While American citizens are demonstrating their good will, as they do, on cue, whenever informed of a disaster of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, we largely remain oblivious of their own government’s direct role in the plight of one of the poorest nations on Earth.
As relayed by Truthdig’s Amy Goodman, Haiti never had the chance to become a self-sustaining, truly sovereign nation capable of withstanding a natural disaster. Not while it has been weathering a succession of imposed political disasters for the last two centuries.
For nearly a century and a half (from 1804 to 1947) Haiti was forced to pay over $150 million in reparations to France for daring to declare statehood, rather than remaining a loyal slave colony under French rule. These reparations, the equivalent of over $35 billion today, permanently entrenched the fledgling state in insurmountable debt.
The U.S, under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF were only too happy to lend Haiti money, under the conditions that it forcibly accepted subsidized US agricultural imports. Of course, Haitian farmers could not compete with the artificially cheap US crops (sometimes referred to as ‘Miami rice’) and a country which once sustained itself on its own food production, became an unwilling dependent on food imports. Before 1950 Haiti produced more than 80 percent of its own food and also exported food. Today it imports 75 percent of its food as a migration of farmers who abandoned their crops sought work in cities.
Of course, this doesn’t begin to speak to the US’s history of supporting bloody Haitian dictatorships, or of our military occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934. It is enough to say that we, very much intentionally, never gave Haiti a chance to compete as an autonomous economy, never gave it a chance to thrive, and never gave it a chance to develop the kind of infrastructure necessary to deal with a natural disaster.
After all, what sort of example would it set for the rest of the subjugated world to watch a former slave colony transform itself into a beacon of hope for other down-trodden, occupied, or enslaved peoples? That certainly could never have been allowed to happen. Imperialism would never have been the same.
