Haiti is a collapsing state.
We are talking about the poorest nation in the so-called West, whose inhabitants are
in one of the most bleak and depressing situations of misery in the world.
Haiti is the scene of a tragedy that has been going on for centuries, which the international
community does not seem willing, nor able, to remedy.
The blame for such a disaster lies not only with the uncontrollable forces of nature,
but also with the great powers, France and the United States above all, as well as the
rulers of Haiti themselves, corrupt to the core.
We are talking about a state where it is common to eat Mud Cakes, real "mud cakes mixed with
powder and food grease, a popular option in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest slums in
Port-au-Prince, the capital, where hunger is a daily problem.
Port au prince has now fallen into the hands of gangs, and has turned into a kind of no-man's
land.
But, what are they, the origins of such chaos?
Is it possible to trace them?
The story of Haiti is perhaps one of the most distressing and difficult to tell.
Once called the Jewel of the Antilles, the Island of Hispaniola, now divided between
Haiti, to the west, and the Dominican Republic, to the east, was the richest colony in the
entire New World.
The ancient Taino people, composed of "amiable, tractable, peaceful, Indians," as Christopher
Columbus had described them in his letters, were quickly decimated by the conquistadores
by sword and disease.
The sudden disappearance of the locals, however, prompted European settlers to quickly look
for another source of labor to exploit in the cultivation of Hispaniola's main resource:
sugar.
The colonists opted to recruit as many slaves as possible, turning their sights, naturally,
to West Africa, and finding a solution in the infamous Atlantic Route.
In the span of 30 years, from 1517 to 1540, more than 30,000 Africans were, pardon the
term, imported to Hispaniola, and, shortly thereafter, the western part of the island,
still sparsely frequented by the Spanish, gradually became a haunt for buccaneers committing
raids in the Caribbean Sea, many of them French.
Frenchmen who, in the mid-17th century, finally succeeded in establishing themselves in the
western quadrant of the island, obviously in an entirely illegitimate form, naming it
"Saint-Domingue."
Haiti alone came to account for as much as 50 percent of the entire French Gross National
Product, exporting to the Old Continent not only sugar, but also coffee, cocoa, tobacco,
cotton, indigo and several other products considered exotic.
It is by no means a coincidence that Saint-Domingue was, at that time, the richest colony on the
globe and the most active mercantile center in the New World, whose productive.
The entire Haitian society was compressed by rigid social castes in the 18th century.
At the top were the "great whites," the landowners, the colonial elite patched up with Metropolitan
French, which amounted to about 40,000 individuals.
The second social class was the mulattos, born of unions, in most cases violent, between
whites and slaves, which consisted of just 28,000 people.
Finally, there were the 450,000 slaves, who led a life of deprivation, hunger and pain.
"This slave colony," observed the Marquis du Rouvray in the late eighteenth century,
"is like a city ready to be attacked: we are walking on barrels loaded with gunpowder."
Well, blowing up those barrels, in 1789, came the French Revolution.
Inspired by the ideals that had shocked Paris, and tired of the summary massacres carried
out by the whites, mestizos and freed slaves, under the leadership of the now free man Toussaint
Louverture and the fugitive Jean Jacques Dessalines, responded to violence with violence.
I have given the French cannibals blood for blood," proclaimed Dessalines, considered
the father of the Haitian nation and nicknamed the Black Napoleon, "I have avenged America",
he said.
The new republic thus became the first independent nation in all of Latin America, the second
on the entire continent, anticipated only by the United States.
In no other case throughout history has an enslaved people been able to break the chains
of servitude and defeat, with a military response.
Finally, the name Saint-Domingue was changed, in fact, to Haiti.
Emerging out of the chaos, however, was - once again - the ruling power elite, the 3 percent
of the population that had enjoyed greater benefits and freedoms under the former colonizers,
and which reintroduced the typical slave system.
In other words, the French colonial legacy was perpetuated by a simple handover.
What is more, Haitians, although free, found themselves living in a world completely hostile
to the idea of a territory self-governed by blacks.
An independent Haiti was in fact a nightmare for all those powers for whom slavery was
kinda normal, starting with the United States.
The so called "international community" or rather Europe, condemned the Haitian model,
that of a nation of freed slaves, Europeans and the United States coordinated to prepare
a full-fledged diplomatic embargo on the island.
France refused to recognize Haiti’s existence as a state, and intimated that it was necessary
to pay compensation due to land confiscation after the revolution.
It's an absurdity, since it is usually the losers who have to pay compensation, if you
think about that.
The request was formalized, so to speak, in 1825, when a French ship loaded with cannons
entered Port-au-Prince, and an emissary of King Charles X intimated to the Haitians that
they must pay a debt of 150 million francs to be paid in five annual installments.
To repay the debt Haiti sought a loan from a group of...French banks.
That’s it.
In this way, the island's economy sank, and the state coffers were depleted for generations
to come.
The impossibility of having an economically sound nation was fertile ground for coups
and government assassinations.
Indeed, since 1855, the average office of Haitian presidents has amounted to just one
year.
There is no question that being president of Haiti should not be a pleasant job: we
can be reminded of this by the last head of state in chronological order, Jovenel Moise,
who was killed in 2021 in his presidential residence by an unidentified gang group.
As if that weren't enough, the U.S. also got in the way.
As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had practically
taken possession of the Dominican Republic, the eastern half of Hispaniola, which in the
previous course had repeatedly gained independence from Spain.
Then, in 1915, Woodrow Wilson gave orders to initiate the invasion of Haiti as well,
in order to "help" the people.
The interrupted French imperialism, then, changed only in the origin of the master.
Haiti was seen as an insult to imperialism, and the United States, which feared the German
investments begun in the late 19th century in the island, applied so called the Monroe
Doctrine, idealistically summarized as "America to Americans," to the letter.
More pragmatically, Wilson sought a military base in the Caribbean Sea.
The marines took control of Haiti's tax revenues and the national bank, forcing the passage
of a new constitution that in essence nullified the ban, established in 1804, that prevented
any foreigner from owning land in the country.
Without a blow, in short, Washington had created a new vassal state that would remain loyal
even after the occupation ended in 1934.
The occupation of the Dominican Republic, however, had ended in 1924, but after six
years of peace, the United States unleashed the coup that brought Rafael Leonidas Trujillo
to power.
Under Trujillo, nationalist thinking was institutionalized and this traced the origins of the Dominican
people back to the conquistadores, they mixed it with anti-Haitian sentiment, when in 1937,
Trujillo had tens of thousands of Haitians residing in the territory of the Dominican
Republic killed with a method that was peculiar, simple and cruel.
In fact, we refer to the entire operation as the "parsley massacre".
Upon meeting the people, the military would ask them what it was all about: anyone who
failed to correctly pronounce the word perejil, meaning parsley, in Spanish, reciting the
word with a mousy "r"...
Actually in English I just found out that the typical "R" French people say when speaking,
is actually called "French R"...
Not ehm, what did I say?
"Mousy R" [???]
... would automatically be considered Francophone, hence Haitian and subject to physical elimination.
You should know, that since 1915, but especially from 1946 onward, the United States, through
various economic and humanitarian aid packages, has wisely played a key role in Haitian politics.
Great, the population is safe.
Yes, In an earthly reality like ours, these subsidies simply went into the wrong pockets,
those of the Haitian rulers.
The most rapacious to take advantage of so-called Western benevolence was an intellectual at
first very well-liked by many: physician Francois Duvalier, nicknamed "Papa Doc."
Duvalier was elected president in 1957.
However, it took little to turn him into a dictator.
First, Papa Doc organized a personal vigilante force, These death squads came to be nicknamed
"Tonton Macoutes," an appellation that, according to Haitian folklore, was attributed to the
boogeyman who, at night, would kidnap children by hiding them in a sack.
It is difficult to say how many people disappeared at the hands of Duvalier's teams, but the
estimates are not the most comforting: there is talk of tens of thousands of desaparecidos.
Basically if you had any doubt about Duvalier, this could lead you to a mass grave along
with your entire family.
Nevertheless, the international community did not pay much attention to Papa Doc's schizophrenic
behavior.
Indeed, during his first four - and bloodiest - years in power, Duvalier received from Washington
the beauty of more than $40 million, most of it in the form of outright gifts.
The White House, as reported in Paul Farmer's essay The Uses of Haiti, had only one purpose:
"to keep Duvalier in Power."
It was necessary to prevent Haiti from going the way of socialist Cuba and continuing to
serve the interests of the U.S. government, despite the fact that, beginning in the 1960s,
thousands of Haitians preferred to flee on makeshift boats to the coast of Florida in
search of political asylum rather than remain on the island.
Corruption, after all, was so entrenched as to be an accepted practice throughout Haiti,
even today senior government officials exploit their position to amass power and wealth at
the expense of ordinary citizens, and police smuggle fuel, of which there is a shortage,
to sell on the black market.
On closer inspection, even the imposition of the official language, French, testifies
to the imbalances that snake through a nation incapable of coming to terms with the past.
In fact, all state business is conducted in French.
However, only 10 percent of the inhabitants are able to express themselves in this language,
and less than 5 percent speak it fluently.
Indeed, the idiom of the masses is Haitian Creole.
The problem is that to be successful in Haiti you necessarily have to speak French.
One result of this language oppression is the abominable national illiteracy rate, which
approaches 90 percent in the cities and is even higher in rural areas.
The reason is that people are needed, manpower in the fields, for all those families who
cannot get by, partly because the search for work has driven almost all Haitians to the
capital.
This demographic imbalance, whereby the inhabitants of the entire country total 11 million - in
a territory that is as vast as Tuscany in Italy - is a burden to a long-standing problem
on the island: the continuing destruction of ecosystems and soil erosion.
Try taking a look at satellite images nearby Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic.
You will notice how, on the left, the vegetation appears to be much less prominent.
What does this mean?
It means that Haiti is a predominantly mountainous country, and over the past 200 years the inhabitants
have been indiscriminately cutting down trees without replanting them.
The spectacle that unfolds every single year during the five months of uninterrupted rainfalls,
when rivers of mud slide down the mountain slopes, is just one of the visible effects
of this savage deforestation.
The main reason for Haitians to destroy their land is the scarcity of fuel, with wood having
been the only material for lighting a fire for centuries: people can afford to cook exclusively
with charcoal, which requires large quantities of wood.
And here, we come to yet another hoax for the Haitian people: most of the best land
domestically produces crops for export, NOT for the domestic market.
Haiti, which would be an agricultural country, is nothing more than a net importer of food.
If you are wondering why, suffice it to say that almost all of the land is controlled
by the 3% that represents the Haitian elite.
Of course, the money that flows into the pockets of the local oligarchy through exports is
not redistributed into the national economy, to build, I don't know, roads or hospitals,
but is spent in foreign markets: the United States, Europe and the Gulf countries.
And so, while a sugarcane cutter can call himself lucky if he earns $1 a day, the domestic
and foreign companies -let's be explicit for the sake of fairness, U.S.companies that manage
the land, make stellar profits..
Faced with a condition of permanent exploitation, one should therefore not be surprised that
so many Haitians have joined organized crime and gangs, which are the same as Papa Doc's
Ton ton macoutes.
Continuing to surf the waves of Haitian history, we come to 1990, the year when the pro-democracy
Presbyterian Jean-Bertrand Aristide incredibly, given his predecessors-won the presidential
election with 67 percent of the vote.
This was an incredible result, considering the history of Haiti.
But what happened?
Well, the Americans come again, forced Aristide into exile, imposed a dictator, the UN declared
an embargo on Haiti, and after four years Bill Clinton came back to fix the disaster
that the United States itself had committed.
Aristide came back, was deposed, came back again, was accused of corruption, and in 2004
a good civil war broke out.
Or at least, that was how the UN justified the deployment of MINUSTAH forces, that is
the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which was supposed to lead the country
through a democratic transition.
And if you think you have already seen hell, know that until now we have solely visited
purgatory.
Haiti, in fact, has been the scene, over the past two decades, of natural disasters that
have destroyed not only its society but also any tiny chance of getting back on its feet.
As mentioned above, gangs have very clear intentions: to take control of the black market
and manage the drug trade, but without assuming power.
Even should one gang be able to undermine the others, attempting a coup would be very
counterproductive: Haiti is already in the hands of criminal gangs, and going to government
would only mean losing the trust of those who support them and see them as the only
solution to the current political disaster.
This is well known by one of Port-au-Prince's most powerful leaders, Jimmy Chérizier, whose
nickname, by the way, is "Barbecue" ...and I'll let you imagine why.
In short, here we are, peering through the gates of Hell.
I confess to you that in the face of so much anguish, I have no solution, no moral to say
at the end of this video.
And yet, I feel so much frustrated with an international community that, in concrete
terms, does nothing at all, except to make promises and promises...
In October 2022, for example, Henry requested the deployment of foreign military forces
in Port-au-Prince, with the aim of quelling the violent gang clash that had broken out
the previous July in Cité Soleil.
Do you know who answered the call?
Yep, the United States.
A tragicomic outcome for the situation of a nation, Haiti, that can neither rid itself
of its past nor extricate itself from the evils that perennially afflict it and that,
unfortunately, fall on the eleven and a half million Haitians who, every single day, see
their hopes fade more and more.
In Haiti, the stars do not shine.