INTRODUCTION TO THE APPENDICES
In Port-au-Prince, in the days following the January 12, 2010, earthquake, a Haitian friend lamented out loud—as we sat together, but speaking to no one in particular—that “Haiti needs to stop changing history.” The scope of the disaster was just settling in, but she was referring to the country’s legacy of setting historical precedents.
Haiti is a small nation, occupying the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. It is smaller in size than the U.S. state of Maryland. But the history of the “New World” cannot be understood without considering Haiti. Haiti has also been central to a number of events of global significance—from first contact with western Europe, through slavery, colonialism, and revolution, to creation and maintenance of external debt, and, most recently, the global response to the 2010 earthquake.
It is likely that Christopher Columbus made first contact in the New World in northern Haiti in 1492. Less than half a century later, the indigenous population was decimated—more than 90 percent of the island’s original inhabitants having died from disease, enslavement, or other brutalities. By the end of the eighteenth century, the colony of Saint-Domingue was producing more than two-thirds of France’s overseas wealth, with sugar the dominant cash crop.
A deadly industry was created to transform sugar cane into granulated sugar and liquid molasses. Sugar cane grows year-round, and the colony’s industrial sugar mills ran around the calendar and around the clock. The industry depended on relatively cheap and expendable slave labor. It was less expensive to import a new African slave than to slow the agricultural or industrial production. Life expectancy for a slave in colonial Haiti was twenty-one years.
The importance of the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution cannot be overstated. It has been an inspiration for the world’s oppressed and a source of great fear for the powerful for more than 200 years. While the United States continued to profit from chattel slavery for a full sixty years after the Haitian revolution and lived with such convoluted inhumanities as the “three-fifths compromise,” Haiti made its politics plain. For example, the 1806 Haitian Constitution states: “Every African, Indian and those issued from their blood, born of colonies or foreign countries, who might come to reside in the Republic, will be recognized as Haitians …” Citizenship could be obtained after one year of residence. Haiti’s mere existence, let alone its open shores, was an affront to colonial world order. In the words of anthropologist Ira Lowenthal, “Haiti was the first free nation of free men to arise within, and in resistance to, the emerging constellation of Western European empire.” It would be another 150 years before much of the colonized gained independence. The roots of what became the modern human rights movement are contained in the Revolution and Haiti’s early governance.
Soon after independence, Haiti encountered a number of all-too-modern consequences typical of the post-colonial world. This includes the first example of foreign debt creation. In 1825, under threat of invasion, Haiti agreed to pay “reparations” to France for property seized during the revolution, namely themselves and the land of the former colony. With no cash reserves or sanctioned foreign trade Haiti had no money to pay this “debt.” It had to borrow from France (and others) to meet the payment. This initial debt, equivalent to $21 billion in today’s money, was paid well into the twentieth century, to say nothing of further indebtedness accrued over the intervening decades. Traces of this initial debt were paid until 1947.
In a direct analogy to what is called “structural adjustment” in the post-WWII global economic era, Haiti’s internal development and foreign trade was heavily influenced by its creditors. Noneconomically productive sectors such as public health, education, and environmental and food sustainability were neglected in favor of agricultural and natural resource exportation.
Though politically independent, throughout the nineteenth century Haiti developed according to the priorities and the constraints of creditors in Europe and the United States and fell ever further into debt. The twentieth century saw the increasing influence of the United States—including a military invasion between 1915–1934, continuing with a number of U.S.-backed governments until the 1957 election of François Duvalier, whose rise to power was part of a backlash against the elite, light-skinned governments that followed U.S. occupation. This brutal Duvalier family dictatorship lasted until 1986.
Most recently, Haiti suffered a “natural” disaster of unprecedented concentration. Only a small number of natural disasters have caused greater casualties: flooding in China in 1931, the Bhola cyclone in present-day Bangladesh in 1970, and the Tangshan earthquake in 1976. The earthquake on January 12, 2010, is estimated to have killed 220,000–316,000 people in its immediate aftermath. As a recent comparison, the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 carried a similar death toll but this was spread over many hundreds of miles of coastline and more than eight nations.
The devestation of the earthquake in Haiti was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, the city’s southern suburbs, the small urban center of Léogâne (closest to the epicenter), and as far south as Jacmel on Haiti’s south coast. The intensity of images and stories that followed the disaster may well have given most people in the world their framework for understanding (and misunderstanding) Haiti.
It is impossible to understand the devastation of the earthquake without understanding the city of Port-au-Prince. But this does not work in reverse; Haiti and its capital city are, of course, much more than a single disaster or any single narrative. The recent loss of lives, homes, crops, and vital public infrastructure brought by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 reminds us that Haiti and Haitians continue to struggle and deserve the world’s attention, understanding, and generosity.
We recognize that the following appendices are wholly inadequate in providing an understanding of the country’s history and society. We offer them instead to help readers grasp the ways the narratives in this book are part of that larger history of a city and nation.
—Evan Lyon