Haiti and the United States, A Complex Past

Autocratic, ineffective and corrupt are all adjectives that, throughout history, have been (sadly) too often applied to the governments of Haiti. It’s only intellectually honest, then, to acknowledge the role that the United States has had in negatively impacting Haiti’s development during these past two centuries. A group of Haitian volunteers actually fought on behalf of the Colonies during the American Revolution, but how did we repay this act of solidarity when Haiti declared its independence in 1804? By refusing to acknowledge their existence, since, after all, the Haitians had the nerve to win their independence by overthrowing those nice men who had owned them as slaves. In 1820, Sen. Robert V. Hayne of South Carolina summed things up by saying: “our policy with regard to Haiti is plain. We never can acknowledge her independence.” It wasn’t until 1862 when the Civil War changed American attitudes towards slavery that Washington DC finally got around to establishing diplomatic relations with Haiti. (France too had their role in crippling the young Haitian state, as reparations for the slave revolt France demanded payment of 150 million francs, though they later generously reduced it to a mere 90 million francs. Still, it would take Haiti more than a century to pay off the French government’s claim, and then only with loans from French banks.)

With the outbreak of World War I, the United States became increasingly obsessed with the idea of Europeans meddling in the Caribbean. At the time, Haiti was deeply in debt to several European governments; President Woodrow Wilson feared this could be used as a pretext for France or Germany to attempt a take over part of the island, so he ordered US troops to preemptively invade in 1915. A pro-US leader, Senator Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, was installed by the National Assembly as the new head of state. According to USMC General Smedley Butler, who led the US mission, the vote was cast as “Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President.” Gen. Butler spent much of his career carrying out US policy in Latin America. He would later say of these experiences, “I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street,” in a 1933 speech that was subsequently turned into a book titled “War Is A Racket,” an early warning about what today we’d call the political influence of the military-industrial complex.

But US coercion in Haiti has not only come from the barrel of a gun, it has also taken the form of agricultural and trade policies. For generations a type of hog called the Creole Pig was a mainstay in Haitian agriculture. A farmer’s wealth was often measured in the number of pigs he owned, they provided a source of food, income and security when times were tough. The Creole Pig was uniquely adapted to life in Haiti, they foraged for food and were highly resistant to diseases except, unfortunately, for African Swine Flu. When a Swine Flu outbreak raced across Hispaniola in the early 1980s, the United States, fearing the disease would spread to the US, pressured the Dominican and Haitian governments to slaughter their Creole Pig populations. The US offered domestic-bred pigs to replace their lost livestock. But the American pigs had been bred for life on Midwestern farms; their skin burned easily under the Caribbean sun, forcing farmers to build shelters for them; they didn’t forage, so farmers had to buy pre-packaged feed for them; and they needed regular inoculations against disease – all factors that won them the nickname “princess pigs.” Eventually, many farmers found they could simply no longer afford to keep hogs.

To make matters worse for the farmers, in 1996 as part of an “economic recovery” plan, Haiti was forced to adopt a package of neo-liberal reforms (much the kind of policy Stephens now advocates), forcing them to drop a series of agricultural tariffs and allowing heavily subsidized American agricultural goods to flood into the country. Haiti’s sugar industry largely collapsed, and the country went from being a net exporter of rice into becoming the third largest market for exports from the United States.

Haitian farmers responded by doing what pastoral people have often done in modern times when they find the land can no longer sustain them, they packed up and moved to the city, many into the massive, ramshackle slums that blossomed in and around Port-au-Prince – the same slums that so quickly turned to dust during the January 12^th tremor.

Could development aid efforts in pre-earthquake Haiti have been better executed and more effective? Almost certainly, yes. But if thousands of aid agencies failed to turn Haiti into a First World nation, then it was a testament as to how far Haiti had to develop in the first place, and how much the country had suffered from poor governance and economic policies. If Stephens, Brooks and the rest are going to criticize Haiti for not reaching what they think is a proper level of development, then they should be honest enough to acknowledge the role United States policy has had in undermining Haiti’s growth in the first place.