There were floods in rural Haiti (and nearby in the Dominican Republic) over the past few days. Thousands may have died — no one will ever know the casualty figures very exacly, at least in Haiti — and thousands more Haitians lost everything of the very, very little that they had.
I spent some time in Haiti in the late 70s and in the mid 90s — in what passed for “non-crisis” times — and life there is hard enough even without natural disasters. Haiti is a fascinating and beautiful country. But the poverty and squalour are pervasive: everything is broken, there are crowds of very poor people everywhere, and many Haitians look near the edge of starvation, with hollow cheeks and painfully thin arms and legs. And that is in “normal” times and in areas accessible to a casual visitor: things were, and are, much worse in the hellish urban shantytowns, and worse still in many rural areas from which people flee to the shantytowns.
Haiti is small, of course: just the western third of the Caribbean island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. But Haiti doesn’t feel small when you are there, in part because the infrastructure is so bad that it is very slow and difficult to get around. The floods this week were just thirty or forty miles from Port-au-Prince, but that would be a hard day’s journey even in “normal” conditions. And as the NY Times reports it, the flood areas are now almost completely cut off.
The Times story mentions that deforestation made the Haitian floods especially dangerous. But the Times doesn’t put this in context. You can literally see the Dominican border when you fly into Haiti. There are trees and it is green on the Dominican side; on the Haitian side the hillsides are brown and bare. As with most doleful things in Haiti, there is history to explain this. In the egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution, the newly independent Haiti abolished primogeniture. With each generation, peasant holdings were divided and subdivided into ever tinier parcels. The peasant smallholders, desperate to survive, cut down their trees for charcoal, their only fuel. But without trees, the soil washes out to sea. (You can see this, too, from the air: the Caribbean is brown with washed-away soil all around the Haitian coast.) Now the land is denuded. Crops do not grow: there isn’t much hope that they ever will. And there is nothing to impede the floods.
Haiti’s political history was nightmarish from the beginning. The French slave system there was probably the cruelest and greediest in the western hemisphere. The French sugar planters made out so well that their biggest town, Cap Haitien, was reckoned one of the richest places in the world in the eighteenth century. When the Haitian slaves revolted, inspired by the fall of the Bastille, they massacred all the whites. (The Haitian flag is blue and red: the founders of Haiti famously ripped the white out of the tricolour…)
Ever since, Haitian history has been a kind of civil war between the tiny Black middle class and the even tinier Mulatto aristocracy. (The impoverished masses don’t count, except in occasional mob scenes, and as victims.) Papa Doc Duvalier came from the Black middle class, for example; so did Jean Bertrand Aristide. General Cedras, on the other hand, who led the coup against Aristide in the 90s, was light-skinned and quite French looking.
The US sent troops to occupy Haiti in 1915 after a mob dragged President Guillaume Sam from his palace and tore him limb from limb. US troops stayed until 1934. It was an interlude of comparatively good government: at least, a period when some infrastructure was built up. But Haitians resented the white occupiers, of course. (Note re Iraq: yes there are some parallels, and also lots of differences…)
An easy moral that comes to mind is that when a political history begins with cruelty, it is set to remain cruel, corrupt, and dysfunctional. That seems true of Haiti: the worst slave system there was, overthrown in a revolution soaked in blood, anarchy, and massacre. Two centuries of misery followed. On a bigger scale, it seems true of the Communist tyrannies as well: the Bolshevik coup, for example, with its Red Terror, the murder of the Romanovs, the Leninist cult of violence, all setting the scene for the Stalinist (and later the Maoist) horrors that followed.
But it ain’t necessarily so. The French Revolution had its definite “terror” elements, elements that inspired the Haitian insurgents, and inspired Lenin and Trotsky as well. But France, for all its ups and downs since 1789, has not been one long nightmare of blood, starvation, and national misery.
Even the American Revolution had its cruel and anarchic elements. And the Civil War was savagely cruel.
So when do cruel beginnings make for a cruel and failed state? And when do they not? Discuss. (It is exam season.)
Meanwhile, Haiti is one of those places that ought to make you pray there is no such thing as reincarnation. If you think the odds are good that you wouldn’t be reincarnated as a Haitian peasant, consider that things are as bad, or worse, in the Congo and in many other places in Africa, and for that matter for many, many people in India and elsewhere. People lucky enough to be law professors in this life — like us RightCoasters, and most of the regular Volokh Conspirators — have especially strong reasons for being dead set against reincarnation…
Comments are closed.