Barry Lyndon
22nd September 2010, 07:41
“Poverty today[in Haiti] is the result of a 200-year plot. In 1803 and in 2003, it is the same plot. Do you understand my message?”
-Jean Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, 2003.
The earthquake of January 2010 focused the world’s attention on the tiny island nation of Haiti. The tragedy of the natural disaster was made worse by the fact that Haiti was already an deeply impoverished and politically unstable country. A question that arose in many minds, seeing the pictures of the devastation, was why is Haiti so poor and backward to begin with? The mainstream media in the United States rarely answered that question in any depth, which is a shame, given the central role that the United States has historically and currently played in the answer to that very question. This essay will try to sketch out the contours of the answer. As to the question of what an analysis of the history of Haiti has to do with the history of labor, the short answer is everything. Haiti’s history is an inspiring example of what working people are capable of winning against enormous odds. But it is also a story of the dire consequences of losing that same struggle. Both the student of labor history and the labor activist must appreciate the importance of internationalism in securing the freedom of the workers everywhere, of every stripe.
Haiti is part of the island that Columbus named Hispaniola when he first landed in the New World in 1492. In only 20 years the population of Arawak Native Americans, numbering three million when Columbus landed, were reduced to 27,000 by Spanish diseases, forced labor and massacres, and was soon afterward eliminated entirely, clearing the way for European conquest. By the beginning of the 1700’s, France had colonized the western third of Hispaniola, leaving the rest of the island to Spain, which is the Dominican Republic today. The colony that the French named Saint-Domingue quickly became the richest colony in the world, as the French found the climate and land ideal for growing sugar and coffee. By 1790, Saint-Domingue alone was producing nearly half of all the sugar consumed in Europe and three-fifths of the coffee. The luxurious lifestyle of the Creole aristocrats who owned the sugar and coffee plantations made Saint-Domingue known as the “Pearl of the Antilles”.
But this prosperity was created on the backs of hundreds of thousands of black slaves shipped in from Africa to work on the plantations. If life for the white masters was a paradise, theirs was a living hell. The average life expectancy for a field slave arriving from Africa was four to six years before they were literally worked to death. This meant that by some estimates, the slave population of half a million had to be almost entirely replaced every twenty years by new arrivals from Africa. The entire colony was, in effect, a large open-air concentration camp. (1)
The white slave owners showed appalling cruelty to the blacks while they were alive. Any attempt to rebel or escape was met with savage punishment. According to French colonial court records, such punishments included flogging, branding, rape, amputation, forcing the slaves to eat human feces, stuffing them in a barrel with nails pointing inside and rolling them down a mountain, shoving gunpowder into their rectum and blowing them up, and endless variations.
Sometimes it was for a minor infraction: a visitor from Paris to Saint-Domingue wrote in a 1790 letter:
“A woman who I have seen, a young woman, one of the most beautiful on the island, gave a formal dinner. When a platter with cakes had not turned out well was served, she became infuriated and ordered her Negro cook seized and thrown into a furnace in which the fire was still burning. This horrible termagant, whose name I withhold out of consideration for her family, still daily receives the homage of society, for she has wealth and beauty” (2)
In Voltaire’s Candide, a slave shows the story’s hero his amputated arm and leg, declaring: “At this price you eat sugar in Europe.”
In 1789, the workers and peasants of France rose up against the corrupt and hated monarchy and overthrew it. The shockwaves traveled across the Atlantic and reached the ears of the slaves. Seeing that the whites had overthrown and beheaded their aristocratic masters, the black slaves resolved to also abolish ‘the aristocracy of the skin’. In August 1791, thousands of slaves in Saint-Domingue rose up in a furious mass revolt, murdering their masters and their families, torching the hated plantations. The rebellion came under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Unlike the leaders of many slave revolts before, Toussaint was literate, having taught himself to read and write as a house slave. He read many books on history and politics, and knew of the American and French revolutions. It was his wish to apply those ideals of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite to the slaves. Toussaint drilled the rebelling slaves into a large, organized guerilla army that was unstoppable. He defeated the French expeditions that were sent to put down the revolt. He defeated the armies of Spain and Britain who were trying to take advantage of the situation by seizing France’s colony for themselves.
In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte made an effort to restore slavery by sending a fleet of 86 ships carrying 40,000 of his finest troops. The French applied scorched earth tactics, but were still unable to destroy the Haitian rebel army. The French then invited Toussaint L’ Ouverture to a peace conference where they treacherously kidnapped him and sent him to a prison in the Swiss Alps. His wife and children put on ship to Guadeloupe, where they were sold back into slavery. Toussaint warned Napoleon that, “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots as they are numerous and deep.” (3) He was right. This foul betrayal only inspired the rebels to fight harder. In desperation, Napoleon authorized that the entire black population over the age of 12 was to be exterminated and replaced by new slaves from Africa. A Haitian ambassador and historian describes the methods used:
“Rochambeau[The commander of French troops in Saint-Domigue], accompanied by the French Generals Pageot and Lavalette, undertook to subdue them[the rebels]. His arrival at Jacmel was signalized by a horrible crime: by his orders, about 100 natives, who were only suspected of having little zeal for France, were thrown into the hold of a man-of-war, the hatchways of which were tightly closed; the men were then suffocated by the fumes of the ignited sulphur, their corpses being afterward thrown into the sea” (4)
As many as 100,000 black men, women, and children may have been murdered in these makeshift gas chambers, 140 years before Hitler’s Final Solution.
In spite of such tactics, the unrelenting resistance of the rebels decimated the French forces. The heroism and morale of the black soldiers was incredible. A French officer reported that he had “seen a solid column, torn apart by the shot of four cannons, advance without taking a step backward. And they advanced singing! Can you imagine the effect of that song-two thousands voices raised in unison with the cannon as a bass?”(5). Many European soldiers(including an entire battalion of Polish troops) defected to the other side, so strong was their disgust with fighting for slavery. In November 1803, the rebel army under the command of Toussaint’s lieutenant Dessalines decisively defeated the French army in the battle of Vertieres. In January 1804, the French surrendered and Saint Domingue became the independent country of Haiti, the first black republic.
The victory of slaves over the most powerful army in Europe threw slave owners everywhere into an unprecedented panic. The French ambassador to the United States wrote to then U.S. secretary of state James Madison in 1805: “The existence of a Negro people in arms, occupying a country it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations.”(6) President Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, was terrified that the Haitian Revolution could spread to the United States itself. Therefore, the United States and all the European powers imposed a crippling economic blockade on Haiti. The United States did not recognize the Haitian Republic for sixty years. As a condition to resume trade with Europe and virtually the rest of the world, Haiti in 1825 was forced to pay France 125 million francs in reparations for the property lost by French slave owners (this is the actual amount, not adjusted for inflation). This “debt” was not fully paid off until 1947. By the end of the 19th century, 80% of Haiti’s economy was devoted to paying off its debts to foreign powers. (7)
Haiti’s increasingly powerful neighbor to the north, following in the footsteps of Jefferson, was determined to ensure that Haiti would never be allowed to become a self-sufficient and successful country, so dangerous was the mere existence of an independent black nation. In 1915, a popular coffee field-workers uprising erupted in Haiti and threatened to bring a government to power that would cancel Haiti’s debts to the United States and France. In response, the United States Marines invaded and occupied Haiti for nineteen years. In that time, the country was openly run like a colony. The American military officers and businessmen, overwhelmingly from the South, exported Jim Crow to the Caribbean. The central business district in Port-Au Prince and other towns garrisoned by U.S. troops were closed off to blacks that were not serving the white Americans. To add insult to injury, the Haitian constitution was re-written on an American battle-ship anchored in the harbor of Port-Au-Prince by the assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The document stipulated that foreign businesses had the right to purchase land in Haiti, ensuring further economic subservience. To make the flow of Haitian agricultural goods to the ports for export easier for American business, the U.S. authorities implemented forced labor to build roads. This blatant step back towards slavery and white domination galvanized the Haitian workers and peasants to fight back, using methods ranging from strikes to riots to guerilla warfare. Guerillas, known as ‘caco’ fighters, launched ambushes and attacks on the U.S. military. Their leader, known as Charlemagne Peralte, was crucified and his photograph was circulated to terrorize the Haitians into submission(8). It only galvanized resistance because his pose in the photograph resembled Christ on the cross. The rebels were described as ‘bandits’ by the US military authorities- much like we have heard about the US military forces dealing with ‘looters’ in Haiti, or for that matter New Orleans.
The historian Hans Schmidt describes the peasant’s head on confrontation with the United States occupiers in 1929:
“Fifteen hundred angry peasants, armed with stones, machetes, and clubs, surrounded a detachment of twenty marines armed with rifles and automatic weapons. The marines had gone out to meet the peasants, who were advancing on the town intent on securing the release of prisoners arrested the day before and on airing various grievances against the Occupation, including complaints about alcohol, tobacco, and other taxes. Marine airplanes had dropped bombs in Cayes harbor in an attempt to awe the local population into submissiveness, but this demonstration apparently had the undesired effect of creating terror and frenetic excitement…The State Department announced that the Haitians first threw stones and then rushed the marines. In any case, the marines opened fire at point-blank range and dispersed the mob”(9)
Urban Haitian students engaged in strikes in solidarity with their rural comrades, making life difficult for U.S. administrators. The de-facto US governor of Haiti, Brigadier General John H. Russell, reported to President Herbert Hoover in 1930: “There was one young man especially in whom I had great trust, in fact, it hurt me so badly at that time I almost cried, he swore he would go down and restrain the boys in their action and then became a leader” (10). Russell’s financial advisor expressed frustration with the failure of the Haitian police to help the marines, saying they “were just dumb, low-class nigger boys who had no idea of what to do to handle an angry crowd” (11).
The ‘handling’ of Haitians who desired their freedom led to the deaths of 15-30,000 people at the hands of the occupation authorities over the course of 19 years.
In 1934, the US military left, but domination of the Haitian economy by US business continued. A long line of dictators from the ranks of the brutal US-trained Haitian puppet army persisted, culminating in the hideous regimes of ‘Papa Doc’ and his son ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier from 1957-86. Their brutal secret police force, the Tontons Macoutes, is estimated to have killed 50,000 people in those twenty-nine years and to have tortured hundreds of thousands more, with US military and diplomatic support at every stage. It was not uncommon for the Macoutes to dump the corpses of their victims in the streets and alleyways for everyone to see, just to remind the average Haitian who was boss.(12) In 1971 American battleships anchored in Port-Au-Prince harbor once again to ensure a smooth transition of power from the father despot to his son. Shortly afterward “Baby Doc” signed on to the ‘American Plan’(this was its actual name), which restructured Haiti’s entire economy. In reaction to history of Haiti’s long tradition of resistance from agricultural workers, Haiti’s cities were flooded with cheap US goods, drawing hundreds of thousands of Haitian peasants to Port-Au-Prince and other cities in search of work at plants set up by K-Mart and Disney, where they were put to work at 11 cents an hour making pajamas and T-Shirts. This dramatic economic restructuring of Haiti is a major reason why the death toll in the earthquake was so high-the congestion of large numbers of former agricultural workers and their families in rickety urban slums created an effective death trap. (13)
In 1986, a widespread popular uprising forced the Duvalier’s to give up their power. The oligarchs were saved from their people’s wrath by the US military once again, who provided them safe passage to the French Riviera on a specially provided cargo plane.
In the period following the fall of the dictatorship, a grassroots organization that was a combination of labor unions, women’s groups, and religious organizations coalesced into a broad-based left-wing Catholic organization known as Famni Lavalas, or ‘The Flood’. They ran for president a Catholic liberation theology priest by the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He won with 67% of the vote in one of Haiti’s first truly democratic elections in 1990. He had extensive plans for restructuring Haiti’s society and economy, making it self-reliant and giving the workers of Haiti themselves a role in the rebuilding of Haiti’s society. Randall Robinson, an African-American advisor to Aristide, describes the vision that Aristide had in mind for his country:
“ ‘Investing in Human Beings' [was a book that] laid out the [Aristide] government's plan for ameliorating the country's gripping poverty. It would be the first time in Haiti's two-hundred-year history that an effort of this kind would be seriously attempted. The plan envisioned developing the country from the ground up. ‘We started at the base with the people;' the president had said. The country had been divided into 365 rural sections, each to have, minimally, a primary school, a health clinic, and a business component, usually a cooperative of one sort or another, made workable by small loans and microcredits. The three components were to be mutually reinforcing. The black poor for the first time were to be given hope and a well-described role in the economic rescue of their country. Haiti had suffered from intractable illiteracy. Under the plan, raising the national literacy rate was to be an objective of primary importance.” (14)
Many of these programs, when implemented by the Lavalas government, met with considerable success. There was an extensive land reform program in which thousands of acres of land were distributed to thousands of peasant families, for which they received heavy equipment, fertilizers and tools from the government. The minimum wage was raised in 1995 and doubled in 2003. The community stores that were set up made basic food much more accessible to the average Haitian and in large part because of this the malnutrition rate had dropped from 63% in 1991 to 51% by 2003. The government-sponsored clinics, with help from Cuban doctors, enabled the infant mortality rate to drop from 125 to 110 in 1,000 in less then a decade. 20% of the government’s budget was devoted to education, more then any government in Haiti had spent before, setting up community schools combined with meal centers for poor peasant children. The illiteracy rate fell from 85-55% in 1996-2003. Taken together, this was one of the most remarkable reductions of poverty in a Third World country in recent history. (15)
These gains were infuriating for the Haitian elite and their patrons in Washington, who saw the poor, ignorant, politically helpless Haitian workforce that they depended upon to super-exploit slipping away from their control. As Robinson explains in his book:
“Happy with things as they were (particularly the nearly limitless availability of cheap, unlettered black labor), the powerful white and mixed-race business community opposed the plan on principle, as well as virtually all other programs that the government undertook. Elites were discouraged by the invidious social prohibitions of their class from judging any government program on its merits alone. Race and class were the warped lenses through which they myopically measured every policy, every attitude, every living, laboring soul in Haiti. They were invariably heard to say with bigoted consistency: You can't go there. You can't meet them. You can't support that. You'd be helping the government. For the government was not to be helped under any circumstance, ever. This was the law of the landed, the moneyed, the white, the light, the destructively privileged, the Pétion-Ville socialite heard berating her black tile setter who, heaven forbid, had placed the pretty ceramic square slightly awry: "You're stupid! You smell! Kongo!" Though Aristide represented the overwhelming majority of the Haitian people, for the high-born he was little more than a peyizan, a peasant from the outside. For this small minority of privileged Haitians, American support never faltered. Washington had done everything in its power to guarantee the government's failure.” (16)
When Aristide also began demanding reparations from the United States and France, enough was enough. Aristide was swiftly overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup de tat in September 1991, just nine months after taking office. Thousands of his supporters were killed and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee(17). In 1994, with the support of the Clinton administration, Aristide was allowed to take office once again on the condition that he accept IMF and World Bank ‘free-market’ policies in Haiti. Within a few years, however, Aristide was again re-elected back into power in 2000, this time with 90% of the vote. When he began to revive his attempts to pursue his populist policies, the U.S. and its oligarchic allies took a two-tiered approach. They funneled millions in so-called ‘aid money’ into anti-Aristide radio and TV stations, as well as reactionary anti-Lavalas political organizations. They also started arming paramilitary thugs who supported the old oligarchy to overthrow the president. In February 2004, just a few weeks after Haiti commemorated the 200th anniversary of its great revolution, its democratically elected president was ousted by a combination of a right-wing paramilitary coup and a direct United States military intervention. This time, so that Washington would be absolutely sure that Aristide wouldn’t be a thorn in their side ever again, he was kidnapped and transported on a U.S. plane to South Africa, where he still resides in exile. (18)
In the aftermath of the earthquake, thousands of U.S. troops were again being deployed to Haiti, to supposedly ‘assist’ the relief efforts there. Keeping in mind Haiti’s history, this was with the added irony of being ordered in by America’s first black president. One wonders if what follows from that is a awakening of new resistance and liberation on the part of the Haitian people, or a further tightening of the shackles of the 21st-century version of slavery, neo-liberalism. Haiti is an example for all of humanity of what a fearless and determined people can achieve, and how the propertied classes will stop at nothing to preserve their privileges. And that is why everyone who longs for a better world and the liberation of the working class should learn from the example of Haiti, and stand with its downtrodden people and against those who attempt to rob and crush them.
SOURCES
1. Korngold, Ralph. Citizen Toussaint, New York, Hill and Wang, 1944.
p. 33.
2. Griffiths, Barbara Ann. Black Patriot and Martyr: Toussaint of Haiti. New York City: Julian Messner, 1970, p. 32.
3. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York City, Random House Inc., 1963, p. 334.
4. Leger, J.N. Haiti: Her History and her detractors. New York and Washington, University of Toronto Press, 1907, p. 131.
5. Griffiths, p. 181.
6. Hallward, Peter. Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, London, Verso, 2007, p.14.
7. Hallward, p. 12.
8. Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-34. Rahway, N,J., Rutgers University Press, 1971, p. 102-03.
9. Schmidt, p. 199.
10. Schmidt, p. 197.
11. Schmidt, p. 198.
12. Hallward, p. 15.
13. Hallward, p. 5-10.
14. Robinson, Randall. Haiti: An Unbroken Agony. Philadelphia, Basic Civitas Books, 2007, p. 133
15. Lendman, Steven. “Achievements under Aristide, Now Lost”, Z-Net, December 16, 2005. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Haiti/Achievements_Aristide_Lost.html
16. Robinson, p. 133.
17. Hallward, p. 40
18. Hallward, p. 200-249.
-Jean Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, 2003.
The earthquake of January 2010 focused the world’s attention on the tiny island nation of Haiti. The tragedy of the natural disaster was made worse by the fact that Haiti was already an deeply impoverished and politically unstable country. A question that arose in many minds, seeing the pictures of the devastation, was why is Haiti so poor and backward to begin with? The mainstream media in the United States rarely answered that question in any depth, which is a shame, given the central role that the United States has historically and currently played in the answer to that very question. This essay will try to sketch out the contours of the answer. As to the question of what an analysis of the history of Haiti has to do with the history of labor, the short answer is everything. Haiti’s history is an inspiring example of what working people are capable of winning against enormous odds. But it is also a story of the dire consequences of losing that same struggle. Both the student of labor history and the labor activist must appreciate the importance of internationalism in securing the freedom of the workers everywhere, of every stripe.
Haiti is part of the island that Columbus named Hispaniola when he first landed in the New World in 1492. In only 20 years the population of Arawak Native Americans, numbering three million when Columbus landed, were reduced to 27,000 by Spanish diseases, forced labor and massacres, and was soon afterward eliminated entirely, clearing the way for European conquest. By the beginning of the 1700’s, France had colonized the western third of Hispaniola, leaving the rest of the island to Spain, which is the Dominican Republic today. The colony that the French named Saint-Domingue quickly became the richest colony in the world, as the French found the climate and land ideal for growing sugar and coffee. By 1790, Saint-Domingue alone was producing nearly half of all the sugar consumed in Europe and three-fifths of the coffee. The luxurious lifestyle of the Creole aristocrats who owned the sugar and coffee plantations made Saint-Domingue known as the “Pearl of the Antilles”.
But this prosperity was created on the backs of hundreds of thousands of black slaves shipped in from Africa to work on the plantations. If life for the white masters was a paradise, theirs was a living hell. The average life expectancy for a field slave arriving from Africa was four to six years before they were literally worked to death. This meant that by some estimates, the slave population of half a million had to be almost entirely replaced every twenty years by new arrivals from Africa. The entire colony was, in effect, a large open-air concentration camp. (1)
The white slave owners showed appalling cruelty to the blacks while they were alive. Any attempt to rebel or escape was met with savage punishment. According to French colonial court records, such punishments included flogging, branding, rape, amputation, forcing the slaves to eat human feces, stuffing them in a barrel with nails pointing inside and rolling them down a mountain, shoving gunpowder into their rectum and blowing them up, and endless variations.
Sometimes it was for a minor infraction: a visitor from Paris to Saint-Domingue wrote in a 1790 letter:
“A woman who I have seen, a young woman, one of the most beautiful on the island, gave a formal dinner. When a platter with cakes had not turned out well was served, she became infuriated and ordered her Negro cook seized and thrown into a furnace in which the fire was still burning. This horrible termagant, whose name I withhold out of consideration for her family, still daily receives the homage of society, for she has wealth and beauty” (2)
In Voltaire’s Candide, a slave shows the story’s hero his amputated arm and leg, declaring: “At this price you eat sugar in Europe.”
In 1789, the workers and peasants of France rose up against the corrupt and hated monarchy and overthrew it. The shockwaves traveled across the Atlantic and reached the ears of the slaves. Seeing that the whites had overthrown and beheaded their aristocratic masters, the black slaves resolved to also abolish ‘the aristocracy of the skin’. In August 1791, thousands of slaves in Saint-Domingue rose up in a furious mass revolt, murdering their masters and their families, torching the hated plantations. The rebellion came under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Unlike the leaders of many slave revolts before, Toussaint was literate, having taught himself to read and write as a house slave. He read many books on history and politics, and knew of the American and French revolutions. It was his wish to apply those ideals of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite to the slaves. Toussaint drilled the rebelling slaves into a large, organized guerilla army that was unstoppable. He defeated the French expeditions that were sent to put down the revolt. He defeated the armies of Spain and Britain who were trying to take advantage of the situation by seizing France’s colony for themselves.
In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte made an effort to restore slavery by sending a fleet of 86 ships carrying 40,000 of his finest troops. The French applied scorched earth tactics, but were still unable to destroy the Haitian rebel army. The French then invited Toussaint L’ Ouverture to a peace conference where they treacherously kidnapped him and sent him to a prison in the Swiss Alps. His wife and children put on ship to Guadeloupe, where they were sold back into slavery. Toussaint warned Napoleon that, “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots as they are numerous and deep.” (3) He was right. This foul betrayal only inspired the rebels to fight harder. In desperation, Napoleon authorized that the entire black population over the age of 12 was to be exterminated and replaced by new slaves from Africa. A Haitian ambassador and historian describes the methods used:
“Rochambeau[The commander of French troops in Saint-Domigue], accompanied by the French Generals Pageot and Lavalette, undertook to subdue them[the rebels]. His arrival at Jacmel was signalized by a horrible crime: by his orders, about 100 natives, who were only suspected of having little zeal for France, were thrown into the hold of a man-of-war, the hatchways of which were tightly closed; the men were then suffocated by the fumes of the ignited sulphur, their corpses being afterward thrown into the sea” (4)
As many as 100,000 black men, women, and children may have been murdered in these makeshift gas chambers, 140 years before Hitler’s Final Solution.
In spite of such tactics, the unrelenting resistance of the rebels decimated the French forces. The heroism and morale of the black soldiers was incredible. A French officer reported that he had “seen a solid column, torn apart by the shot of four cannons, advance without taking a step backward. And they advanced singing! Can you imagine the effect of that song-two thousands voices raised in unison with the cannon as a bass?”(5). Many European soldiers(including an entire battalion of Polish troops) defected to the other side, so strong was their disgust with fighting for slavery. In November 1803, the rebel army under the command of Toussaint’s lieutenant Dessalines decisively defeated the French army in the battle of Vertieres. In January 1804, the French surrendered and Saint Domingue became the independent country of Haiti, the first black republic.
The victory of slaves over the most powerful army in Europe threw slave owners everywhere into an unprecedented panic. The French ambassador to the United States wrote to then U.S. secretary of state James Madison in 1805: “The existence of a Negro people in arms, occupying a country it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations.”(6) President Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, was terrified that the Haitian Revolution could spread to the United States itself. Therefore, the United States and all the European powers imposed a crippling economic blockade on Haiti. The United States did not recognize the Haitian Republic for sixty years. As a condition to resume trade with Europe and virtually the rest of the world, Haiti in 1825 was forced to pay France 125 million francs in reparations for the property lost by French slave owners (this is the actual amount, not adjusted for inflation). This “debt” was not fully paid off until 1947. By the end of the 19th century, 80% of Haiti’s economy was devoted to paying off its debts to foreign powers. (7)
Haiti’s increasingly powerful neighbor to the north, following in the footsteps of Jefferson, was determined to ensure that Haiti would never be allowed to become a self-sufficient and successful country, so dangerous was the mere existence of an independent black nation. In 1915, a popular coffee field-workers uprising erupted in Haiti and threatened to bring a government to power that would cancel Haiti’s debts to the United States and France. In response, the United States Marines invaded and occupied Haiti for nineteen years. In that time, the country was openly run like a colony. The American military officers and businessmen, overwhelmingly from the South, exported Jim Crow to the Caribbean. The central business district in Port-Au Prince and other towns garrisoned by U.S. troops were closed off to blacks that were not serving the white Americans. To add insult to injury, the Haitian constitution was re-written on an American battle-ship anchored in the harbor of Port-Au-Prince by the assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The document stipulated that foreign businesses had the right to purchase land in Haiti, ensuring further economic subservience. To make the flow of Haitian agricultural goods to the ports for export easier for American business, the U.S. authorities implemented forced labor to build roads. This blatant step back towards slavery and white domination galvanized the Haitian workers and peasants to fight back, using methods ranging from strikes to riots to guerilla warfare. Guerillas, known as ‘caco’ fighters, launched ambushes and attacks on the U.S. military. Their leader, known as Charlemagne Peralte, was crucified and his photograph was circulated to terrorize the Haitians into submission(8). It only galvanized resistance because his pose in the photograph resembled Christ on the cross. The rebels were described as ‘bandits’ by the US military authorities- much like we have heard about the US military forces dealing with ‘looters’ in Haiti, or for that matter New Orleans.
The historian Hans Schmidt describes the peasant’s head on confrontation with the United States occupiers in 1929:
“Fifteen hundred angry peasants, armed with stones, machetes, and clubs, surrounded a detachment of twenty marines armed with rifles and automatic weapons. The marines had gone out to meet the peasants, who were advancing on the town intent on securing the release of prisoners arrested the day before and on airing various grievances against the Occupation, including complaints about alcohol, tobacco, and other taxes. Marine airplanes had dropped bombs in Cayes harbor in an attempt to awe the local population into submissiveness, but this demonstration apparently had the undesired effect of creating terror and frenetic excitement…The State Department announced that the Haitians first threw stones and then rushed the marines. In any case, the marines opened fire at point-blank range and dispersed the mob”(9)
Urban Haitian students engaged in strikes in solidarity with their rural comrades, making life difficult for U.S. administrators. The de-facto US governor of Haiti, Brigadier General John H. Russell, reported to President Herbert Hoover in 1930: “There was one young man especially in whom I had great trust, in fact, it hurt me so badly at that time I almost cried, he swore he would go down and restrain the boys in their action and then became a leader” (10). Russell’s financial advisor expressed frustration with the failure of the Haitian police to help the marines, saying they “were just dumb, low-class nigger boys who had no idea of what to do to handle an angry crowd” (11).
The ‘handling’ of Haitians who desired their freedom led to the deaths of 15-30,000 people at the hands of the occupation authorities over the course of 19 years.
In 1934, the US military left, but domination of the Haitian economy by US business continued. A long line of dictators from the ranks of the brutal US-trained Haitian puppet army persisted, culminating in the hideous regimes of ‘Papa Doc’ and his son ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier from 1957-86. Their brutal secret police force, the Tontons Macoutes, is estimated to have killed 50,000 people in those twenty-nine years and to have tortured hundreds of thousands more, with US military and diplomatic support at every stage. It was not uncommon for the Macoutes to dump the corpses of their victims in the streets and alleyways for everyone to see, just to remind the average Haitian who was boss.(12) In 1971 American battleships anchored in Port-Au-Prince harbor once again to ensure a smooth transition of power from the father despot to his son. Shortly afterward “Baby Doc” signed on to the ‘American Plan’(this was its actual name), which restructured Haiti’s entire economy. In reaction to history of Haiti’s long tradition of resistance from agricultural workers, Haiti’s cities were flooded with cheap US goods, drawing hundreds of thousands of Haitian peasants to Port-Au-Prince and other cities in search of work at plants set up by K-Mart and Disney, where they were put to work at 11 cents an hour making pajamas and T-Shirts. This dramatic economic restructuring of Haiti is a major reason why the death toll in the earthquake was so high-the congestion of large numbers of former agricultural workers and their families in rickety urban slums created an effective death trap. (13)
In 1986, a widespread popular uprising forced the Duvalier’s to give up their power. The oligarchs were saved from their people’s wrath by the US military once again, who provided them safe passage to the French Riviera on a specially provided cargo plane.
In the period following the fall of the dictatorship, a grassroots organization that was a combination of labor unions, women’s groups, and religious organizations coalesced into a broad-based left-wing Catholic organization known as Famni Lavalas, or ‘The Flood’. They ran for president a Catholic liberation theology priest by the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He won with 67% of the vote in one of Haiti’s first truly democratic elections in 1990. He had extensive plans for restructuring Haiti’s society and economy, making it self-reliant and giving the workers of Haiti themselves a role in the rebuilding of Haiti’s society. Randall Robinson, an African-American advisor to Aristide, describes the vision that Aristide had in mind for his country:
“ ‘Investing in Human Beings' [was a book that] laid out the [Aristide] government's plan for ameliorating the country's gripping poverty. It would be the first time in Haiti's two-hundred-year history that an effort of this kind would be seriously attempted. The plan envisioned developing the country from the ground up. ‘We started at the base with the people;' the president had said. The country had been divided into 365 rural sections, each to have, minimally, a primary school, a health clinic, and a business component, usually a cooperative of one sort or another, made workable by small loans and microcredits. The three components were to be mutually reinforcing. The black poor for the first time were to be given hope and a well-described role in the economic rescue of their country. Haiti had suffered from intractable illiteracy. Under the plan, raising the national literacy rate was to be an objective of primary importance.” (14)
Many of these programs, when implemented by the Lavalas government, met with considerable success. There was an extensive land reform program in which thousands of acres of land were distributed to thousands of peasant families, for which they received heavy equipment, fertilizers and tools from the government. The minimum wage was raised in 1995 and doubled in 2003. The community stores that were set up made basic food much more accessible to the average Haitian and in large part because of this the malnutrition rate had dropped from 63% in 1991 to 51% by 2003. The government-sponsored clinics, with help from Cuban doctors, enabled the infant mortality rate to drop from 125 to 110 in 1,000 in less then a decade. 20% of the government’s budget was devoted to education, more then any government in Haiti had spent before, setting up community schools combined with meal centers for poor peasant children. The illiteracy rate fell from 85-55% in 1996-2003. Taken together, this was one of the most remarkable reductions of poverty in a Third World country in recent history. (15)
These gains were infuriating for the Haitian elite and their patrons in Washington, who saw the poor, ignorant, politically helpless Haitian workforce that they depended upon to super-exploit slipping away from their control. As Robinson explains in his book:
“Happy with things as they were (particularly the nearly limitless availability of cheap, unlettered black labor), the powerful white and mixed-race business community opposed the plan on principle, as well as virtually all other programs that the government undertook. Elites were discouraged by the invidious social prohibitions of their class from judging any government program on its merits alone. Race and class were the warped lenses through which they myopically measured every policy, every attitude, every living, laboring soul in Haiti. They were invariably heard to say with bigoted consistency: You can't go there. You can't meet them. You can't support that. You'd be helping the government. For the government was not to be helped under any circumstance, ever. This was the law of the landed, the moneyed, the white, the light, the destructively privileged, the Pétion-Ville socialite heard berating her black tile setter who, heaven forbid, had placed the pretty ceramic square slightly awry: "You're stupid! You smell! Kongo!" Though Aristide represented the overwhelming majority of the Haitian people, for the high-born he was little more than a peyizan, a peasant from the outside. For this small minority of privileged Haitians, American support never faltered. Washington had done everything in its power to guarantee the government's failure.” (16)
When Aristide also began demanding reparations from the United States and France, enough was enough. Aristide was swiftly overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup de tat in September 1991, just nine months after taking office. Thousands of his supporters were killed and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee(17). In 1994, with the support of the Clinton administration, Aristide was allowed to take office once again on the condition that he accept IMF and World Bank ‘free-market’ policies in Haiti. Within a few years, however, Aristide was again re-elected back into power in 2000, this time with 90% of the vote. When he began to revive his attempts to pursue his populist policies, the U.S. and its oligarchic allies took a two-tiered approach. They funneled millions in so-called ‘aid money’ into anti-Aristide radio and TV stations, as well as reactionary anti-Lavalas political organizations. They also started arming paramilitary thugs who supported the old oligarchy to overthrow the president. In February 2004, just a few weeks after Haiti commemorated the 200th anniversary of its great revolution, its democratically elected president was ousted by a combination of a right-wing paramilitary coup and a direct United States military intervention. This time, so that Washington would be absolutely sure that Aristide wouldn’t be a thorn in their side ever again, he was kidnapped and transported on a U.S. plane to South Africa, where he still resides in exile. (18)
In the aftermath of the earthquake, thousands of U.S. troops were again being deployed to Haiti, to supposedly ‘assist’ the relief efforts there. Keeping in mind Haiti’s history, this was with the added irony of being ordered in by America’s first black president. One wonders if what follows from that is a awakening of new resistance and liberation on the part of the Haitian people, or a further tightening of the shackles of the 21st-century version of slavery, neo-liberalism. Haiti is an example for all of humanity of what a fearless and determined people can achieve, and how the propertied classes will stop at nothing to preserve their privileges. And that is why everyone who longs for a better world and the liberation of the working class should learn from the example of Haiti, and stand with its downtrodden people and against those who attempt to rob and crush them.
SOURCES
1. Korngold, Ralph. Citizen Toussaint, New York, Hill and Wang, 1944.
p. 33.
2. Griffiths, Barbara Ann. Black Patriot and Martyr: Toussaint of Haiti. New York City: Julian Messner, 1970, p. 32.
3. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York City, Random House Inc., 1963, p. 334.
4. Leger, J.N. Haiti: Her History and her detractors. New York and Washington, University of Toronto Press, 1907, p. 131.
5. Griffiths, p. 181.
6. Hallward, Peter. Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, London, Verso, 2007, p.14.
7. Hallward, p. 12.
8. Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-34. Rahway, N,J., Rutgers University Press, 1971, p. 102-03.
9. Schmidt, p. 199.
10. Schmidt, p. 197.
11. Schmidt, p. 198.
12. Hallward, p. 15.
13. Hallward, p. 5-10.
14. Robinson, Randall. Haiti: An Unbroken Agony. Philadelphia, Basic Civitas Books, 2007, p. 133
15. Lendman, Steven. “Achievements under Aristide, Now Lost”, Z-Net, December 16, 2005. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Haiti/Achievements_Aristide_Lost.html
16. Robinson, p. 133.
17. Hallward, p. 40
18. Hallward, p. 200-249.