Haiti’s Fate : A Lesson in Power and History

J Alfred Cavalari
Nov 3 · 11 min read

The purpose of this piece is simple — everyone should have the resources, encouragement, and guidance to investigate the past to draw critical conclusions about the present. Everyone should be a historian. Rage Against the Machine (riffing on a quote from Orwell’s 1984) put it best:

“Who controls the past now, controls the future now. Who controls the present now, controls the past.”

I want to talk about Haiti: its past, present and its historical legacy. Common knowledge about Haiti generally falls under three categories:

According to United Nations algorithmic data that quantifies global human health and productivity by country, the people of Haiti are not only the poorest in the western hemisphere, but they suffer from the lowest life expectancy at birth and achieve the lowest level of education out of any country outside of the African continent. Haiti’s destitution is not just severe, but the most dire in its hemisphere by a significant margin.

I think for many people, even many sympathetic to the plight of the Haitian people, the severity of Haiti’s present has no story- it simply is what it is. Or, from a more malignant perspective, some may even argue that Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere simply because the Haitian people do not try hard enough — at work, at democracy, at modernization or at capitalism viable social contract. But even a brief survey of this island’s history refute such thoughts. Moreover, a critical eye toward Haiti’s past could mean a brighter future for the Haitian people.

From Columbian Genesis to Early Modern Power House

Image cred: Smithsonianmag.com

The History of the island of Hispaniola (what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) does not begin in 1492, but in that year things changed indefinitely when Columbus went searching for a new, un-taxed ocean route to the spice trade of the far East. He stumbled upon the Bahamas and the Caribbean- he stumbled upon an island called Hispaniola. The island was inhabited by the Taino people, a subculture of the Arawak culture that existed across the Caribbean and the continental coasts. These people had developed language, ceremony, spirituality, economy and conflict among themselves long before 1492. But with a culture at odds with Western notions of wealth, sovereignty and power, the disadvantages of the Taino were identified immediately by Columbus, who stumbled upon the island on his first fateful journey across the Atlantic. He reported back to the Spanish Crown:

“They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

By 1650, the Tiano were no more — the genocide of indigenous American peoples that spread through disease and conquest across the ‘New World’ began on the place where Haiti stands today.

Vast fortunes were wrought from the resources on Hispaniola. The Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was built in the name of commerce and empire. Islands were coveted by the architects of European colonialism as they provided ships safe harbors to stock up on wood, water, food and medicine on long voyages. While the Spaniards maintained control over the eastern half of the island Hispaniola, French and British pirates encroached on the western half over the decades of the early 1600’s. By 1640 the French controlled the resources there; they called their colony Saint-Domingue (Sahn Doh-mang).

By the mid 1700s, Saint-Domingue was a nova of Atlantic commerce. Known as the ‘Pearl of the Antilles,’ Saint-Domingue produced 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe at the time. These commodities were incredibly lucrative, and generated immense wealth not just for the distant French elites, but a local economy of citizens on the island itself. To be on Saint-Domingue in the 1780s was to be at the epicenter of all tensions wrought by Atlantic commerce- the place where race, class and gender converged in a complex, unsustainable nexus.

The place where it all fell apart.

Slavery in an Age of Revolution

To turn the land of Hispaniola into hyper-productive plots of commodity yielding property, the elites of Saint-Domingue utilized a form of chattel slavery that was a hallmark of Caribbean colonial systems — slaves were worked to death and replaced, kept in subjugation through death and terror. African kingdoms, operating under different forms of economic and social organization than Europeans, traded slave laborers to Europeans for commodities and goods. While these people were enslaved in Africa, African systems of servitude commonly consisted of human rights (slaves were not worked to death and replaced). This was not the nature of the system they were sold into, however, as European colonizers reinvented slavery as a violent adherence to white supremacy.

While African men were forced to be sugar boilers, carpenters, blacksmiths and masons, African women were preparing soil, weeding, cutting cane, feeding the mills, and making rum. But the bodies of African women sustained unrelenting assault from their masters — their bodies plunder for colonial consumption. The rate of manumission (the process through which some enslaved people could ‘purchase’ or earn their own freedom from their master) was higher among African women on Saint-Domingue — often, after forcing them to bear one or more children, a master would ‘manumit’ his property, removing them from the violent system that killed thousands of other African people.

Over time, through the domination and manumission of African women and their children, a society rife with racial and economic tensions emerged on Saint-Domingue. There emerged a powerful class of elite, property owning people of color, known as the gens-de-colour. White landowners were very wary of how this violated the notions of white supremacy that justified chattel slavery, as did the poor white laborers who held high and violent prejudice for the socially inferior/economically superior gens-de-colour. These social circumstances equated to massive wealth coupled with blatant instability — Saint-Domingue stood no chance as a wave of revolutions crashed around the Atlantic world.

Consider the course of events following the American War of Independence. If we step back and look at things from far away, the connectivity of the early modern Atlantic world becomes clear. In 1776 the settler colonial Patriots in North America (our founding fathers!) boldly told their distant colonial overlords, effectively, to fuck right off. In doing so, the Patriots set a precedent in the form of a well-articulated standard of human rights: their Declaration of Independence. It’s infuriating, the irony of the Declaration, given that as it was penned, African people were still subjugated as human property, women were still considered their husbands’ property, and indigenous people were beingdisplaced from their land through conquests and disease. The Patriots, despite all this, proclaimed to support a few universal rules: that all men are created equal; that Liberty (whatever that means) is an unalienable right; and that ‘the people’ have the right (nay, the duty!) to abolish governments that don’t foster ‘safety and happiness.’ These ideas did not stay in North America- they spread like fire in a cane field across the Atlantic world. In 1789, the French matched the American Patriots with their Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaiming the same standards of liberty and equality. But in 1793 the French revolutionaries broke ground that the American Revolution did not — instead of telling their king to fuck right off, they cut his fucking head off!

N​ow let’s regroup.

We must remember that while the French and American Revolutions were monumental historical events, they were also tragically limited in addressing the inequalities of white(male) supremacy forged by centuries of colonialism. We must also remember that nothing in history happened in a vacuum — while the Jacobites in France were screaming and shouting about liberty and equality, their French counterparts in Saint-Domingue were listening carefully, especially the socially marginalized gens-de-colour, who started voicing their own thoughts on liberty through a series of protests and an attempted uprising. But the fight for liberty truly began in 1791- as the Patriots were fumbling to keep control of their brave new social project, as the French revolutionaries were chasing the Royal Family out of Paris with pitchforks and torches, and as civil war erupted between the white and colored elites of Saint-Domingue. In 1791, on the night of August 21, the slaves of Saint-Domingue (who numbered half a million compared to the thirty thousand masters and free people) made clear to these fools that they knew nothing of liberty.

W​hen the slaves broke their chains in Saint-Domingue, they did so with a hellish fury. Their insurrection left the infrastructure of industrial sugar production in ruins, and the cane fields charred patches of hot embers. They also murdered, sometimes indescriminately, their oppressors and their families- sometimes wreaking the same carnage that had kept them for so long subjugated. This story is too awesome to summerize quickly — the Haitian revolutionaries accomplished unthinkable victories against their adversaries. The Haitian Revolution, which started during the French Revolution and lasted into the Napoleonic wars, was as complicated as it is fascinating. Elite (meaning literate and educated) slaves led massive armies the uprising, as the major colonial powers fought one-another for alliegances with the insurgents. The story of the revolution in Haiti is the stuff of legend, and deserves greater attention than can be placed here.

R​evolution and Repercussions

T​he Haitian Revolutionaries played by the book of Atlantic Revolutions. After defeating their colonial aggressors, they crafted their own Declaration of Haitian Independence in 1804. This document is rife with the imagery standard for the early Atlantic revolutions:

“It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.

T​he Haitian Revolutionaries exposed the fallacy of the ‘American Revolution’ — they finished what the Patriots started in 1776, and did so with enough force to shake the Atlantic world at its foundation. While the French Revolutionaries did, momentarily at least, abolish slavery across the French empire, they did so only after the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue turned the island into a scene of fire and death. But, just as Haiti’s history didn’t start in 1492, it did not end in 1804 with the abolition of slavery and codification of Black supremacy (see article twelve) on the island.

After defying the economic and cultural norms of the colonial order (slavery and white supremacy), the first Black state was shunned by the rest of the Atlantic world, and was systematically kept out of the economic prosperity of transoceanic trade. Moreover, their nationhood was wholly rejected by the nations of Western Civilization for decades. The first successful slave revolution in human history, the first statement made on the global stage that demanded wider (non-white) definitions of human rights to liberty and equality, was systematically stifled and silenced for centuries.

H​aiti’s history from the aftermath of the revolution to our present is a laundrylist of international shaming, political turmoil and natural disasters. In 1825 Haiti earned national recognition by taking on a massive economic reperations plan to repay those who lost property as a result of the revolution — yes, you read that correctly, Haiti had to pay colonial overlords reperations for the value of property lost during the revolution. The first installment was made with a loan from French banks. By 1898, half of Haiti’s national budget was dedicated to paying the French; by 1913 it had grown to 67% of their national budget.

The United States effectively denied Haiti’s claim to nationhood from the start: this changed, of course, during the American Civil War when the federal government of the North thought Haiti a great strategic location in their battle against the South. In 1904, the Roosevelt Corrolary set the stage for the American imperialism in Haiti; the United Stated occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 to maintain order and secure economic interests. In 2003, a conference in Canada deliberated the best course for Haiti’s government; no Haitian government officials were involved.

H​aiti’s history of disruptive outside intervention is compounded by their own tumultuous history. Presidents in that country have historically been more likley to be assassinated or overthrown than complete their term. The year 1957 alone saw five Haitian presidents- this particular cycle of instability ended with the 15 year long genocidal reign of Papa Doc Duvlaier. In 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristride was overthrown the same year that hurricane Jeanne killed 1,900 people. In 2008, in a single year, riots broke out over high food prices, a series of four storms killed 800 people and wiped out a quarter of the Haitian Economy, and two seperate schools collapsed in a single month. In 2010 over 100,000 people perished in one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history.

(​Un)Silencing the Past

R​eally think about this.

H​aiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. But in our collective imagining of Haiti, that poverty is just integral to the Haitian people. We don’t question it. We don’t make the connection why the poorest country in the western hemisphere is also the only country on the planet produced through a successful slave rebellion.

The revolution in Haiti was silenced among the scholars of the Western. They spoke about it in the 19th century only as evidence of the dangers of wholesale emancipation; they spoke about it as a tragedy. The silencing of the revolution in Haiti was intentional — it was grounded in the fact that Haiti challenged the very ideas that served as the foundation of the global order.

The former slave insurgents of the Haitian Revolution destroyed every literal and theoretical structure of power that Western modernity had created in Saint Domingue: the technology of the sugar plantations, and the capitalist system that it represented; the social and racial hierarchies, dominated by white supremacy. The colonial system that drew wealth from across the globe and deposited it in European coffers. The institution of slavery, and the brutality which ensured that slaves would stay in a state of stagnant fea. All these structures of power were reduced to smoldering, bloody rubble on the colony once known as Saint Domingue.

F​reedom and Liberty were born in Haiti. When the enslaved masses of Saint-Domingue caught wind of these ideas as they echoed across the Atlantic from the U.S. and France, they sent a clear message to those in power that they could not have their cake and eat it too, by stabbing the cake to death and lighting it on fire. If we love liberty ( if we are privileged enough to enjoy liberty) we owe it in no small part to the rebels of Haiti.

I​’ll end with the words of Thomas Jefferson from 1787, who seemed to understand what the score was:

“the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.”

J Alfred Cavalari

Written by

Starving historian squatting in the forests in a camper with my dirty desert dog squad.

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