Haiti After the Earthquake (22 page)

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].”
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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.
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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:

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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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:

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.
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) 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.
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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.

There was much talk, in 1986, of bringing the Duvaliers to justice—or at least trying to recover some of the millions they'd looted from public coffers. It was a heady time, one chronicled by Jean Dominique
and Michèle Montas on Radio Haiti-Inter, and others also seeking to introduce the country's first free press. Broadcasts and broadsheets reached more and more Haitians, and the word “democracy” could be heard across the country. A new constitution was drafted, one that declared Creole the national language and banned Duvalierists from office. It was a period of restless hope.

It was also a violent interregnum, in which the military and economic élite again vied for power.
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Frequent clashes between prodemocracy demonstrators and the military claimed many lives. Most demonstrations were organized by young people in the city, but rural farmers also began taking arms against unjust social arrangements and pressing for land reform. In the city and countryside, some of the most outspoken community organizers were Catholic clergy influenced by liberation theology. One was Father Jean-Marie Vincent, who worked with peasant farmers in the northwest. The notion of basic social and economic rights for the poor—the right to land, jobs, and basic services—resonated with those so long denied them but was anathema to regional landowners, to some in the military, and to many of the wealthy. During the late eighties, violence broke out not only in Port-au-Prince but anywhere land reform, literacy campaigns, or political enfranchisement were discussed openly.

Such discord—essentially class conflict—took the country by storm. Military and paramilitary forces, many of them holdovers from the old order, often fired on demonstrators pushing for change. The most infamous attacks targeted progressive church leaders, including Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Salesian priest who rose to prominence because of his fiery sermons and his work with youth groups and the poor, and because he and his followers were persecuted by the military and parts of the Catholic hierarchy. In one lethal episode, hundreds of peasant farmers were killed in the northwest and Father Vincent narrowly escaped with his life.

Repression did little to stop the popular movement, which hadn't yet organized under one particular banner but was coalescing around the rights long denied to the majority: political and civil rights and also (perhaps more boldly) social and economic rights. The chief order of business was to organize proper democratic elections.
In 1987, an attempt to hold elections ended in a polling station massacre, and the military—implicated in the killing—stepped in and declared martial law. It was during these years that Jean Dominique's rich baritone voice declared Haiti
la belle prisonnière de l'armée.
And it was during these years that Aristide survived several assassination attempts, which only increased the numbers and devotion of his followers.

Genuinely democratic elections seemed unlikely to occur under the army's patronage, but that's just what army leadership promised a few months after the abortive 1987 poll. Numerous accounts—in French and in English, partisan and less so—cover these years after the fall of the Duvalier family dictatorship. One of the best comes from Amy Wilentz, who was present for much of this violence and chronicled the rise of the popular movement. She offered the following assessment of the 1988 elections organized under martial law:

Wilentz might have witnessed one of the last gasps of the old order when she survived the sack of Saint-Jean Bosco church on September 11, 1988. A group of hired assassins set fire to the church while Father Aristide was saying mass. Aristide (and my future coworker and friend, Loune Viaud) survived; a least a dozen did not.
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The attack on Saint-Jean Bosco was among the darkest chapters of the period and surely one of the great crimes against the democracy movement (and the Church) in Haiti. It was, alas, soon eclipsed by other crimes and more political violence, as great numbers of Haitians continued to push for free and fair elections. But the military leadership held firm, in spite of growing pressure from the international community. There was meeting after meeting, commission after commission, inquiry after inquiry, and a handful of interim
governments in Haiti before enough players agreed that elections and democratic rule—in keeping with the new constitution—were the only way out of this quagmire.