[This excerpt crossposted from http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html ]
America’s Sorry History with Haiti
By Lisa Pease
January 30, 2010
With all the talk of America taking charge of Haiti for a while, it would be prudent for us to take a step back and review the history of our various interventions in Haiti, and the outcomes of those efforts.
For there is another kind of aid that the people of Haiti need that isn’t being talked about. They need us to understand their real history, their culture and their potential.
They need us to stop patronizing them and interfering with their progress so they can realize the freedom they are still seeking two centuries after officially casting off the shackles of slavery. [For more on that era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Haiti and America’s Historic Debt.”]
If there’s one lesson we’ve had to learn in Haiti over and over, it’s that the solutions to Haiti’s problems can never be imposed from the outside. They must be allowed to grow from within.
And we have to let those solutions flourish, instead of trying to shape them to the liking of our business class, as we have repeatedly attempted to do, with disastrous effect.
The Military Occupation
In 1915, the United States began a nearly 20-year military occupation of Haiti, ostensibly to guarantee the country’s substantial debt repayments to American and other foreign lenders. But historian Hans Schmidt, among others, questioned this motive, as he found that Haiti’s record of repayment had been “exemplary” compared with that of other Latin American countries.
The larger reason for the occupation, according to Schmidt and others, was to keep European financial interests (German and French in particular) from economically colonizing Haiti at a time when America, having recently completed the Panama Canal, was hoping to expand its own sphere of influence in the Caribbean.
And potential investors in Haiti, such as the United Fruit Company (whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the CIA’s coup in Guatemala), weren’t going to move in unless the U.S. took over the government and brought stability.
To be fair, it’s not like America alone ruined the place. Haiti was a mess when the U.S. forces got there. Of the 11 presidents who had held office in Haiti from 1888 to 1915, only one had apparently died a natural death, and none had served their full term. Seven presidents were killed or overthrown in 1911 alone.
And from 1843 to 1915, Haiti had been through, according to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, “at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections” or as one commentator called it, a series of “bloody operettas.”
Years of various colonization attempts had divided Haiti into an economic and cultural caste system that was in part racially based. The whites and lighter-skinned people often held the money and position; the darker the skin, the lower down the economic totem pole one was likely to be.
Efforts to spread modern technology among the peasant population fell flat, and working all day for someone else’s profit wasn’t much of an incentive for people who had few needs and were accustomed to scarcity.
In addition, many Americans who came to Haiti looked down on the native people, often due to racial prejudice. The Americans typically didn’t recognize the value of the natives’ knowledge, and believed that America knew what was best for Haiti.
One notable exception was Major Smedley Butler, who noted that “The Haitian people are divided into two classes; one class wears shoes and the other does not. The class that wears shoes is about one percent. …
“Ninety-nine percent of the people of Haiti are the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people I have ever known. They would not hurt anybody [unless incited by the shoe-wearers; then] they are capable of the most horrible atrocities.”
“Those that wore shoes I took as a joke,” Butler added. “Without a sense of humor, you could not live in Haiti among these people, among the shoe class.”
Ignorance and Arrogance
You’d think that if you wanted to help a people become a prospering democracy that the first thing you’d offer them would be an education. But over 10 years into the U.S. occupation, 95 percent of the Haitian population remained illiterate.
The one educational effort the U.S. put forward was the Service Technique, a training program in agricultural and industrial technology. The problem with that, as Schmidt noted, was that the elite “traditionally held that manual labor was demeaning, while the peasants were enmeshed in subsistence farming and were reluctant to risk an already tenuous existence in outlandish experiments that were fundamental to American technological progress.”
In addition, American arrogance even prevented an exchange of ideas that could have benefited American businesses. For example, the Haitians had developed a much more efficient way of farming cotton than the industrial farming methods employed by the Americans. But Americans pushed their own technology instead.
Not surprisingly, the Americans failed to win many converts.
What little profit Haiti did make, financially, was used to pay off American bankers, sometimes in advance of the payment schedule. Funding education and public projects — the very projects the loans had been provided for — were not the priorities.
Haitian laborers were paid pennies an hour to work 12-hour days. Raising wages was discouraged for fear it might cause capital to seek a more favorable climate.
In 1925 and 1926, in an attempt to make the country more attractive to farming interests such as United Fruit, the Marines took aerial photographs of the land in the hopes of creating a cadastral survey showing actual boundaries of property.
But the photographs were destroyed in a fire, and American officials for the large part refused to pressure the masses into selling their tiny, title-less but generations-held property to American businesses.
When the market crash in 1929 rippled around the world, Haiti’s productive coffee farms lost their markets, and the people returned to subsistence-level farming. Students began striking to protest the American occupation, and soon others joined in a general strike.
An early attempt at “shock and awe” failed as miserably in Haiti as it did in Iraq. The Marines dropped bombs in a harbor where a particularly aggressive group of protesting Haitians had gathered. But instead of cowing them, the demonstration seemed to instigate them further. The Marines had to fire on the group to disperse them.
Ultimately, the depression turned the tide of opinion in Haiti against its American occupiers, increasingly seen as oppressors.
By 1932, tensions had come to a head, and President Hoover began taking steps to end the occupation. President Roosevelt completed the action in 1934.
Evaluating the Effort
What did the United States leave the Haitians with in return for the occupation? The U.S. did bring them some years of relative stability, law and order. The U.S. built some hospitals and rural health clinics as well as some roads and bridges and airstrips.
But for all that, as a contemporary observer noted, “the Haitian people are, today, little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915.”
U.S. military forces also killed thousands of Haitians in efforts to achieve security.
The aforementioned Major Butler became quite outspoken about the role he’d been forced to play. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912…
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Did the U.S. learn from this failed attempt at nation building? No. The U.S. just kept intervening, with repeatedly disastrous results.
Cut to 1957. Whatever modernization was achieved from the U.S. occupation was already a distant memory. Bridges and roads had fallen into disrepair. The same drive that in 1934 took two hours to complete by 1957 took nine hours by jeep (in good weather) due to unpaved potholes and the island’s “wrinkled paper” topology.
And that was just one road.
Imagine a country without a telephone system, with failing bridges, ports with crumbling docks, patients lying ill on the floor of dirty hospitals, political institutions in shambles or even nonexistent. Imagine what you’re seeing now, post-earthquake, as the everyday state of things.
… read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html.
The Duvalier part (not included here but posted at that link) is especially interesting re some overlap with people from the Kennedy assassination story. That part has many links – better if you read it there.
Part 2, about our Janus-faced dealings with Aristide, should be up tomorrow, I think.