Haiti After the Earthquake

by Paul Farmer

  Haiti, an independent nation for more than two centuries, has the worst health indices in the Western hemisphere. Whether we look at malnutrition, maternal mortality, or life expectancy at birth, Haiti is an outlier in the region—not just in comparison with the United States or Canada but also with the more modest economies of Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Such outlier status looms large in any discussion of Haiti’s future health and economic development. (Haitians are not surprisingly tired of their homeland being labeled “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.”) But few agree about the causes of Haiti’s present condition. Simple stories of corruption or ungovernability (although real problems) do little to explain the chronic nature of such problems nor can we invoke the crutch of cultural difference to explain the challenges before Haiti.

  To be credible, and to yield workable recommendations for building Haiti back better, to use Clinton’s optimistic phrase, analysis of Haiti’s current woes must be historically deep and geographically broad. Such an approach may also provide some inoculation against the old and pernicious tendency to blame solely Haitians—and Haitian culture—for their misfortunes. This default logic relies on the erasure of history.1 For many who arrived in Haiti immediately after the quake, history began the moment they got off the plane. But Haitians from all classes will tell visitors that to understand Haiti’s problems, you need to understand its history. As Mark Danner has written:Whether they can read or not, Haiti’s people walk in history, and live in politics. They are independent, proud, fiercely aware of their own singularity. What distinguishes them is a tradition of heroism and a conviction that they are and will remain something distinct, apart—something you can hear in the Creole spoken in the countryside, or the voodoo practiced there, traces of the Africa that the first generation of revolutionaries brought with them on the middle passage.2

  Haiti’s history has been recounted before in a literature of mixed quality. This includes a Haitian bibliography that is quite robust, considering the low literacy rates since independence. In the nineteenth century, Haiti contributed more books per capita than any other country in Latin America. From the end of the revolution in 1803 to the withdrawal of U.S. Marines in 1934, after a nineteen-year occupation, Haitian élites wrote tome after tome in impeccable French about the country’s glories and travails.3 Although books in Haitian Creole, the lingua franca, remain rare, Haitians from all classes seem to agree about the nation’s beginnings: the colonial experience and the fight against slavery constitute the template of modern Haiti.

  The story starts at the close of the fifteenth century. Haiti was the site of Europe’s first New World settlement after one of Columbus’s three ships foundered off the northern coast of Haiti in 1492. The island’s native Taíno population, numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands (some demographers say millions),4 was mostly wiped out within a century of the Columbian exchange by assault from pathogens ranging from slavery to smallpox. When a 1697 treaty ceded the western third of Hispaniola (Columbus’s name for the island called Ayiti by its doomed inhabitants) to France, not a single Taíno remained alive. For those who say Haiti’s history is written in blood, this is the first chapter.

  The second chapter is equally brutal. Although the Spanish began importing slaves from Africa in the first decades of the sixteenth century, it was the French who moved the slave trade into high gear: by the mid-eighteenth century, Haiti was the Americas’ chief port of call for slavers. By 1540 some thirty thousand in chains had reached Haiti’s shores.5 Saint-Domingue—the name given to the French colony on Hispaniola from 1659 until it became the independent nation of Haiti in 1804—became the world’s leading exporter of coffee, sugar, and other tropical produce. It brought in more income for the French, noted Moreau de St-Méry (the chief French chronicler of the era), than all their other colonial possessions combined.6 Moreau de St-Méry’s two-volume treatise wasn’t able to completely sanitize the horrors and excesses of the period. But it was the Haitian slaves who would later write the most damning accounts:Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, after having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup?7

  Revolts were frequent everywhere chattel slavery was practiced. But none had succeeded in ending slavery, much less founding a nation in which slaves would become citizens. In Haiti, the numbers were heavily skewed in favor of the slaves, who accounted for 85 percent of the colony’s population by the time of the French revolution.8 A major uprising in 1791 laid waste to many of the plantations and fields in the north and soon coalesced into a full-scale revolution led by former slaves such as Toussaint Louverture. European armies from all the great powers of the era (and the newborn republic to the north) proved no match for those organized by Louverture. But the slave leader was soon kidnapped in a parley with the French, later dying in a French prison, probably of tuberculosis.

  Such treachery only stiffened the resolve of the Haitians, now under the leadership of the fiery Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who vowed to fight for as long as it took to found an independent nation. It would be the epic battle of the era. In 1801, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, Captain-General Leclerc, to retake the colony. Leclerc sailed at the head one of the largest armadas ever to set forth for the New World; his more than forty thousand troops included not only French soldiers but also German, Polish, Swiss, and Dutch mercenaries. But the European troops fared poorly against the guerilla tactics of the Haitians, as General Leclerc, who later died there (of yellow fever), was to learn. In one of his last letters home, Leclerc wrote that the only remaining tactic was to “destroy all the negroes in the hills, men and women, sparing only children under twelve, destroy half of those living in the plains and leave behind not a single man of color who has worn a uniform—without this the colony will never have peace.”9 Dessalines and his irregulars routed the French and their conscripts by November of 1803. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared Haiti a sovereign nation, the first (and only) one born of a slave revolt. “I have given the French cannibals blood for blood,” he said. “I have avenged America.”10

  The end of slavery in Haiti caused ripples throughout the Americas, from Venezuela to the United States and back to Europe, where plantation slavery had been spawned. Many have observed that most modern human rights movements trace their origins to the fight to end the slave trade and slavery itself. Britons proudly claim that this fight began in their own country, when Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and others used moral suasion and legal and political means to end the British slave trade.11 But the first decisive blow against slavery was struck in Saint-Domingue in 1791, culminating in the defeat of Napoleon’s vast army in the hills and plains of his soon-to-be former colony. For those who doubt the grand aspirations of the victorious slaves—to establish an independent republic free from slavery—we have only to consult the historical record. The discovery, in late March 2010, of the only surviving copy of Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence in the British National Archives leaves no doubt: Haiti’s military leaders used rights language unstintingly. These are Dessalines words:And you, a people so long without good fortune, witness to the oath we take, remember that I counted on your constancy and courage when I threw myself into the career of liberty to fight the despotism and tyranny you had struggled against for 14 years. Remember that I sacrificed everything to rally to your defense; family, children, fortune, and now I am rich only with your liberty; my name has become a horror to all those who want slavery. Despots and tyrants curse the day that I was born. If ever you refused or grumbled while receiving those laws that the spirit guarding your fate dictates to me for your own good, you would deserve the fate of an ungrateful people. But I reject that awful ide
a; you will sustain the liberty that you cherish and support the leader who commands you. Therefore vow before me to live free and independent, and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back in chains. Swear, finally, to pursue forever the traitors and enemies of your independence.12

  If the prize was great, the price paid for it by the Haitians was steep. Dessalines was killed in a power struggle a few years after he penned these stirring words; his former masters orchestrated an economic and diplomatic embargo, the first of many, against the troubled young nation. Hemmed in by the Caribbean’s slave colonies and, to the north, by the only other independent nation in the Americas (which also practiced slavery), the nascent republic was born into a hostile world. Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina summed up the United States’ stance toward Haiti in 1824: “Our policy with regard to Hayti [sic] is plain. We can never acknowledge her independence.... The peace and safety of a large portion of our union forbids us even to discuss [it].”13 Many U.S. statesmen continued calling Haitians “rebel slaves,” and the government refused to recognize Haiti’s existence until President Lincoln did so in 1862.

  It can be reasonably said that no one helped the Haitians on the road to independence, and that many forces, the deliberate policies of their neighbors among them, stymied their growth as a nation. France, as might be expected, was a particularly sore loser—and influential with its allies in the region, especially the United States. Absurdly, the French demanded reparations, and not just for the losses of French plantations but for the losses of their slaves, too. Desperate for trading partners and international recognition, Haitian eaders agreed, in 1825, to pay France 150 million germinal francs.14 Never before or since has a poor but victorious nation indemnified the rich and defeated in this manner. For more than a century, well into the 1950s, the Haitians paid this debt.

  Many adverse events ensued: coups, invasions, military occupations, dictatorships, epidemics. Let me quote Danner’s recent essay once more because it sums up the effects of these national beginnings on the course of Haitian politics:The new nation, its fields burned, its plantation manors pillaged, its towns devastated by apocalyptic war, was crushed by the burden of these astronomical reparations, payments that, in one form or another, strangled its economy for more than a century. It was in this dark aftermath of war, in the shadow of isolation and contempt, that Haiti’s peculiar political system took shape, mirroring in distorted form, like a wax model placed too close to the fire, the slave society of colonial times.15

  Diverse claims of causality are now made to explain Haiti’s poverty and inequality. But the nagging sense that Haiti had paid dearly for achieving, however briefly, the goals of liberty, fraternity, and equality for all is the most commonly heard explanation in Haiti. “We’re still paying the price for defeating the architects of slavery,” a young Haitian recently told me, and most others would likely agree. The French debt looms large in internal discussions but is scarcely remembered beyond Haiti’s borders.16 How much money went from the former slave colony to one of the richest countries in the world is debated, of course, as is the significance of this transfer to the parlous state of modern Haiti. One scholarly history, written in 1953 by the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, blames the local élites for accepting the 1825 agreement: “From a country whose expenditures and receipts were, until then, balanced, the incompetence and frivolity of the men in power had made a nation burdened with debts and entangled in a web of impossible financial obligations.”17

  Regardless of how blame is doled out, Haiti was not, as some have said, cut off from the world in the nineteenth century. The fledgling republic actively supported the anticolonial project in the Americas, helping to bankroll and supply Simón Bolívar, for example. Its economy, though moving away from its slave-labor roots, was still wedged in the tight and unequal embrace of international commerce. The country had been redivided into smaller holdings on which peasant farmers continued to grow—in addition to food for their families and local markets—coffee, cotton, and sugar for export.

  During these first decades after independence, a tiny élite began consolidating control over the busy ports in the capital. Recurrent palace coups, often with foreign sponsorship, fueled the centralization of power in Port-au-Prince. The British, Americans, and Germans traded briskly with the Haitians, even though they had no formal diplomatic relationship. The subaltern status that led to the disastrous treaty of 1825 continued to shape trade arrangements favorable to the blan, as Haitians now termed the world beyond their shores. From the late nineteenth century on, the United States kept gunboats in or near Haitian waters. In 1915, after yet another internal coup, we sent in the Marines.

  The nineteen-year U.S. occupation of Haiti—like the French debt, remembered by all within Haiti and few without—was justified in the usual manner, with a host of contradictory claims. Just as the “peace and safety of our shores” was the early nineteenth-century reason for refusing to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty, so was early twentieth-century Haiti’s mayhem held to be infectious. But President Wilson may have put it more honestly when he said, “control of the customs houses constituted the essence of the whole affair.”18 U.S. banks took over Haiti’s treasury. The Marines also disbanded the army, the last, tattered remnant of the revolutionary army, long bereft of a non-Haitian enemy.

  The new rulers cobbled together by the Marines would also lack for nondomestic targets: foreign occupation engendered local dissidence and fierce resistance. By 1919, when the United States was distracted by the closing chapters of the war in Europe, simmering resentment boiled over and rebellion erupted throughout the country. The violence was fiercest in rural regions, where forced labor had been used to build roads and other public works. Thousands were killed as the Marines and their newly formed Haitian constabulary sought to suppress the rebellion. Haitian historians (such as Roger Gaillard) estimate that 15,000 were killed or seriously injured, and internal U.S. reports put the numbers in the thousands, too.19 Such news disturbed pacifist groups in the United States, which brought attention to the U.S.–Haitian conflict, if only after the rebellion had been suppressed. For example, Emily Greene Balch, a writer and peace advocate, repeatedly called for an end to the occupation of Haiti.20 (She won the Nobel Peace Prize for these and other efforts some years later.) The affair stained the reputation of the Marine Corps, even according to its internal assessments.21 On October 14, 1920, the New York Times noted an in-house investigation conducted by Brigadier General George Barnett, former Commandant General of the Marine Corps, who concluded that 3,250 “natives” had been killed:On 2 September, 1919 [General Barnett] wrote a confidential letter to Colonel John H. Russell, commanding the Marine forces in Haiti, bringing to the latter’s attention evidence that “practically indiscriminate killings of natives had gone on for some time,” and calling for a thorough investigation.... “I think,” General Barnett wrote to Colonel Russell, “this is the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps, and I don’t want anything of the kind to happen again.”22

  Rebellion aside, Haiti, along with much of the Caribbean basin, was firmly in the U.S. sphere of influence by the 1930s. Naked force was no stranger to many of the small island republics surrounding Haiti, including the Dominican Republic (to the east) and Cuba (to the west). Most Americans knew little of these matters: there wasn’t much appetite, during the Depression, for such foreign adventures. Although President Roosevelt was no isolationist, he too favored ending the occupation. (During his campaign, Roosevelt had once boasted of learning a thing or two about government by writing Haiti’s constitution.23) In 1934, Roosevelt made his second trip to Haitian waters to announce the withdrawal of U.S. troops. (He was the first and only U.S. president to visit northern Haiti until Bill Clinton did so just before the quake.)

  The U.S. government had little intention of leaving a power vacuum in Haiti. As local factions struggled to control the state, and as another world war
was brewing in Europe and Asia, U.S. leadership cast its lot firmly with the military and economic élite. This pattern was repeated throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where military-civilian élites were rapidly assuming greater power and an increasing share of scarce resources. Throughout the region, participatory democracy broke down; elections served as charades to showcase power and boost meager legitimacy; and puppet régimes and military dictatorships became the rule.

  Thus did the U.S.-trained army and a small number of families hold the upper hand in Haiti until 1957, when François Duvalier was “selected” (as Haitians say) president in fraudulent elections. Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) built up his own militia and began using terror liberally to tighten his control over the country. Wave after wave of refugees, including professionals and other élites, left Haiti for safer shores. Graham Greene pilloried Papa Doc in The Comedians; Duvalier, idly banning the book, vowed to remain in office until the end of his days.24 He did just that, naming his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), as his successor before he died in 1971. Baby Doc held onto power until 1986, when the Duvaliers left Haiti for gilded exile in France.