Don't Be Haitian
If you find yourself reincarnated, Haiti is the last place you want to be.
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The mendacity of the Trump/Vance quote machine is always alarming, but the attacks falling upon perhaps the least deserving group of people of such vitriol in modern history is a level of repugnance I haven’t seen in fifty years of being politically aware.
I’ve only known a couple of Haitians personally, but they were so sweet and kind that they almost took me aback. Small sample size, sure, but reports from Springfield Ohio are similar. There, Haitians are almost universally praised as typically industrious immigrants, especially by those who employ them.1
What Haitians have gone through as a nationality is beyond anything most Americans can grasp.
Today in Haiti, gangs control 90% of its capital, Port-au-Prince.2 It’s a place where traipsing through your neighborhood to refill a jug of water is like walking through a prison yard while raising your fist in the air and giving everyone the finger on a dare.
In other words, you’re putting your life in your hands.
For most of its history, wealthy Haitians have been able to avoid whatever carnage befalls the rest of the population. No more.
As the dominance of gangs has grown, so has the violence.
The United Nations reports that at least 3,600 Haitians have been killed since January in a country of about 11 million people.3 This includes over 100 children. The UN also says 500,000 have had to flee their homes. Many people died as a result of sniper fire, of all things, from gang members randomly targeting people just for the adrenalin rush.4
In March, Haitian gangs stormed a maximum security prison and released 4,000 of Haiti’s worst criminals when its prime minister, Ariel Henry, tried to fly home from a trip to Kenya to sign a deal for acquiring an international police force. When he was unable to land at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince because it was overrun, he fled the country.5
Haiti isn’t just a failed state. It’s a broken island of hell on earth where people are treated by the rest of the world as human refuse. That’s why a cute little song arrangement was the only substantial response when Trump blathered on about Haitians eating pets in Springfield.
The truth is, most people don’t care now that we’ve all finished with the initial finger-wagging.
Meanwhile, back in Haiti, while we’re watching cute videos, gangs of wild, angry men and boys are now taking over the entire country, not just its capital, and if you’ve been lucky enough to survive the horrors of living in Haiti during the last 100 years or so because you’re flush with cash, your luck has run out.
The entire country is now like a huge prison yard without the guards.6
Haiti’s long history of horrors at the hands of Europeans is too long even for a TLDR Substack article
Why would the Haitians let this happen? That’s the refrain we hear, even from many progressives. The situation is a little different than you might imagine, but, as usual, you’ll need to digest some unpleasant history to appreciate it.
To tell the story of the crimes against the Haitian people at the hands of Europe and the United States would turn this article into a read of several hours. I need to try to keep it under 10 minutes, according to my questionable research on these things.
So I’ll do this: I’ll describe what happened when Haiti gained its independence, then what happened after its most recent earthquake, and ask you to trust me when I tell you that everything in between has been a harrowing timeline of horror, not a small amount of it fallout from American malfeasance.
Some of Haiti’s terrible history is just rotten luck. Its bad fortune is laced with horrific earthquakes and hurricanes. It is almost as if the people were born there to die early under gruesome circumstances overseen by a demonic overlord created by Quentin Tarantino.
But most of its pain has been at the hands of the cruel ministers of colonialism.
Haiti began life as one part of a happy little place that Spanish explorers called Hispaniola, which was populated by the Taino people. There is genetic evidence that links the Taino to the Amazon’s amazing Yanomami people, who are so popular with anthropologists that you may have read about them in high school or college. The Yanomami are also well known for their creative use of straws.
When Christopher Columbus arrived, bedecked in jewels and bags of smallpox, the Taino were nearly wiped out by European-born disease and hardships created by something called the encomienda system of labor. Without going into detail, it was kind of a formal plundering system that imposed slave labor on the island’s people.7
The Spanish, after devastating the population on the western side of the island, next focused their efforts on the eastern two-thirds, which eventually became the Dominican Republic, home of some of your favorite major league baseball players, and treated with about the same level of respect by its new overlords.
The French moved into the part of the island left by the Spanish, when, after one of their wars with Spain, they were given the western third as part of a truce. They renamed their new prize Saint-Domingue and brought in slaves from Africa. A lot of them. 700,000, in fact, at final count, according to a 1788 census.8
To get an idea of how many people that was for that period: In 1776, the largest American city, Philadelphia, contained 40,000 people, New York City 25,000, Boston 15,000, and Charleston 12,000. Those were America’s largest cities in those days.
Why, you might be wondering, would the French import 700,000 slaves to a tiny island in the Caribbean? Well, some things never change. People in those days loved sugar and coffee. The climate there was perfect for the production of both, so the French created a brutal internment camp that became its richest colony. Since the slaves were from Africa, they were considered expendable, and one-third of them died, with nary a complaint.
The demographics were quite strange. There were 25,000 Europeans in Saint-Domingue. And 700,000 slaves. Guess what happened?
The slaves, aware of their numbers, gave the French colonialists a big middle finger. Under the guidance of Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, they threw off the chains of slavery and nearly scared the pants off Thomas Jefferson, who had nine-year-old slaves working in his nailry on Monticello. Of course, as we all know, when it comes to slaves, Jefferson’s pants were already off.9
Ah, the consequences of elections. John Adams, who preceded Jefferson in the presidency, was an abolitionist who supported Louverture and his revolution by sending naval gunships to the island. But then an election happened, and Jefferson, perhaps whilst looking into the eyes of his underage slave girl while pouncing on her in bed, ordered the ships removed.
Nevertheless, Louverture somehow prevailed. The Haitian Empire was born.
The island in those days had high literacy rates despite its slave culture because of French King Louis XIV’s Code Noir, which was a loophole-filled civil structure for governing slave ownership. It was supposed to provide a modicum of fair treatment. It didn’t (remember how one-third of all slaves died in captivity?) but it did result in much higher literacy rates in Haiti than in the United States, where slave owners liked to keep books as far away from slaves as possible.
When Haiti was born, its potential was huge. It controlled the entire island of Hispaniola. Many of its newly freed slaves were literate. Its architects gave birth to such luminescent projects as La Citadelle Laferrière10 and Sans-Souci Palace11. It was teeming with educated and skilled citizens.
But then, the French sought revenge for the Haitian Revolution, and in 1825 returned with an armada to show them a thing or two. In effect, the French demanded reparations from their former slaves to the tune of 150 million francs for having the audacity to fight for their freedom. The Haitian president didn’t have a friend in the Western Hemisphere he could rely on for help, so he acquiesced.
By 1900, “80% of Haiti’s government spending was debt repayment and the country did not finish repaying it until 1947.”12
During the age of repayment, 1825–1947, lots of bad things happened to Haiti, as usual. They had zero funds with which to cope.
I want you, for a moment, to consider what life would be like if the U.S. government had to spend 80% of its money paying off a massive debt to another country.
Use your imagination.
Or, if you must cheat, I’ll do it for you with character.ai:
You are the United States treasurer in 1825 and face the impossible task of repaying a debt to a foreign country that is equal to 80% of your annual budget. You consider all the options and decide that the only way to succeed is to impose higher taxes on businesses and individuals, leading to a massive recession. Prices climb, unemployment rises and people riot in the streets. The United States economy crashes and the country is brought to it’s knees.
Haha, character.ai didn’t spell “its” correctly. Hahahhahaha!!! Stupid AI!!! Come on, character.ai, ain’t ya’ got Grammarly installed on your ass?13
Anyway, you get the point. Haiti, part of a small island in the Caribbean, was forced to fork over most of its money to France for well over a hundred years.
So. That’s step one of Haiti’s demise.
Fast forward now to today.
According to a New York Times article I somehow have in my bookmarks folder:
The assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021 unraveled the country, tipping it into terror and disarray: There is, effectively, no elected government. The acting prime minister is widely viewed as inept. There is no legislature since the terms of the last remaining members of Parliament expired in January, the judiciary is seen as fundamentally corrupt and the national police force appears on the brink of collapse.
The time between independence and current conditions was marked by political unrest and the kind of social upheaval you’d expect to find in a nation governed by impossible levels of debt to another country.
For example in 1934:
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo used anti-Haitian sentiment as a nationalist tool. In an event that became known as the Parsley Massacre, he ordered his army to kill Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border. Few bullets were used — instead, 20,000–30,000 Haitians were bludgeoned and bayoneted, then herded into the sea, where sharks finished what Trujillo had begun.
Haiti’s history is littered with such brutality.
Some of the more “positive” stuff for Haiti occurred during the years of American occupation, which made some inroads into building the country’s infrastructure when 1700 roads and 189 bridges were added. But the locals weren’t happy that many of these projects were built at gunpoint, forcing people out of their homes to participate in the grand plan.
Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat14 calls the system that was used for infrastructure development by the U.S. in Haiti a “national chain gang.”
The locals weren’t happy with the Les Cayes Massacre of 1920, either.15 That’s when U.S. marines fired on a crowd of 1500 demonstrators, killing twelve of them and wounding more than two dozen others.
They weren’t happy when marines pinned a popular resister to a door for several days to bake in the Haitian sun.
Nor were the locals happy with the final toll of Haitian deaths resulting from the American occupation of 1915–1934, which was estimated by many sources at around 15,000.
The Americans finally left. Years of instability and chaos ensued, but then, after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010, the United Nations came to the rescue under the pseudonym MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti).
Yay!!! Help is on the way!
They didn’t do a very good job of “rebuilding” the country, but they did leave behind what some folks call minustah babies.
Hmm. What are those, you must be wondering?
The short version: Girls as young as 11 fathered babies by the occupying U.N. forces, many of whom treated the island like an underaged tropical brothel. Minustah babies started appearing all over the Haitian landscape to join millions of other stories featuring undeserved bouts of punishment bestowed upon the people of Haiti by outside forces.16
Another not-so-fun fact: Cholera had never been recorded in Haiti until a Nepalese U.N. contingent arrived and “contaminated the river tributary next to their base through a faulty sanitation system.”17
The UN delivered a cholera epidemic to Haiti that killed nearly 10,000 and infected five percent of the country, about 500,000 people.
You can thank the miracle of genetics research for establishing the cause, which was found by a fellow named Dr. Paul S. Keim, who is, according to the New York Times, “a microbial geneticist whose laboratory determined that the Haitian and Nepalese cholera strains were virtually identical.”
Being Haitian is like getting out of bed after recovering from COVID-19 and getting bashed in the skull by a gang of thieves and thrown into a toxic sanitation canal. You somehow climb out of the sanitation canal, and an earthquake hits, burying you in rubble. You climb out of the rubble, crawl to one of the few remaining NGO aid stations, dodging bullets the whole time, and a hurricane strikes. You survive that, look for something to eat, but can’t find anything. Then you get cholera. You somehow make your way to America. Springfield Ohio seems like a nice quiet place to settle down.
Oh. Oops.
Meanwhile, that nice man, Joe Biden, is on the news excitedly telling you about a forthcoming international expeditionary force.18
Oh, dear God, no.
Honestly, I’d be all for it if the motives weren’t so obvious. Joe and the rest of America were afraid of Haitian boat people arriving on our pristine shores. Springfield was a mirror of American attitudes toward race, and Haiti in particular.
During the last few months, Republicans have managed to gin up hate faster than a Florida school can burn an LGBTQ+ book.
The proposal for an international police force was never about fixing Haiti. Even if it was, do we trust our foreign policy regime to fix it? After all the failures that have led to Haiti’s current anarchy?
People who know much more about Haiti than I say that one of the biggest obstacles toward a solution in a country that doesn’t manufacture its own guns is all the guns in the country. These guns are imported mostly from… guess where?
I’ll be more specific. A large number of guns come from states like Arizona, Florida and Georgia, thanks to their nearly non-existent gun laws.19
Look. I know France is having a hard time adjusting its economy to an influx of migrants from other former colonies it decimated, but shouldn’t it pay back those reparations to Haiti? Times a hundred? Shouldn’t the U.S. also pay reparations? Spain? The World?
Instead, what will probably happen is that the International Monetary Fund will scheme up some horrible financing to try to get Haiti on its feet. A few other countries will send in some troops to silence the gangs (instead of attacking the actual import of arms in the first place).
Haiti will become slightly livable for a few years, and the cycle of poverty, death, and terror will resume. Another earthquake or hurricane will hit. Then, more terror.
So if you die and get re-incarnated, whatever you do, blacklist Haiti if you get a choice of residences. Unless you want a very short lifespan.
And if you currently live in Haiti or are of Haitian descent, America and Europe owe you some money. Among other things.
One thing that nobody owes you is this: The disparaging, awful things that Trump and Vance are saying about you.
Notes
What would a reparations plan look like when there is effectively no government in place? I don’t know. There are smarter people than me that might. Time to find them.
Thanks for reading!
It would be more accurate to say these stats were valid before the UN-mandated expeditionary International police force, consisting mostly of Kenyans, arrived on the scene, but there is no indication that they are having much of an effect: https://theconversation.com/un-extends-kenyan-policing-mission-in-haiti-in-futile-attempt-to-tackle-gangs-240234
Admit it. I’m way more fun than your history teachers were. Except for that one you’re about to mention in the comments.
Brilliant. And, of course, infuriating. When I think of lower forms of life like Trump denigrating those who've managed to escape my blood boils. But maybe if he's re-elected and there is another cataclysmic hurricane, he can go down there and hand out paper towels.
France and the US made clear to slaves all around the world, what the consequences of rising up and throwing off their chains would be. They made (and continue to make) Haiti an example to anyone who dares think there could be a better way for humans to live together.
I met a woman in the early aughts who worked with NGO’s around the world. I’ve never quite figured out what she saw in me, but she’d leave me in her bed and go off to work Monday through Friday (I was a bartender, so…)
Oh, boy! Did she have books! Rwanda, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, the Sudan, Tibet, Southeastern Asia, and yes: Haiti. I read them all, and my first world, white privileged eyes were opened. It took me a very long time to recognize joy when I saw it again.
Hold your loved ones close and do what you can for those less fortunate around you. Because evil exists, ladies and gentlemen; and monsters have always been real.