EPILOGUE

“We have become the subjects of our own history,” announced Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1987, “and we refuse from now on to be the objects of that history.” Aristide’s exultation captured the hope and determination of the moment. The 1986 overthrow of Duvalier was spoken of as the “uprooting”: the tree planted by decades of dictatorship had to be completely destroyed before something else could grow in its place. Under the aegis of a transitional military government known as the Conseil National de Gouvernement (CNG), an assembly set about writing a new constitution aimed at undoing the three decades of Duvalierism. The resulting document was a watershed in the country’s constitutional history, the first attempt at creating a truly participatory democracy in Haiti.1

The 1987 constitution explicitly identified the central problem in Haitian political culture: the gap between the mass of the population and the political class. The aim of the new political order, it declared, should be to “eliminate all discrimination between urban and rural populations, through the acceptance of a community of language and culture and the recognition of the right to progress, information, education, health, work and leisure for all citizens.” To that end, the constitution for the first time made Kreyòl an official language of the country on a par with French, requiring the government to disseminate all laws, decrees, and international agreements in both French and Kreyòl in the press and on the radio. Taking aim at the political culture of the Duvalier regime, the constitution also announced that “the cult of personality is formally outlawed,” and it ordered that no streets, public buildings, or works of art could be named after living individuals. It prohibited those who had carried out torture or committed other crimes under Duvalier from serving in office for ten years. And it created a new electoral commission, charged with overseeing the political process and assuring the legitimacy and fairness of elections.2

Almost immediately after its ratification, though, the ambitious new constitution ran into a wearily familiar challenge: the military seemed determined to stay in power. They refused to apply the new laws and seemed intent on putting off the transition to democracy for as long as possible. Haiti was stuck in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot dubbed “Duvalierism after Duvalier”: the dictator was gone, but his generals and his tactics were still in place. It seemed possible that, as had happened so many times before, the popular uprising would find itself stifled, blocked off, and ultimately evanescent. A song by the musical group Les Frères Parent pointed out that Haitians had spent almost all of the twentieth century struggling against leaders they couldn’t trust: “Vincent let Lescot rise up / Lescot was succeeded by Estimé / Estimé left Paul Magloire / Our misery did not abate … / Magloire gave us Duvalier the father / Duvalier the father gave us Duvalier the son / Duvalier the son gave us the CNG / And that’s why we have to watch them!” Still, activists kept speaking out, through songs and sermons, newspaper columns and street demonstrations, and after years of repression by the military, they finally prevailed. In 1990, the CNG, yielding to the pressure, named the supreme court justice Ertha Pascal-Trouillot to the post of provisional president—making her Haiti’s first female head of state—and put her in charge of organizing an election.3

The field of candidates was large and diverse; among others, it included Louis Déjoie Jr., the son of Duvalier’s 1956 opponent. But the competition shifted dramatically when, a few weeks before the election, Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he was running. Since his participation in the anti-Duvalier movement of the early 1980s, Aristide had become one of the most prominent voices of protest in Haiti, speaking out boldly against the CNG and criticizing many aspects of U.S. policy in Haiti. Infuriated by his blistering speeches from the pulpit, the military regime had carried out several assassination attempts against him; but although they killed dozens of his parishioners and burned his church to the ground, they never got Aristide himself. These repeated escapes from death were seen by many of Aristide’s supporters as evidence of divine protection, and they helped to establish him as the embodiment of the popular push for democracy in Haiti.4

Aristide called his party Lavalas, “the flood,” after a popular anti-Duvalier song that likened the demonstrators to a deluge that would carry away the oppressive regime. As his symbol he chose a white rooster, a symbol of strength and combativeness. It decorated his campaign posters, the pro-Aristide murals that sprang up throughout the country—and the ballots that about two-thirds of the voters put into the urns. Not since the 1930 elections, when the end of the U.S. occupation was in the offing, had an electoral process generated such enthusiasm, and the levels of participation were significantly higher than ever before. At last, many Haitians hoped, there would be a real connection between the country’s population and its government institutions. A song produced for the electoral commission summed up the ebullient mood: “We are the state … / The state is us.”5

The day after his inauguration as president, Aristide led a march to the notorious Fort Dimanche prison and declared that it should be made into a museum documenting the crimes of the Duvalier years. Families of the prison’s victims carried photographs of the dead and disappeared and placed them around the site. Many hoped for a reckoning with the crimes of the recent past and a fundamental transformation of the political order. But while the movement to overthrow the Duvalier regime had created a flowering of new organizations and institutions, they emerged in a landscape scarred by the repression of civil society. The state was essentially a shell, offering few services to the Haitian population. And despite the efforts of the previous years, the army was in fact far from uprooted and still had support from influential sectors of Haitian society. With Aristide promising sweeping changes that threatened their power, the military leadership struck back. On September 30, 1991—less than eight months after Aristide’s inauguration—a group of army officers organized a coup. Aristide was able to escape to the United States, but the army carried out brutal reprisals against his supporters, killing at least twelve hundred over the next few days and many thousands more in the following years.6

Aristide returned to the presidency in 1994, escorted by U.S. troops ordered to Haiti by President Bill Clinton with the sanction of the United Nations. Once back in office, Aristide disbanded the Haitian army entirely, convinced that if left in place it would represent a recurrent threat to the fragile democratic regime. Foreign troops—first from the United States, and then from a U.N. mission—took over some of the army’s duties. Aristide had long spoken about the need for Haitians to emancipate themselves from foreign influence, but the conditions of his return in fact helped establish a long-term foreign military presence in the country.7

In the three years of Aristide’s absence, the economic situation in Haiti had gotten even worse: an embargo put in place after the military coup had taken a deep economic toll. As a condition of their support, international financial institutions insisted that Aristide follow the neoliberal economic doctrine and remove all protectionist tariffs—a policy which, as Clinton himself would later admit, devastated Haiti’s rice growers and deepened the country’s dependency on imported food. When Aristide attempted to resist, he found himself facing the threat of withheld aid and loans. With the government in tremendous debt, he also had difficulty financing state projects that might have improved the lives of the population. And he was given little time: the United States counted Aristide’s years in exile as part of the five-year presidential term and insisted that he step down and allow a new presidential election in 1995. René Préval, a member of the Lavalas party, was voted in as his successor. Aristide remained a powerful political figure, however, and at the end of Préval’s term, he was elected president once again. This succession of presidential elections was a landmark in some respects: they represented largely peaceful and democratic transfers of power of a kind rarely seen before in Haitian history. Nevertheless, especially after Aristide’s second election, there were complaints of electoral fraud, and the next years saw increasing political conflict as his opponents tapped into popular frustration at the lack of improvement in the country. Protests against him increased, and Port-au-Prince and other cities were racked by violent street confrontations.8

The year 2004 was supposed to be a moment of triumph for Haiti: the bicentennial of the country’s independence. Aristide had prepared elaborate celebrations and invited international guests to attend. He also issued a challenge to France, accusing the country of having condemned Haiti to poverty through the 1825 indemnity and demanding that France pay it back. But the bicentennial instead became the occasion for an uprising: in February 2004, a small group of former military officers took up arms against Aristide, approaching Port-au-Prince from the north. The U.S. government made it clear that it would not intervene to support him, and at the end of the month, Aristide left the country in circumstances that remain the subject of tremendous controversy. He was escorted by U.S. troops and officials, who claimed that they were simply helping him to flee to safety; Aristide himself, however, described the event as a kidnapping. Exiled for a second time, Aristide would remain abroad until 2011, when, despite strenuous objections from the United States, he returned to Haiti as a private citizen. Aristide’s return came just a few months after Jean-Claude Duvalier astonished virtually everyone by similarly reappearing in Haiti, and the political life of both men is probably far from over.

What happened to Aristide between 1990 and 2004? Why did the promise of the uprooting remain unfulfilled? The question still haunts political debate. There were powerful people both inside and outside Haiti who always distrusted Aristide, and they played a crucial role in undermining his regime. But in time he and his party also lost the support of many close allies, some of whom accused Aristide of sinking into the very patterns of authoritarianism and corruption he had once so eloquently denounced. His defenders, meanwhile, continue to insist that such accusations are largely ideological fabrications and that his attempts to bring democracy and reform to Haiti were crushed by the policies of foreign governments and international financial organizations. Given the recentness of these events, and the fact that many of those involved are still playing central roles in Haitian political life today, the dispute is an intense and often hyperbolic one, a tangle of accusations and counteraccusations of bewildering complexity. But the larger lessons to be learned must be less about individuals than about structure, about the long-term historical processes that came bearing down on Haiti in the wake of Duvalier. Regardless of their opinion of Aristide, all those who look back at the 1990s can share a sense of mourning that yet another moment that seemed to offer hope for real and profound change in Haiti fell prey to the seemingly inescapable cycle of crisis and decline.9

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Twenty-five years after the overthrow of Duvalier, Haitians are still largely the objects rather than the subjects of the political and economic order under which they live. Their capacity to shape the direction taken by their country remains extremely limited. Elections, understood as the necessary precondition for political stability, are instead occasions for shadowy and often violent political conflict. State institutions are weak and largely unresponsive. And the population has no control at all over foreign governments and organizations, which in many ways call the shots in contemporary Haiti.

Those institutions—including the U.N. military mission (known as MINUSTAH), official U.S. aid agencies, and NGOs and missionary organizations—make up a startlingly fragmented and complex network. Their actual functioning and impact are difficult to analyze or evaluate with much precision; indeed, trying to count how many nongovernmental groups are operating in Haiti is itself a remarkable challenge. NGO employees, young volunteers, missionaries, and U.N. soldiers from a bewildering array of countries with their national flags on their uniforms are a constant presence throughout most of the country.

Some political activists compare the current foreign presence in Haiti with the era of the U.S. occupation. René Préval, who was elected president again in 2005, has been accused of selling out to the United States: at one point, graffiti comparing him to Jean-Baptiste Conzé, the Haitian who led marines into the camp of Charlemagne Péralte, popped up on walls in Port-au-Prince. The comparison is politically potent, but it is also somewhat misleading: the foreign presence today operates in rather different ways and on different terms than it did in the early twentieth century. The various organizations are dispersed, decentralized, and largely uncoordinated. Members of the Haitian diaspora are also heavily involved in seeking to address pressing issues in the country, adding another dimension to the international presence. As the novelist Edwidge Danticat puts it, “Every Haitian is an NGO.” Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, spent a number of years living in the United States, and the Haitian diaspora was actively involved in his campaign.10

The current situation does have one major characteristic in common with the occupation years, however: now, as then, the setup leaves most individuals within Haiti almost completely disempowered. To survive, they continue to depend, as they long have, on their informal rural and urban networks and on deeply rooted practices of self-reliance. They draw what they can from the shifting and unpredictable terrain of aid. At times, they gain assistance from foreign organizations for projects that are truly valuable for their communities. When taken as a whole, however, it is clear that the current aid schemes are simply not working to address the larger issues: poverty, ecological devastation, insufficient educational opportunities for the youth who make up the majority of the population, a dire lack of water, food, and health care. Hope for real change is difficult to summon. Demonstrators often chant simply “Nou bouke!”—“We’re tired!”

The devastating 2010 earthquake profoundly deepened the country’s problems, destroying much of the infrastructure in Port-au-Prince and leaving millions homeless. It also starkly exposed the Haitian state’s inability to help its people in times of crisis. A global response provided emergency assistance to the country in the days and weeks after the disaster, and an array of governments and organizations mobilized to try to contribute to rebuilding the country. But it is now also abundantly clear that the tremendous difficulties of reconstruction are part of much deeper and older problems: the aftershocks of a long history of internal conflict and external pressures that has left Haiti’s population vulnerable and exposed.

In December 2010, nearly a year after the earthquake, Ricardo Seitenfus, the Brazilian head of the OAS mission in the country, offered a frank and devastating analysis of Haiti’s condition to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. He described the U.N. presence in Haiti as wasteful and even harmful: “Haiti is not an international menace. There is no civil war.” Rather, he said, the country was in the midst of low-intensity conflict between “various political actors who do not respect the democratic process.” In such a context, the U.N. approach—which results in “freezing” the existing power structures—would “resolve nothing, and only make things worse.” The U.N. troops, Seitenfus said, were there only to prop up a bankrupt vision for the country. “We want to make Haiti a capitalist country, a platform for export to the U.S. market. It’s absurd.” Echoing the historian Steven Stoll, who has called for a “Second Haitian Revolution” that would allow Haiti’s “subsistence cultures” of agrarian self-sufficiency to exist on their own terms instead of being forced to reform or disappear, Seitenfus proclaimed that “Haiti must return to what it is, a primarily agricultural country.”11

Seitenfus was as withering in his analysis of NGOs as he was about the United Nations. “There is a malicious and perverse relationship between the force of NGOs and the weakness of the Haitian state,” he declared. He described the NGO relationship to Haiti as a relatively cynical one: the country, he lamented, has been reduced to a handy place for “professional training” for an increasingly youthful group of workers. “And Haiti, I can tell you, is not the place for amateurs.” The complex interrelationships between state officials, community leaders, businesses, and other foreign aid groups in the country often mystify and deeply frustrate new volunteers, while the proliferation of different aid organizations—which often do not coordinate their work, and sometimes directly compete with each other—leads to tremendous amounts of duplicated effort.12

What was blocking a “normalization” of the situation in Haiti, the interviewer asked Seitenfus? In order to answer, the Brazilian official looked back to the country’s founding. “Haiti’s original sin, in the international theatre, was its liberation,” he said. “Haitians committed the unacceptable in 1804.” The world “didn’t know how to deal with Haiti,” and time and time again simply turned to force and coercion. Two centuries on, Seitenfus concluded, it was clear that outsiders’ efforts to shape Haiti to their own liking were ineffective. If there was hope for improvement, it would come from the realization of the original dreams of self-determination that had launched Haiti into the world. “Two hundred years ago, Haiti illuminated the history of humanity and of human rights. Now we must give Haitians the chance to confirm their vision.”13

Seitenfus’s remarks hit a nerve. The OAS pulled him from his position several months early, displeased with his unflinching critique of essentially every aspect of international work in Haiti. Many Haitians, however, applauded and celebrated the controversial interview, pleased that complaints they had often made themselves were now being voiced by a prominent figure in the international community. They noted that surprisingly few aid workers speak either French or Kreyòl, and that NGOs are subject to very little oversight from the Haitian government, essentially reporting only to their donors. As in the later years of the U.S. occupation, Haitian critics also pointed out that the money spent on salaries and living expenses for foreign workers could go much further if it were used to employ people from within the country. In March 2011, President Préval honored Seitenfus by naming him a Knight of the Republic of Haiti. The entire incident, in a way, only confirmed the continuing distance between the different groups who all have the same general aim—improving Haiti—but harbor completely different visions of what that actually means.

Looking back on the history of Haiti and its recent struggles, it is sometimes difficult not to succumb to hopelessness, to the feeling that nothing can be done. But in truth, none of what has happened in Haiti during the past two hundred years has been inevitable. Haiti’s current situation is the culmination of a long set of historical choices that date back to its beginnings as a French plantation colony. And it is the consequence of the ways that powerful political leaders and institutions, inside and outside the country, have ignored and suppressed the aspirations of Haiti’s majority.

It’s easy, in the abstract, to identify what makes for a successful democracy: a strong state, civil society, popular participation, an effective legal system. Many of these have in fact existed at one time or another in Haitian history. But the devastating combination of internal conflict and external intervention has stymied their consolidation into a network of sustainable and responsive political institutions. Remarkably, however, the history of repression has not snuffed out the Haitian struggle for dignity, equality, and autonomy. Haiti’s people have steadfastly sustained the counter-plantation system that they created through their founding revolution and painstakingly anchored in the countryside over the course of the nineteenth century. Generation after generation, they have demonstrated their ability to resist, escape, and at times transform the oppressive regimes they have faced.

“A different Port-au-Prince is possible,” graffiti declared on the walls of the city a few years ago. A different Haiti is—always, and still—possible too. That is because Haitians have never accepted what so many have announced, over and over again, during the past two hundred years: that democracy is not for them, that it cannot flourish in their land. They have kept their political imagination alive, and the story of how they have done that for so long should spur us on toward a still unwritten future. When the situation is at its worst, we should remember how this story began, and what the ancestors of today’s Haitians accomplished two hundred years ago. In the midst of a brutal plantation system, they imagined a different order, one based on freedom, equality, and autonomy. But they did more than imagine it. They built it out of nothing—with fury, solidarity, and determination. Out of a situation that seemed utterly hopeless, they created a new and better world for themselves. Two hundred years later, that remains a reminder of what is possible: if it happened once, perhaps it can happen again.