Is the U. S. Friend or Foe to Haiti?

Is the U.S. Friend or Foe to Haiti?

Unfortunately, the U.S. has been and still is, in my opinion, more foe than friend. Historically, we were allies with the evil French in our fierce opposition to Haiti. For those who want detailed documentation, I recommend three books: Paul Farmer, the Uses of Haiti; Killing with Kindness and an Unbroken Agony by Randall Robinson, 2007.

Politically and economically, the U.S. has treated Haiti either as an enemy state or as a puppet state, never as a democratic equal. We have done far more harm than good, sometimes using the CIA to achieve our purposes. Often even well-meaning attempts by missionaries and NGOs to fix the pervasive poverty problem plaguing Haiti have been misguided, created dependency, and have not addressed the fundamental problems of oppression and justice.

Overall, U.S. efforts are flawed because of our ethnocentric arrogance and our economic greed which overwhelm any goodwill and justice.

Randall Robinson is an African American with the courage and wisdom of a Martin Luther King; his wife is from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. The following quotations are from his book An Unbroken Agony. The U.S. has often participated and perpetuated in preserving this endless oppression, this unbroken agony. Haiti's oppression began in 1492 with Columbus who initiated Spanish genocide which wiped out the original Native American population. Then the nasty French took over and implemented 200 years of slavery and neoslavery (debt slavery).

The Haitian slaves began their revolt against Napoleon's armies in 1791 and completed their bloody revolution in 1804, losing one-third of their population in the process---lost 150,000 of 465,000; a much higher percentage than in the U.S. Civil War.

From Randall Robinson:

"Even before France leveraged the weak new state [Haiti] with crushing financial reparations in 1825, the United States and Western Europe---including the Vatican---moved on the heels of the French army's departure in 1804 to cripple the fledging nation socially, politically, and economically, just as France was fashioning new policies to favor Haiti's minority community of French white ex-colonist and mulattoes, the people in Haiti who needed French help the least.

"Unsurprisingly, the black peasant community---impoverished by centuries of French slavery and devastated by the war that ended it---found itself in a state of perilous disrepair. Unlike the fair-skinned Haitians who always had a monopoly on education, education by the early 1800s was a privilege rarely enjoyed by the blacks."

The U.S. attitude toward Haiti is reflected by this statement by a U.S. senator (1824): "Our policy with regard to Haiti is plain We can never acknowledge her independence. . . . The peace and safety of a large portion of the union forbids us to ever discuss it."

"For the next two hundred years, Haiti would be faced with active hostility from the world's most powerful community of nations. The new country endured a variety of attacks, some imposed concurrently, other consecutively, including military invasions, economic embargoes, gunboat blockades, reparation demands, trade barriers, diplomatic quarantines, subsidized armed subversions, media distortions, and a string of twentieth-century U.S.-armed black dictators, beginning with Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who rose to power in 1957, . . . "

"American economic sanctions against Haiti would not end until . . . 1863, nearly sixty years after the founding of the free Haitian republic."

In regard to the reparations France forced Haiti to pay (debt slavery): "the government of Haiti was required to make thirty annual payments of 2 million francs in order to pay off the 60 million franc balance. Haiti had to make these payments in addition to payments it had been making to a succession of private banks from which it had to borrow at onerous interest rates in order to meet the terms of its original unjust obligation to France. . . . Haiti was left virtually bankrupt, its workforce in desperate straits. THE HAITIAN ECONOMY HAS NEVER RECOVERED FROM THE FINANCIAL HAVOC FRANCE (AND AMERICA) WREAKED UPON IT, DURING AND AFTER SLAVERY." (Emphasis added).

In 2004, "Slavery had long since ended, but the country's wealth remained concentrated in the closed fists of the very few whose families and descendants had seized and held onto it since the early 1700s."

In January 2003, Denis Paradis, Canada's secretary of state, no friend of Haiti, "was dumbstruck on first witnessing the wealth of Haiti's . . . upper class: 'the rich are so rich there, . . . . I've never seen anything like that . . . but the poor is unbelievable."

My conclusion: The U.S. rich and powerful elite ally themselves with the Haitian rich in order to maintain the oppressive status quo.

U.S. Senator Dodd stated: "He [Aristide] wasn't going to be beholden to the United States, and so he was going to be in trouble. We had interests and ties with some of the very strong financial interests [the rich] in the country, and Aristide was threatening them."

In 2014, the U.S. democracy is not working well; since the rich and powerful now control much of the political process, our democracy has become a plutocracy. From 1945-1970, the U.S. political and economic process produced a thriving middle class. Now that middle class is shrinking and the gap between the rich and poor is widening. The criminal justice system has become an oppressive law and order system targeting and oppressing poor ethnic communities.

While there are important differences between Haiti and the U.S.---the poor in Haiti are a much larger part of the population with no safety net---the similarities are frightening. In both countries, rich whites are in control and poor blacks are oppressed. The rich whites in both countries are in cohoots. Rereading both An Unbroken Agony and The New Jim Crow at the same time, it is glaringly obvious that whites in the U.S. treat poor blacks, especially "criminalblackmen" much the same as Haitian blacks; both are treated as second-class, as inherently inferior.