Haiti Read online

  All these factors have contributed to a powerful sense of political exhaustion surrounding Haiti’s future. A succession of military regimes has left the country with almost no functioning social infrastructure. Ever since popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was violently overthrown in 2004, Haiti has been policed largely by foreign troops under U.N. command. Haiti’s proud independence has been eroded, too, by the thousands of foreign organizations that have flocked to the country over the years with projects for improvement and reform. For all their work, though, hunger, poverty, and disease still stalk much of the population. In the cities, the last decades have seen an increase in violent crime, including drug trafficking and kidnapping, while the situation in rural Haiti, where the majority of the population still lives, is increasingly desperate. The soil is severely depleted; generations of intensive agriculture and deforestation have taken their toll. As the population has grown and parcels of land have been divided into smaller and smaller bits, the social and agricultural strategies that worked well for Haitian peasants into the early decades of the twentieth century have become increasingly unsustainable. At the same time, the solutions prescribed by foreign powers and international organizations have largely turned out to be ineffective, or worse.

  * * *

  “Ladies and gentlemen, come and see,” beckons novelist Lyonel Trouillot in a searing account of life in contemporary Haiti. “This isn’t a country here but an epic failure factory, an excuse for a place, a weed lot, an abyss for tightrope-walkers, blindman’s bluff for the sightless saddled with delusions of grandeur … Proud mountains reduced to dust dumped in big helpings into the cruciform maws of sick children who crouch waiting in the hope of insane epiphanies, behaving badly and swamped besides, bogged down in their devil’s quagmires.” “Our history,” he laments, “is a corset, a stifling cell, a great searing fire.”11

  That history, however, represents the only foundation upon which a different Haiti might be built. And it can—indeed must—serve as a source of inspiration, and even hope. Despite all its tragedy, Haiti’s past shows the remarkable, steadfast, and ongoing struggle of a people to craft an alternative to the existence that others wanted to impose on them. Throughout Haiti’s existence, reformers and rebels have attacked authoritarian leaders and exclusive institutions in the effort to bring something better into being. Even when these attempts have failed, they serve as touchstones, sources of inspiration for confronting Haiti’s present crisis.

  “Haiti disturbs,” sociologist Jean Casimir likes to say. It disturbs, of course, because of its poverty and its suffering. But it also disturbs because, throughout its history, Haiti’s people have repeatedly turned away from social and political institutions designed to achieve profits and economic growth, choosing to maintain their autonomy instead. The Haitian population has been told for two centuries, as it is told today, that it must change, adapt, modernize. No doubt some change is needed; but what has largely been offered to Haiti’s population in the guise of foreign advice is simply a precarious place at the bottom of the global order.

  Haitians have consistently refused such offers. In 1883, Janvier explained that he was more than happy for outsiders to come to Haiti to enrich themselves through commerce. “But please,” he asked, “spare us your advice … We want to do things ourselves.” Haitians might be “stubborn” and “proud” in their independence. But they had their reasons. No one else in the world had ever “paid as dearly for the right to say, while stomping their foot on the ground: ‘This is mine, and I can do with it what I want!’”12

  Faced with various envoys, missionaries, and experts from inside and outside the country, many Haitian communities have—often with impressive patience and a marked lack of hostility—steadfastly resisted all attempts to make them abandon their historic aspirations. A population born of slave revolution, they have insisted on holding on to a way of life predicated on refusing the return of the plantation system or anything that looks like it. They have paid more and more for that refusal as their situation has grown increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, under incredible duress, Haitians remain as determined as ever to make their world on their own terms, to use it to their own ends and not those of others.

  The social cohesion that has resulted from this long historical process was made dramatically visible by the 2010 earthquake. Many outside observers expected that, given the massive difficulties and lack of security in Haiti even before the disaster, there would be a complete social breakdown—as there might well be in many places where the state has essentially evaporated. But as aid workers and journalists arrived in the country, they were surprised at the level of organization they encountered. Television anchors kept asking expectantly when the looting was going to begin, but reporters in Haiti instead described most communities as rapidly mobilizing to deliver mutual aid. In many disasters, of course, common citizens are the first responders to the crisis, and Haiti was no different: neighbors, family members, passersby dug people out of the rubble with hammers, rocks, or their bare hands. But even after the initial rescue work was done, when the solidarity of emergency response might have given way under the strain of dealing with the catastrophe, the people of Haiti largely continued to look after one another. In many areas Haitians got no assistance at all for many days, even weeks. It was not the government but the networks that crisscross the country—neighborhood organizations, religious groups, extended families—that tended the injured, set up camps, fed one another, sang and prayed and mourned together.

  The fact that they had to do so much on their own is appalling. But that they did it also shows clearly that Haiti, despite its massive poverty and its almost total lack of a functioning government, is not a place of chaos. Life in Haiti is not organized by the state, or along the lines many people might expect or want it to be. But it does draw on a set of complex and resilient social institutions that have emerged from a historic commitment to self-sufficiency and self-reliance. And it is only through collaboration with those institutions that reconstruction can truly succeed.

  The Haiti of today cannot be understood without knowledge of its complex and often tragic history. Against visions of Haiti that see it only as a place of disaster and failure, a country lacking democratic principles and civil society, the pages that follow also highlight Haiti’s legacy of political struggle in the country, and Haitians’ historic insistence on fashioning a way of life predicated on equality and autonomy. For it is now more vital than ever to remember that Haiti has had its triumphs, as distant as they often seem. Haiti’s founding revolution—the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world—has continued to resonate in Haiti’s society and culture for the past two centuries. The promise of that revolution, disparaged and undermined by the powerful both within and outside Haiti, has remained unfulfilled. But it has never disappeared.

  1

  INDEPENDENCE

  “In the end,” Jean-Jacques Dessalines announced on January 1, 1804, “we must live independent or die.” Six weeks earlier, Dessalines, the revolutionaries’ general-in-chief, had secured the decisive defeat of the French forces at the Battle of Vertières. Now, surrounded by the main commanders of his army, he called into existence a new nation: Haiti. On the same day, those commanders named him “Governor-General for Life” of the newborn country, making him its first head of state.1

  Like the majority of the population he spoke to, Dessalines had once been a slave. The slogan “Liberty or Death,” printed above the official independence decree, had a particularly potent meaning in Haiti. Defeat at the hands of the French would have meant literal death for the revolution’s leaders, and a return to slavery for the rest. In victory, they guaranteed themselves the freedom to build new lives and a new society.

  Haiti’s independence had been won at a terrible cost. The new nation’s ports and many of its plantations were in ashes. Combat, hunger, and disease had killed vast numbers of people—as many as 100,000 during 1802–03 alone.
As Dessalines surveyed the new country, he saw a land haunted by the dead. “Men and women, girls and boys, let your gaze tend on all parts of this island: look there for your wives, your husbands, your brothers, your sisters … what have they become?” He also invoked the memory of those who had died as slaves on the plantations, their misery the wellspring of the colony’s fabulous wealth. The French “barbarians,” said Dessalines, had “bloodied our land for two centuries,” and their influence would not be easy to throw off. “Le nom français lugubre encore nos contrées,” Dessalines declared—“The French name still glooms our lands.” The unconventional transformation of the adjective “lugubre”—“lugubrious”—into a verb captured just how deeply the history of French colonialism shadowed the newborn country. Against all this loss, the new country’s leader offered an absolute commitment to a liberated future. “We have dared to be free,” he proclaimed; “let us be thus by ourselves and for ourselves.”2

  The expulsion of the French seemed to hold out the promise of a completely new system for organizing the Haitian society. But as Dessalines quickly realized, the colonial order could not be exorcised by fiat or decree. The Haitian population and its leaders, after all, inherited a finely tuned plantation machine, a place whose entire mode of being was driven by the production of sugar and coffee for export. That was the initial condition from which the new country had to be built, and it proved inescapable. Colonial Saint-Domingue had been constructed around a hierarchical social order, an autocratic and militarized political system, and an export-oriented economy. From the moment of its founding to the present day, Haiti would find itself burdened by all three.

  At the same time, however, the Haitian Revolution was an act of profound—and irreversible—transformation. Few other generations in history have achieved what the Haitian revolutionaries managed to do. If not for their victory, slavery would almost certainly have continued in the colony for at least several decades more, as it did in all the societies that surrounded them. By defeating the French forces, they created a space where former slaves could exercise cultural and social autonomy to a degree unknown anywhere else in the Americas. While Dessalines and other Haitian leaders eloquently articulated a passionate refusal of slavery, it was the people of Haiti who truly gave content to that refusal. Melding traditions and beliefs carried from Africa, the spirit of resistance born on the plantations of Saint-Domingue, and the confidence and knowledge gained from the triumph over the French, they created a new culture and way of life driven by an unceasing emphasis on independence and personal freedom.

  Despite its drama and historic importance, many of the most important aspects of Haiti’s revolution are startlingly difficult to document. We know much about its leaders, who left plentiful records of their actions and perspectives; we know far less about the experiences and the views of the masses of slaves who so dramatically changed the world in which they lived. Yet it was the culture of these masses, forged in bondage—the Kreyòl language, the Vodou religion, the focus on community, dignity, and self-sufficiency—that ultimately enabled them to destroy slavery and produce something new in its place.

  * * *

  Haiti has had many names. When the Atlantic currents brought Columbus to its shores on his first voyage, he baptized the island La Española, which in English became Hispaniola. The small outpost that Columbus set up on the northern coast of Hispaniola was the first European settlement in the Americas, though an ill-fated one: by the time he returned, all the settlers had been killed by indigenous inhabitants. The Spanish soon built a new settlement on the southeastern coast of the island, however, which they dubbed Santo Domingo, after the revered founder of the Dominican order. The town gave its name to the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, which, centuries later, would become the Dominican Republic. French colonists, arriving on the western half of the island in the late seventeenth century, took the Spanish name and translated it, giving the title of Saint-Domingue to what would soon become their most precious American territory. Of course, long before the Europeans appeared, the indigenous inhabitants had their own names for the land. Among them, as early Spanish chroniclers noted, was Ayiti—“land of mountains.” It was this name that the founders of Haiti reached back to in 1804, seeking to connect their struggle for freedom from slavery with the earlier battles of indigenous peoples against Spanish invaders.3

  The island of Hispaniola was the starting point for European conquest of the Americas. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Hispaniola’s indigenous population of perhaps 500,000 to 750,000 people was almost completely eliminated through war, forced labor, and disease. Santo Domingo became America’s first colonial city, with a cathedral and university, and the Spanish imported African slaves to work on sugar plantations. As Spain conquered vast territories on the mainland of South America, however, Santo Domingo lost its importance, becoming mainly a stopover point for Spanish ships on their way to Europe. The ships’ cargoes of silver drew English and French pirates to the region, and the Spanish government, unable to protect settlements on the western half of Hispaniola against pirate raids, removed them altogether. Soon French settlers from the famous pirate haven of Tortuga, just north of Hispaniola, moved in on the Spanish territory and began building plantations on the island’s northwest coast. For a few decades they remained essentially illegal squatters, but in 1697 Spain officially ceded the territory to France.

  By the late seventeenth century, the English and French empires in the Americas were increasingly fixated on growing one particular crop: sugar. The geographical fault lines that lie under Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean created a series of islands that turned out to be the perfect place for the cultivation of sugarcane. Haiti had the region’s highest mountains, which sent water down to a series of large, flat plains. These abutted well-protected bays, ideal for anchoring ships. The island, furthermore, is situated right at the end of a highway crossing the Atlantic: a strong current flows from Europe directly toward it. Another set of currents lead from Africa straight to Haiti as well. The territory became one of the key points in the “triangle trade” that created the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century: manufactured goods were brought from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, and slave-produced crops from the Caribbean back to Europe.

  French Saint-Domingue grew to become the most profitable colony in the world. By the late eighteenth century, it was the world’s largest producer of sugar, exporting more of it than the colonies of Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. At the same time, Saint-Domingue also grew fully half of the world’s coffee. It was a small territory, covering only about 10,600 square miles—about the size of Massachusetts. Yet it was more valuable to France than all the thirteen colonies of North America were to England.

  An official estimate of the colony’s population in 1789 reported that Saint-Domingue contained 55,000 free people and 450,000 slaves. But because slaves were taxed, they were also broadly undercounted; in all likelihood there were at least half a million of them. The slaves outnumbered the free population by ten to one in the colony overall, and by a much higher proportion on many of the plantations. In the parish of Acul, where the 1791 insurrection began, there were 3,500 slaves surrounding 130 free people.4

  The free population was also deeply segmented and divided. It included fabulously wealthy white planters and powerful officials; poor white migrants managing slave gangs or working in the ports; and what were known as “free people of color,” men and women of African descent who were not slaves and who indeed often owned slaves and plantations themselves.* According to official estimates, the colony’s free population was divided more or less evenly between whites and people of color. Notably, the free men of color made up a large portion of the local police as well as of the colonial militia. The major task of that militia force, in Saint-Domingue, was not to defend the colony from external threats but to protect the territory from its potentially overwhelming enemy within: the slave majority.5

&nbs
p; Although the colony produced some cotton, indigo, and a great deal of coffee, most of the slaves toiled on sugar plantations. Harvesting cane is backbreaking work, made risky by the razor-sharp spines of the tall stalks and the insects and snakes nested in the fields. Once cut, cane has to be processed quickly, so enslaved workers—usually women—worked day and night feeding the cane stalks into large stone mills, where it was all too easy for hands and arms to be pulled in and crushed. Other slaves supervised vats of boiling cane juice that produced the sugar crystals. A small number of slaves also worked as artisans, constructing barrels and buildings, or as domestics in the opulent plantation homes. A privileged few occupied positions as commandeurs, slave drivers transmitting instructions from masters and managers to field hands and making sure that these orders were followed. The drivers were viewed with both respect and fear—they were the ones who whipped any slaves who disobeyed—and were informal leaders within the plantation. It was a well-ordered system, a combination of “field and factory,” in the terms of anthropologist Sidney Mintz, that brought together advanced technology and carefully designed labor management. But it also exhausted the soil through one cane harvest after another, and began a process of deforestation as swaths of trees were cut down to build plantation houses and the thriving port towns.6

  Although masters controlled slaves in part through the promise of material rewards—extra food, better work, and sometimes even freedom—they depended most of all on terror. Slaves were branded with their masters’ initials (often after having been already branded once by slave traders in Africa) and quickly learned that any resistance would be met with whipping or worse. Each plantation in Saint-Domingue had a post ready for public punishments, which were carried out in front of the assembled workforce. Some contemporaries described brutally creative tortures devised by particularly sadistic masters, such as cutting off arms and legs, or burying slaves up to their necks and leaving them to be attacked by biting insects.