Haiti After the Earthquake (64 page)

3
Jean-Claude Duvalier, for example, often spoke of making Haiti the “Taiwan of the Caribbean” to attract foreign businesses and investment. More often than not, what he attracted were offshore assembly plants which had mixed effects on Haitian employment (many offered impossibly low wages, less than $5 per day in most cases) and long-term growth. See Maguire.
Haiti After the Donor Conference.

4
This estimate of 2009 disbursements was prepared in January 2010 in an internal memorandum of the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti. President Clinton, in his capacity as UN Envoy, frequently appealed to donors to fulfill their commitments. See Helprin, “Bill Clinton Chides Nations over Help to Haiti.”

5
Madeline Kristoff and Liz Panarelli.
Haiti: A Republic of NGOs?
U.S. Institute for Peace, Peace Brief (April 26, 2010). Available:
http://www.usip.org/publications/haiti-republic-ngos
(accessed April 15, 2011).

6
In 2004, the de facto government published a set of ground rules following the forced departure of President Aristide. The Haitian government put out two reports in 2007, one on political decentralization (the government had little presence outside Port-au-Prince) and another on poverty reduction, and then another report in 2009 that spelled out a rebuilding strategy after the previous year's hurricanes. The RAND Corporation summarized the Haitian Government's strategic plans in a report in 2010, which can be found online at
www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG1039.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2011).

7
Neil MacFarquhar. “Haiti Frets over Aid and Control of Rebuilding.”
New York Times
(March 30, 2010). Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/world/americas/31haiti.html?ref=haiti
(accessed April 15, 2011).

8
These pledges for reconstruction aid were separate from the $2 billion or so already promised or disbursed in Haiti for immediate disaster relief.

9
Jonathan Katz. “US and EU Pledge $9.8 Billion to Rebuild Haiti After Earthquake.” Associated Press (April 1, 2010). Available:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/31/us-and-eu-pledge-billions_n_520560.html
(accessed April 15, 2011). The story notes that Venezuela's $2 billion contribution may have included money already sent to Haiti as relief funds.

10
Quoted in “Over US $5 Billion Pledged for Haiti's Recovery.”
http://www.haiticonference.org/story.html
(accessed April 15, 2011).

11
Pamela Falk. “Haiti Donor Meeting Far Exceeds $4B Goal.”
CBC News
(March 31, 2010). Available:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/31/world/main6350269.shtml
.

12
One report found that the quake left 40 percent of the civil service injured or dead, along with twenty-eight out of twenty-nine federal buildings down.
Haiti—no leadership, no elections.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report. 111th Congress, 2nd Session (June 10, 2010). Available:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html
(accessed April 15, 2011).

13
This is not meant as an ideological claim; telecommunications is a case in point. The public sector was unable to meet demand for telephones in Haiti—only a few thousand firms and families had landlines. It was not until the cell phone revolution, over the past decade, that privatized phones became valuable, even to the very poor, who use them as banking tools as well as a means of communicating with family and friends. More people had access to cell phones now than had they waited for a publicly controlled company to deliver. Similarly, independent service providers and NGOs might do a better job getting social services to the poor now. But should we compare providing cell phones to providing health care or safe water or education?

14
Jonathan Katz. “Clinton-Led Commission Starts Up in Haiti.”
ABC News
(June 17, 2010). Available:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10943320&page=1
(accessed April 15, 2011).

15
See Charity Navigator's special report on the anniversary of the quake. Available:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1186
(accessed April 15, 2011).

16
At the Skoll Foundation Conference on April 30, 2010, we brainstormed this question as a problem of catalysis, hoping that the entrepreneurs gathered there would seek new technologies and delivery strategies that might fill the gap between goodwill and implementation in Haiti.
Catalyzing Collaboration: Our Humanity at Stake.
http://www.skollworldforum.com/forum-2010
(accessed April 15, 2011).

17
See Walter Rodney's forceful argument that colonialism led to the underdevelopment of Africa. Walter Rodney.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania: London and Tanzanian Publishing House, 1973). Available:
http://www.blackherbals.com/walter_rodney.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2011). On so-called dependency theory see the work of Hans Singer (“The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries,”
American Economic Review
40, no. 2, 1950) and Raúl Prebisch. (
The Economic Development of Latin American and Its Principal Problems.
[New York: United Nations, 1950].) Dependency theory emerged in the post-War era to counter reigning modernization theory, which held that all countries progressed along a series of stages of economic development. In contrast to this progressivist vision of development, dependency theorists posited that the poverty of countries at the periphery was intimately linked to the wealth of countries at the core. According to this narrative, the rich get richer because the poor get poorer.

18
Paul Collier has argued the combination of high population growth and unemployment in Haiti has created a large and volatile group of unemployed young people—a “youth tsunami,” in his words. “Haiti has exceptionally rapid population growth,” he writes, “which adds to an already acute pressure on land. This youth tsunami is accelerating the process of environmental degradation and adding to the potentially explosive pool of underemployed youth.” See Paul Collier. “Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Recovery.”
United Nations
(January 2009). Available:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26835870/Paul-Collier-on-Haiti
(accessed April 15, 2011). Secretary Clinton referred to this concept in her speech at the 2009 donors' conference: “Haiti has the highest unemployment rate in our hemisphere. Seventy percent of its people do not have jobs. It also has one of the region's highest growth rates. Together, these trends have created what Paul Collier has called a youth tsunami. Nearly one million young people are expected to come into the job market in the next five years.” Available:
http://www.haitiinnovation.org/en/2009/04/14/secretary-clintons-remarks-haiti-donors-conference
(accessed April 15, 2011).

19
Jonathan Katz. “Does Camp Corail Explain How Haiti Relief Can Be Done Right?”
Center for Economic and Policy Research
(April 26, 2010)
.
Available:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/does-camp-coraildemonstrate-how-haiti-relief-can-be-done-right/
(accessed April 15, 2011).

20
Jonathan Katz. “Haiti Recovery Paralyzed 6 Months after Deadly Quake.” Associated Press (July 11, 2010). Available:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38184951/ns/world_news-americas/
(accessed April 15, 2011).

21
Jonathan Katz and Marko Alvarez. “Haiti: Summer Storm Floods ‘Safe' Refugee Camp.” Associated Press (July 13, 2010). Available: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com /html/nationworld/2012347420_apcbhaitihomelesscamp.html (accessed April 15, 2011).

22
For more information on
Zanmi Beni
, see “Update: A New Home at Zanmi Beni.” Available:
http://www.pih.org/news/entry/update-a-new-home-at-zanmibeni/
(accessed April 15, 2011).

23
Remarks by Paul Weisenfeld, USAID Haiti Task Team coordinator, at a media roundtable on July 19, 2010. Available:
http://www.usaid.gov/press/speeches/2010/sp100719_1.html
(accessed April 15, 2011).

24
Ibid.

25
Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address. March 4, 1933.

26
See Martin Luther King, Jr.
All Labor Has Dignity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

27
Conrad Black.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), p. 194.

28
The crisis had finally imposed some discipline of responsibility even on the Republican legislators, who with uncharacteristic docility did what the governor asked. (The New York voters would overwhelmingly approve the bond issue in November 1932.) Faithful to his own romantic notions of rural life, Roosevelt had TERA subsidize the resettlement of as many unemployed as possible on marginal farmland, with tools and instruction on how to cultivate it. In six years TERA assisted five million people, 40 percent of the population of New York State, at a cost of $1,555,000. At the end of the period, 70 percent of these were no longer reliant on government assistance. See Black.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
pp. 216–217.

29
Robert Maguire has written eloquently of the need for similar programs in Haiti. See, for example,
Haiti Held Hostage: International Responses to the Quest for Nationhood, 1986–1996.
Occasional Paper #23. (Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, Brown University: 1996). See also his more recent
Haiti after the Donors' Conference: A Way Forward.
This article calls for a national civic service corps that would generate shovel-ready projects, akin to President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and its subsidiary Civilian Conservation Corps. Not only would such an initiative grease the wheels of economic growth, he contends, but it could also combat the cycles of deforestation and erosion that—along with dumping subsidized American produce in Haitian markets—fuel rural poverty and urban crowding.

30
Jonathan Katz. “Associated Press Impact: Haiti Still Waiting for Pledged U.S. Aid,” Associated Press (September 28, 2010). Available:
http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2010/09/28/5195300-ap-impact-haiti-still-waiting-for-pledged-us-aid
(accessed April 15, 2011).

31
See Nicolai Ouroesoff, “A Plan to Spur Growth Away from Haiti's Capital.”
New York Times
(March 30, 2010). Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/arts/design/31planning.html?pagewanted=2&ref=haiti
(accessed April 15, 2011).

32
Those interested in this topic should read Sidney Mintz's
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1985). The book provides an excellent account, although completed before the era of biofuels. Mintz's ethnographic work on Haiti, which spans three decades, is also always instructive to read, as are his books on the rest of the Caribbean.

33
For more on the Butaro hospital, see: http://act.pih.org /page/s/watch-butaro (accessed April 15, 2011).

34
Denis Lai Hang Hui. “Politics of Sichuan Earthquake,”
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
17, No. 2 (June 2009).

35
Jonathan Watts. “Sichuan Earthquake: Tragedy Brings New Mood of Unity.”
The Guardian
(June 20, 2008):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/10/chinaearthquake.china
(accessed April 15, 2011).

36
“Katrina, Five Years Later,”
New York Times
(September 1, 2010):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/opinion/02thu1.html
(accessed April 15, 2011).

37
The best example is Amy Wilentz'
The Rainy Season,
which spoofs her journalist colleagues' prejudices about Haiti. Most journalists with deep knowledge of the place have also mocked the Haiti set piece. A case in point set of platitudes comes from an American journalist in 1991: “It's hard to sell Haiti as a tourist paradise when popular perceptions of the place make a visit fall into the category of ‘Holidays from Hell.' Dire poverty, AIDS, child slavery, zombies, voodoo animal sacrifices and political violence are just some of the negative images facing tour operators. A U.S. government travel warning ‘strongly advises' Americans to avoid Haiti.” (San Francisco
Sunday Punch
, March 31, 1991). Also see Robert Lawless.
Haiti's Bad Press
(Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1992). The same sort of template-driven reporting has been critiqued after the quake. Dr. Evan Lyon sent us a wry (and perhaps rueful) article titled “How to Write About Haiti” by an irritated, Haiti-based journalist that captures some of the tropes found in popular press articles after the earthquake. The following passage is representative: “You are struck by the ‘resilience' of the Haitian people. They will survive no matter how poor they are. They are stoic, they rarely complain, and so they are admirable. The best poor person is one who suffers quietly. A two-sentence quote about their misery fitting neatly into your story is all that's needed. On your last visit you became enchanted with Haiti. You are in love with its colorful culture and feel compelled to return. You care so much about these hard-working people. You are here to help them. You are their voice. They cannot speak for themselves.” See Ansel Hertz. “How to Write about Haiti.”
Huffington Post
(July 23, 2010). Available:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/crossover-dreams/a-guide-for-american-jour_b_656689.html
(accessed April 15, 2011). As noted throughout this book, the Haitians, however resilient, did not in fact suffer in silence.

38
“Plans and Benchmarks for Haiti,”
New York Times
(August 29, 2010). Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30mon2.html
(accessed April 15, 2011).