In Haiti: We have met the enemy, and he is us

For generations in the 18th Century, the second-born sons of French autocratic families customarily shipped out to Haiti to get rich on the sugar and coffee plantations that served the European consumers. And when Haitians liberated themselves from France in 1804, America’s great liberal slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, feared the Haitians would become too good an example for enslaved “Americans.”

Without a tradition of self-governance, liberated Haitians broke up the plantation acreage into small plots. Boodle and corruption flourished as foreigners or native dictators strip-mined Haiti’s virgin forests to pay off government debts. It took the U.S. 58 years even to recognize that “new” country— not until 1862, when Abraham Lincoln followed his conscience.

Now that Haiti has been devastated yet again— this time by an earthquake— we Americans profess ourselves amazed at the sharp contrast between the lush forests of Santo Domingo and the denuded contiguous Haitian territory. When two countries share the same island, we ask ourselves, how can one seem so prosperous while the other seems so poor?

A day after the earthquake, the TV evangelist Pat Robertson blamed the Haitians themselves for making a pact with the devil back in 1804. “They said we will serve you if you get us free from the French,” he claimed on his Christian Broadcasting network. “True story. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

Yet Haiti’s barren waste derived at least in part from foreign devils— from those who cashed in quickly on its lumber, as well as from local efforts to find enough small plots for Haiti’s indigènes.

As recently as World War I, Woodrow Wilson, busy “making the World safe for Democracy,” sent in the Marines to make what was left of Haiti safe for American investments. (His populist secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, confessed his astonishment at “the perfect French of those there Niggers.”) Subsequently we preferred to prop up Haitian dictators like “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc” rather than foster democratic institutions there. Even today, the U.S. maintains similar “enslavement by trade” policies that prevent Haitians from profiting from agricultural and factory employment.

I know it may sound foolish, but the best thing Americans could do about Haiti’s plight right now is not aid, not adoptions, not marshaling pop stars to rattle televised tin cups. It’s learning how long and hard American policies over the past two centuries have damaged these poor people long before the earthquake hit them.

In the wake of the January 12th earthquake, Haiti’s last dictator, the exiled Baby Doc Duvalier, grandly offered his former countrymen $8 million in emergency aid. This faux magnanimous gesture begs a few questions that Americans, from our safer perspective, ought to be raising, to it: Where did Baby Doc get that money? If he can part with $8 million without altering his lifestyle in a French villa, how much more does he have? Above all, who helped him steal it, or at least closed our eyes when he did?

This piece first appeared in Broad Street Review.