Haiti is what Jamaica Kincaide once called “a small place” – in fact, a very small place. It’s about 0.002% the size of the United States, and its economy is only about 0.001% as large. If the U.S. economy was the size of Planet Earth, Haiti’s would be nine times smaller than Charon, one of the tiny moons of Pluto.
The astronomical metaphor is appropriate, because the United States has always exercised a kind of gravity over Haiti. Ever since Haiti’s war of independence, it has been the main destination for refugees fleeing the country, its most important trading partner, and its most frequent source of foreign intervention. Although American policy towards Haiti is often a complete afterthought for whoever is making it in Washington, it has always been a matter of life and death for Haitians.
Haiti is once again suffering a prolonged period of unrest and violence as a group of heavily armed criminal gangs undertake a violent challenge to the country’s leadership. When acting president Ariel Henry was in Kenya trying to negotiate a package of UN security force assistance in late February, the gangs launched an insurgency which has since prevented him from returning to the country. Armed men have attacked the police and other government agencies and begun what seem to be random acts of violence and looting in wealthy neighbourhoods, leading to thousands of deaths.
Haiti’s current round of violence began with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, but it has much deeper roots. One of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti has long lacked strong state institutions or economic stability. Moïse’s assassination came several years into a bout of political turmoil which had its origins in high fuel prices and fears that the president was seeking to establish a dictatorship.
Since then, it has become clear that some sort of outside force is needed to restore order. But Republicans in Congress are currently blocking a portion of promised American funding for the UN peacekeeping force, fearing that America might acquire some long-term responsibility for rehabilitating Haiti.
They should think again, because Haiti’s fate has always been entangled with America’s, and always will be.
The wages of history
The birth of the Haitian state can be dated to 1791, when residents of the island nation launched a revolution against France. In some respects this revolution was modelled on the example of the American revolution, but there was a crucial difference - this was also a revolution against slavery. The colony of Saint-Domingue, which belonged to France, was the richest prize in the entire Caribbean, producing 40% of all of the sugar and 60% of all of the coffee consumed in the entirety of Europe. The death rate among the slaves working on its plantations was so high that it required the fresh importation of tens of thousands of Africans a year to keep the profits flowing to French planters. They considered it worth it.
News of the Haitian uprising soon reached the shores of the United States, where it was met with predictable horror in the slave states of the South. But even Northerners were aghast at the tales of violence and upheaval which reached them in hushed tones across the Caribbean. Although Americans had recently engaged in a revolution of their own, it had been a political, not a social, upheaval - they threw off British rule but preserved their own social hierarchy and way of life, including slavery. Many Americans had hoped that their revolution might inspire Europeans to overthrow their monarchs and adopt republican forms of government, but a republic of slaves was something most refused to countenance.
Early American policy towards the revolution was hence to help France, and later the UK, to try to restore order. One of the main concerns of the Americans - particularly Southern leaders like Thomas Jefferson - was that soon ships crewed by free Haitian blacks would start arriving at Southern ports, spreading revolutionary contagion. At one point the Americans joined with the hated British to reopen shipping from the island, but only on the condition that Haitians not crew the vessels involved. Throughout all of this there was little attempt to see the Haitian revolution through the lens of America’s own, and it has not until the American Civil War that Washington finally extended diplomatic recognition to Haiti.
As America took on a hegemonic position in the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Washington made it clear that Haiti needed to get with the program or suffer the consequences. Because of the country’s strategic location near the America shoreline and on the approach to the Panama Canal, generations of American policymakers had worried that Haiti might fall under the control of a European power. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant reached an agreement with the government of the Dominican Republic - which occupies the other half of the island of Hispaniola - to be incorporated into the United States, and if it the agreement had come to pass then it’s entirely possible that Haiti might eventually have followed suit.
As it was, the U.S. Congress rejected Grant’s deal, but that didn’t spell the end of American interest in the region. Following a period of instability which looked like it might open a door to increased German influence, Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines in 1915, and they didn’t leave until 1934. Then, during the Cold War, successive U.S. administrations provided financial support to President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc” Duvalier. They instituted a brutal dictatorship which ravaged the island - but Washington considered it worth it in order to suppress Communist influence in the country.
Then, once the Cold War was over, U.S. troops went back to the island again - first in 1994 to support a UN mission which was trying to help the country transition to democracy, and again in 2004 when the country’s president was forced to flee. This latter mission eventually grew into yet another UN operation, lasting from 2004 to 2017 - and including the tragic cholera outbreak caused by poor sanitation at a UN camp.
What is owed
The point of recounting this history is not to make the point that because America did X, Y and Z to Haiti, it now owes it a historical debt. That might be a reasonable argument to make, but I think history shows us that it isn’t one that people tend to be very susceptible to. Various movements around the world for reparations for either domestic evils like slavery or transnational evils like imperialism and the slave trade have not got very far in achieving results. A far better argument to make is one based on self-interest, and the realities of current geopolitics.
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