The Misery of Haiti – An American Gift to the Caribbean

"I will not be associated with the United States' inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees." 

2021 Biden appointed Ambassador Daniel Foote, U.S. special envoy to Haiti, in his resignation letter.

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – legally in the United States – were invited by local businesses to provide relief from a local labor shortage… and they have performed exceptionally well under most difficult times. They have become Trump’s hate fodder. But why did they have to leave their homeland in the first place?

Over a decade has passed since the natural disasters began to take down this country… and it is still in shambles, even as the nation that occupies the other part of the Island of Hispaniola – the Dominican Republic – has survived just fine. Why is life so bad in Haiti? Destruction from recent severe hurricane damage followed by a devastating earthquake? The collapse of the government and the ascendancy of war lords and gang dominance? Desperate poverty? Famine? “Yes” to all of these, but the true explanation has deep historical roots, and a whole lot of blame and underlying causation can be traced directly to US policies, even US occupation, and our support of European claims against this tiny island nation.

According to the Manchester Historian, in the 18th century, “The French colony of Saint-Domingue (contemporary Haiti) was heralded as ‘the Pearl of the Antilles’, the slave-driven sugar economy making it the richest of the French colonies and a central component in France’s imperial vision. This was largely to do with the ‘exclusif’, a trade deal that meant Haiti could only trade with France, monopolizing Saint Domingue’s main product, sugar – a highly lucrative import catering to Europe’s fledgling sweet tooth.” By the early 19th century, exporting those slaves was part of Napoleon’s masterplan to convert that vast French colony on the mainland, Louisiana, into a major and exceptionally profitable agricultural provider of exports for France. But in 1804, a slave rebellion – aided by malaria and yellow fever – defeated the French military and ejected or slaughtered the French landowners there.

Needless to say, the fledgling United States, with a very large agricultural industry based on slave labor, supported the French all the way, including a subsequent agreement between France and the new, slave-free Caribbean nation, to pay France “reparations” for lost “property.” Oh, the country was surrounded by French gunboats to seal the deal. The Franco-Haitian negotiation is pictured above; the other pictures are of Haiti today. Those reparations were paid over almost a century and a half, bore interest, such that the final payment to France was made in 1947!

Haiti was already a weak, subsistence economy after its 1804 “independence” (not recognized by the US), and robber barons and criminals had their way with the tiny country. Haiti had downs and further downs over the years. No ups! According to the US Department of State Archives, “Under interventionist policies of the early 20th century, President Woodrow Wilson sent the United States Marines into Haiti to restore order and maintain political and economic stability in the Caribbean after the assassination of the Haitian President in July of 1915. This occupation continued until 1934.”

But while this may have seemed like beneficial and stabilizing effort, the United States very much reconfigured Haiti as a subordinate trading partner, literally controlled by American interests on terms most favorable to the US, which only heightened Haiti’s socio-economic decline. An article by Greg Rosalsky in the October 5, 2021 NPR reminds us that: “Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and rich countries have their fingerprints all over the nation's stunted development. The United States worked to isolate a newly independent Haiti during the early 19th century and violently occupied the island nation for 19 years in the early 20th century. While the U.S. officially left Haiti in 1934, it continued to control Haiti's public finances until 1947, siphoning away around 40% of Haiti's national income to service debt repayments to the U.S. and France.”

The post WWII Haiti suffered through horrific dictators (like the voodoo worshipping “Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime); poverty and hopelessness spiraled to new depths. That these dictators were kept alive with US financial and military aid – to “keep the country from going communist” – further decimated this clinging-to-the-edge nation. But even after a few bouts with democracy, modern Haiti has become hell on Earth, worse still from a July, 2021 assassination of then President Jovenel Moïse: “[P]arts of Haiti are still struggling to recover from the August 2021 earthquake, various drought episodes and Hurricane Matthew, which struck Haiti as a Category 4 storm in 2016.

“Gang violence, however, accounts for most of the hunger, with gangs controlling 80% of [capital city] Port-au-Prince and the roads that lead to and from northern and southern Haiti… Nearly 6,000 people in Haiti are starving, with nearly half the country’s population of more than 11 million people experiencing crisis levels of hunger or worse as gang violence smothers life in the capital of Port-au-Prince and beyond, according to a report released Monday.

“The number of Haitians facing crisis, emergency and famine levels of hunger increased by 1.2 million in the last year as gang violence disrupts the transportation of goods and prevents people from venturing out of their homes to buy food, according to the report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification… In addition, 2 million Haitians are facing severe hunger, according to the report.” Associated Press, October 2nd.

“The Haitian refugees hoped the United States, under President Biden, would offer them a lifeline. They were wrong. The Biden administration has been sending thousands back to Haiti, even though Haiti is a disaster zone, and many of the refugees fled it years ago. Some of those the U.S. government forcibly sent to Haiti are kids who have never lived there.” NPR. The quote in the opening of this blog came from Biden’s special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote. In the last few years, many Haitians have entered the United States, some illegally with others under a special US program that offered a right to earn a right to residency.

“[I]f the rich world wants to help right the wrongs done to Haiti in the past, perhaps the most effective policy right now would be to accept more Haitian refugees. This wouldn't only be a humane policy that would improve their and their future families' lives. It would also likely be a boost to the Haitian economy. According to the World Bank, Haitian expatriates sent $3 billion in remittances back home to Haiti in 2018, which was almost one-third of the island nation's entire GDP.” NPR.

Some of the Haitians legally allowed to remain in the US under that special post-natural-disaster program included those Haitians specifically requested by Republican Mayor of Springfield, Ohio, responding to his constituents’ desperate cry for workers to reignite their community. These Haitians did that job exceptionally well, God-fearing Christians who integrated quickly into that small Ohio town. Their reward for their decency and hard work: they became the “cat and dog eating criminals” that Donald Trump and JD Vance used to create heartless lies and thus fuel their hate-filled campaign rhetoric in the current campaign.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is too much hate stirred up in the United States based on ignorant politicians, willing to sacrifice morality and Christian-mandated kindness, to fabricate hurtful lies just to grab and hold political power.