In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Eight US marines disembarked, sauntered to the Banque National de la République d’Haïti (BNRH), removed $500,000 worth of gold belonging to the Haitian government – $15m in today’s money – packed it in wooden crates to carry back to the ship and thence to New York, where it was deposited in the vaults of the investment bank, Hallgarten & Co.
The BNRH was Haiti’s central bank. It was also a foreign private corporation. Originally set up in 1880 through a concession granted to a French bank, pressure from America brought in US investors. By 1920, the BNRH was wholly owned by the American National City Bank. Haiti’s central bank it may have been but the Haitian government was charged for every transaction and the eye-popping profits spirited off to Paris or New York.
Political turmoil in Haiti in the 1910s led to Wall Street demanding action to protect its investments. Washington obliged, sending in the marines. A year later, the marines returned in force, remaining there for the next 19 years, in an often brutal occupation. “I helped make Haiti… a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” Maj Gen Smedley Butler, a leader of the American forces in Haiti, wrote in 1935.
The almost forgotten story of the bank robbery organised by the US state department is a small but illuminating moment in Haiti’s history. The forced resignation last week of prime minister Ariel Henry, the collapse of civil life and gang warfare on the streets have returned Haiti to international headlines. To make sense of the latest events, we need to understand not just where Haiti is today, but also how it got there.
The history of Haiti is one in which the nation’s governing classes have exhibited a contempt for the masses extraordinary even by the standards of the global south. It is also one in which foreign powers have never shrunk from repression and bloodshed, or straightforward theft, in pursuit of their aims, sometimes in alliance with local elites, sometimes in opposition to them. Haiti is now the poorest nation in the Americas and among the most unequal in the world.
The tragedy of Haiti is not just the devastation wrought on its people but also that, while today it may be a symbol of corruption and lawlessness, 200 years ago it symbolised, indeed was the living embodiment of, the opposite: the possibilities of human emancipation. Haiti was born in 1804 out of a 13-year revolution in which the enslaved people of the then French colony of Saint-Domingue dismantled their chains, defeated, in succession, the armies of France, Britain and Spain, and established a new nation.
Their astonishing success turned the revolution into an inspiration for those resisting slavery and colonialism across the globe.
In the independent Haiti, though, the necessities of a class-driven world ensured that the new ruling class governed as would any elite, whether in Haiti, France or America. Its objectives were to maintain power, suppress dissent and enforce the exploitation of labour. A weak and divided ruling class ensured that Haitian political life was punctuated by a succession of coups and insurrections. The suppression of democratic movements became the constant thread of the nation’s history.
The ruling elites in Europe and America, meanwhile, fearful that the Haitian example might embolden others struggling for freedom, sought to isolate the new nation, refusing for decades even to recognise it.
In 1825, France demanded, as the price of recognition, reparations of 150m francs (the equivalent, according to different estimates, of between $4bn and $21bn today) to compensate for loss of property, including human chattel. Along with the demand, it sent 14 warships.
France was compelling enslaved people and their descendants to pay their former masters for having freed themselves from servitude. Though the figure was eventually reduced to 90m francs, it remained well beyond Haiti’s capacity to pay, forcing it to take out loans from French banks at exorbitant rates, adding to the burden. By 1914, 80% of the government budget went to repaying the debt. Year after year, money that might have been spent on schools or hospitals, industry or agriculture, in one of the world’s poorest countries (though, admittedly, much of it may also have gone into the pockets of Haitian oligarchs) was purloined instead to fill the treasury of one of the richest nations of the world.
Western nations have not only impoverished Haiti, they have also constantly intervened, propping up politicians who enforce “stability”, undermining those whose democratic demands seem threatening. François Duvalier, or “Papa Doc”, came to power in 1957, a vicious dictator whose reign was built on ferocious violence. US leaders cavilled at Duvalier’s brutality, but saw him as an important asset against communism, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And so the aid poured in.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftwing priest, with mass support among Haiti’s working class and poor, elicited a different response. Twice, in 1990 and 2001, waves of public support propelled Aristide to the presidency. And twice, in 1991 and 2004, he was ousted in bloody coups.
After the first coup, Aristide returned to power with US support. Nevertheless, many of the coup leaders were on the CIA payroll and the agency did not hide its hostility. A decade later, opposition to Aristide’s economic and social policies led America to force him out of office (though Washington implausibly insists that it played no role in Aristide’s voluntary “resignation”).
Today, the Haitian state barely exists. Its functions, from policing to health, from education to social services, have been outsourced to what researcher Jake Johnston calls the “Aid State” – NGOs, UN bodies, development banks, private companies. Especially since the devastating earthquake of 2010, this “parallel state” has been the source of power in Haiti. Ariel Henry was not voted into office but appointed by the so-called “Core group”, a collection of foreign ambassadors who effectively run the country.
The result has been a complete rupture between those who govern and those who are governed; a rupture visible in everything from the gangs on the streets to the hunger that haunts its people.
“We have become the subjects of our own history,” Aristide claimed in 1987; “we refuse from now to be the objects of that history.” The tragedy is that the opposite has happened, that the people of Haiti remain excluded from the governance of their country. Until that changes, Haiti will not change.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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