just the devastation wrought on its people but also that, while today it may be a symbol of corruption and lawlessness, 200 years ago it symbolised, indeed was the living embodiment of, the opposite: the possibilities of human emancipation.
To Black people- maybe. But Blacks were a small minority in that part of the world. Perhaps if Haitians had got into ship-building and the Slave trade, they could have formed alliances with 'maroons' in Brazil and Dahomey type kingdoms back on the mother continent. Also, they should have mobilized Islam (the first Maroons were Muslim Senegalese) so as to gain support farther afield.
Haiti was born in 1804 out of a 13-year revolution in which the enslaved people of the then French colony of Saint-Domingue dismantled their chains, defeated, in succession, the armies of France, Britain and Spain, and established a new nation.
No one has ever said that Haitians lack courage, creativity or the ability to work hard and take risks. Where they fell down was responding to collective action problems of an economic and political type. One reason for this was that its intellectuals and clergymen were Francophone and thus embraced the shittiest type of romantic Marxism. They didn't get that establishing a reputation for protecting investors and paying back loans is how you can rise from being of the exploitable class to having capital of your own.
While today Haiti may be a symbol of corruption and lawlessness, 200 years ago it symbolised the opposite
In 1822 it invaded its neighbor and fucked it over for the over for 22 years. This was one reason it signed a treaty in 1825 with France. In return for having its independence acknowledged, Haiti agreed to pay a lot of reparations though, no doubt, big kickbacks were involved. True, many Francophone countries in Africa got the same deal in in the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties but nobody thought they had heroically overthrown slavery or Imperialism. The plain fact is, getting access to international Banking and Credit does mean having to do deals of this sort. If you develop rapidly, you can renegotiate. If you don't, the 'front loading' aspect protects the initiators and those who come after eat the loss.
Their astonishing success turned the revolution into an inspiration for those resisting slavery and colonialism across the globe.
Not really. The dispiriting truth was that people marooned on islands could do little to improve their lot. One option African Americans considered was repatriation to Africa. Liberia and Sierra Leone were set up for freed slaves who lorded it over the indigenous people till they rebelled in the Seventies. Both are now poorer than Haiti.
In the independent Haiti, though, the necessities of a class-driven world ensured that the new ruling class governed as would any elite, whether in Haiti, France or America.
Which is why France and America are such shitholes. Not till we kill Rishi Sunak and his chums will we in England rise up out of abject poverty.
Its objectives were to maintain power, suppress dissent and enforce the exploitation of labour.
The objective of a ruling class is to maintain power. How very strange! As for 'the exploitation of labor', why enforce it? Why not just do it? Haiti is where Zombies come from- right?
A weak and divided ruling class
can't 'enforce the exploitation of labor' without which countries remain Malthusian shitholes.
ensured that Haitian political life was punctuated by a succession of coups and insurrections.
Dominican Republic had a terrible Civil War in the mid Sixties. Still, going forward it was more stable and sometimes had fairly decent governments which encouraged the creation of SEZs. It is likely that it had higher 'Human Development' even in the Fifties. Ecologically too, it was better placed.
The suppression of democratic movements became the constant thread of the nation’s history.
But those movements were and are shit. It is easy to pretend that 'ruling elites' and 'foreign creditors' are forcibly draining the poor of their precious bodily fluids. Haiti had Aristide- who started off as a Catholic priest - who may now be worth 800 million.
The ruling elites in Europe and America, meanwhile, fearful that the Haitian example might embolden others struggling for freedom, sought to isolate the new nation, refusing for decades even to recognise it.
So what? We are speaking of a tiny island far far away. It could kill off the local Whites but when its leaders wanted to buy nice stuff for themselves, they had to go through the European shipping companies. True, they could have lured French troops onto their soil and then enslaved some while killing the others. The problem was the French might arm poor Haitians against their new masters. Also, Haiti thought the French would let them keep the Spanish half of the island.
In 1825, France demanded, as the price of recognition, reparations of 150m francs (the equivalent, according to different estimates, of between $4bn and $21bn today) to compensate for loss of property, including human chattel. Along with the demand, it sent 14 warships.
The right strategy would be to play rope-a-dope. Lure Whitey into the interior and then slit their throats. But, it paid better to sign up with France- at least for the moment. At a later point, Emperor Solouque tried to lay claim to Navassa island which was rich in guano. It is said the Americans paid him off. It was his own people who rebelled and sent him packing. Apparently he was good at killing 'mulattos' and totes into Voodoo.
France was compelling enslaved people and their descendants to pay their former masters for having freed themselves from servitude.
They could have refused and fought the French. Why didn't they? I suppose they wanted White support so as to carry on killing mixed race people. The Dominican Republic went the other way.
Though the figure was eventually reduced to 90m francs, it remained well beyond Haiti’s capacity to pay, forcing it to take out loans from French banks at exorbitant rates, adding to the burden.
Whereas buying nice crowns for Emperors from Paris wasn't burdensome at all. The fact is, as with Liberia, at a later date, foreign loans represented a way to do capital flight for the people negotiating the loan.
By 1914, 80% of the government budget went to repaying the debt.
This forced the Government to cut back on its Space Exploration program.
Year after year, money that might have been spent on schools or hospitals, industry
not to mention the Space Exploration program
or agriculture, in one of the world’s poorest countries (though, admittedly, much of it may also have gone into the pockets of Haitian oligarchs) was purloined instead to fill the treasury of one of the richest nations of the world.
Aristide did try to claim reparations from France. I suppose Haiti wants reparations from him.
Western nations have not only impoverished Haiti,
No. Haitians impoverished Haiti. They also tried to fuck over its neighbor which, however, once had brutal dictators of its own. I suppose hating Haiti and not wanting to be like it, helped the Dominican Republic go down a better path. But, material standards of living only started to diverge once technology had advanced to a point where fossil fuels could be substituted for human sweat in tropical contexts.
they have also constantly intervened, propping up politicians who enforce “stability”, undermining those whose democratic demands seem threatening. François Duvalier, or “Papa Doc”, came to power in 1957,
he won an election on a black nationalist platform against a Mulatto.
a vicious dictator whose reign was built on ferocious violence.
Like every other Haitian regime before and afterwards.
US leaders cavilled at Duvalier’s brutality, but saw him as an important asset against communism, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And so the aid poured in.
The Kennedy administration had limited aid even though Batista was a friend of Duvalier and thus he hated Castro. Papa Doc claimed his Voodoo curse had killed the President. Why take chances? Johnson turned the Aid tap back on. But Duvalier would have killed Commies anyway because he thought they were plotting against him. Still, his Black Nationalism made him cool in the Sixties. Emperor Haile Selassie visited him. My memory is that John Okello, the leader of the Zanzibar rebellion in which lots of 'Arabs' and Asians were killed and raped, was an admirer of Duvalier. I may be wrong. What is certain is that both thought themselves chosen by God to kill lighter skinned, or- in the case of Okello- Muslim people. The Caribbean wasn't the only part of the world where racial politics was complicated.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftwing priest, with mass support among Haiti’s working class and poor, elicited a different response.
No. It was the same response as got Papa Doc elected. The outcome, too, wasn't very different.
Twice, in 1990 and 2001, waves of public support propelled Aristide to the presidency. And twice, in 1991 and 2004, he was ousted in bloody coups.
But he has 800 million dollars for his pains. Not bad for an ex-priest.
After the first coup, Aristide returned to power with US support.
As Obama said, America's foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit.
Nevertheless, many of the coup leaders were on the CIA payroll and the agency did not hide its hostility.
Everybody who is anybody in that part of the world is on the payroll of some Agency or the other.
A decade later, opposition to Aristide’s economic and social policies led America to force him out of office
Haitian gangs don't need no steenkin' Yankees to kill or chase ex-priests away.
(though Washington implausibly insists that it played no role in Aristide’s voluntary “resignation”).
Washington's foreign policy consists of, as Obama said, doing stupid shit. The mistake was to bother with Haiti in the first place. Clinton sent in 20,000 American troops to restore Aristide. But, getting rid of the Army was a mistake. Sooner or later the police would surrender in the face of the gangs.
Today, the Haitian state barely exists.
There's more money to be made by catering to the NGOs and International Development Agencies- not to mention any UN troops who might turn up to rape the kids.
Its functions, from policing to health, from education to social services, have been outsourced to what researcher Jake Johnston calls the “Aid State” – NGOs, UN bodies, development banks, private companies.
It was fashionable to go off to Haiti for a week or two to provide clean water or some such bullshit. The bigger problem is that 'Disaster Capitalism' is very profitable because nobody cares how charitable money is spent. The 2010 earthquake killed over 200,000 Haitiains. This brought in about 13 billion dollars only ten per cent of which went to the Haitian government and local organizations. Haitians blame the Clintons for the waste and boondoggle. Apparently, they had honeymooned there back in 1975 when 'Baby Doc' was in power and the place was still a tourist destination.
Especially since the devastating earthquake of 2010, this “parallel state” has been the source of power in Haiti.
It has been the source of money. Killing people is what gets you power.
Ariel Henry
a neurosurgeon
was not voted into office
his predecessor was killed. Was Henry part of that conspiracy? We can't be sure.
but appointed by the so-called “Core group”, a collection of foreign ambassadors who effectively run the country.
It isn't effectively run. Anyway, the Americans have evacuated their people and run the fuck away.
The result has been a complete rupture between those who govern
there is no government
and those who are governed; a rupture visible in everything from the gangs on the streets to the hunger that haunts its people.
Elon Musk thinks that cannibalism is the solution. There is no evidence of this.
“We have become the subjects of our own history,” Aristide claimed in 1987; “we refuse from now to be the objects of that history.”
Aristide helped Haiti's history become more horrible. Still, at least he got rich.
The tragedy is that the opposite has happened, that the people of Haiti remain excluded from the governance of their country.
Only because their own people were shit at governing it. Once the money for 'disaster capitalism' runs out, the most ruthless gang-leader will become the Stationary Bandit. By then, China may be interested in providing infrastructure in return for making Haiti their own Cuba.
Until that changes, Haiti will not change.
Haiti turned into what it is precisely because its people were not excluded from ruling it since 1804. Haiti can be made safe for Haitians in the same way that any ghetto or sink Estate can be made safe for its residents. This is done by killing or incarcerating gangsters. Libtards won't do this. Instead they will pretend that everything is the fault of the International Bankers and the fact that the IMF refused to finance the Haitian LGBTQ collective's Space Exploration program.
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