Mention Haiti, and this is what you'll likely hear:
Poverty, natural disaster, now political violence.
Every report about Haiti has to include the line that
it's the poorest country
in the Western Hemisphere.
But hold on for a second. Something's missing in this conversation, right?
We need to be all thinking about the relationship
of what we're calling poverty in Haiti
and the relation to the richness
of the rest of world.
And how did the rest of the world get so rich?
Let's start with France.
Imagine if you were enslaved and after fighting for your independence,
you were forced to spend the next couple of generations
paying compensation to
those who colonized you.
Reparations for slaveholders is a new one for me.
That is exactly what happened to Haiti.
This is punishment
for their unwillingness
to remain under the yoke of slavery.
In 1697, France and Spain ended a war with each other
by dividing up the Spanish colony Hispaniola.
Through the labor of enslaved Indigenous and Black people,
Saint-Domingue became the world's most profitable colony,
exporting sugar, coffee and indigo.
Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue
suffered some of the harshest and cruelest
slave punishments in the entire Atlantic world.
Life expectancy was extremely low,
such that at the moment
of the Haitian Revolution breaking out
in August of 1791,
the vast majority of enslaved people
had only been on the island for
two or three years.
They were from whatever nation that they had been captive and brought over.
And they basically said no.
Self-liberated Africans led the Haitian Revolution and ended slavery
in present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
After 12 years of fighting the French colonial power, which had tried to reintroduce slavery,
the formerly enslaved people of Saint-Domingue officially declared independence
and renamed their country Haiti.
Many countries, including the United States, refused to recognize Haitian
independence in fear of slave rebellions.
And France refused to accept Haiti's independence unless
Haiti paid 150 million franc as so-called compensation
for lost revenues from slavery.
That was around 10 times Haiti's annual budget.
But Haiti couldn't decline the indemnity request since the French came ready for war,
carrying more than 500 cannons on their ships.
Articles from that period show that the French king knew the Haitian government
wouldn't be able to repay the debt, which decimated Haiti's economy.
Haitians had extremely high taxes, and most of the tax revenue was paid for the indemnity.
This left the education system, public infrastructures
and health care underdeveloped.
Agricultural land was also depleted
to grow cash crops that pay for the debt but couldn't feed the country.
It took Haiti 122 years to pay off its debt
and required taking high-interest loans.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy
to say that Haiti is poor
and Haiti must be poor.
And I think the better question whenever a people,
an entire people is characterized as poor
with this word is to say,
not “why are they poor?” but “why aren't you?”
But it's not just the French who have played a role in Haiti's misery.
So the United States has intervened
in Haitian affairs quite a lot.
President Moïse's assassination in 2021
left some Haitian officials
calling for U.S. intervention.
But not everyone agrees.
The only way that that could ever even have
a fruitful outcome
would be if it was because they were in dialogue
with the Haitian people for the first time.
Because that is not what usually happens.
That's not what happens at all.
They dialogue with the people claiming power
and some negotiation is struck
between those vying for power
and the United States government.
There's a lot of people saying, no,
we don't want the United States to come and
intervene again
because this is, again, a repetition of history.
The history that Professor Daut is talking about
involves the United States 19-year occupation of Haiti,
an occupation that killed thousands of Haitians.
Following the assassination of Haiti's president
in 1915,
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's administration
invaded Haiti to protect U.S. investments.
Then, they forced the election of a new Haitian president who would protect
American interests in the country.
Racist and fear-mongering rhetoric was used to justify the move.
The occupation ensured that the U.S.
prioritized its own interests in Haiti over what was best for Haitians.
The U.S. occupation ended in 1934
after local dissent and rebellion grew too costly for the U.S. to control.
But even after the occupation, the United States continued
to play a role in the internal affairs of Haiti.
In 1957, the U.S. government
threw its support behind a Haitian dictator -
Duvalier and his successor, aka his son Jean-Claude, ate up
aid from the United States in exchange for their strong anti-communist stand
at the height of the Cold War.
Haitian uprisings ended Duvalier Jr.'s rule,
and led to Haiti choosing its democratically elected leader,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1990.
But within a year, Aristide's government was toppled by a coup.
Not only was one of the leaders of the coup on the CIA's payroll,
but the U.S. had set up and funded the Haitian military and national intelligence service,
which both played key roles in the coup.
Ousted Aristide returned to his second presidency in 2001
and again was forced out of office by a coup that he claimed
the U.S. had orchestrated.
And after that, President Obama's cabinet pressured
a Haitian presidential candidate to withdraw in 2010.
We see reports coming out of
various civil society organizations saying
that Haitians have lost faith
in the electoral process because it doesn't
reflect their actual concerns.
And that brought us to the 2016 Haitian presidential election,
where late President Moïse was elected with an extremely low voter turnout,
but U.S. backing.
In February 2021, Moïse refused to step down at the end of his term.
The U.S. once again backed him while thousands of Haitian protesters took to the streets.
[protesters chanting]
- Many Haitians are saying,
we want to try actual Haitian democracy,
where the Haitian people,
not just the elite and the bourgeoisie
and the business interests,
get to have a say and determine the direction
and future of the country.
It's clear that Haiti's poverty and political instability has long
been influenced and shaped by foreign players.
So knowing this, where does Haiti go from here?
We have never been able to see what could happen
in this particular Black country
without meddling and interference.
We should try something new in the United States
and that is back off and back away
and let the Haitian people determine their
own future.