Okay, But Why Haitians Specifically?

Hispaniola, with Haiti in green, in a map from the Encyclopedia Britannica

Springfield, Ohio, mayor Rob Rue has spent the last week on a multimedia blitz campaign to shut up the former President of the United States. After Donald Trump lied outright in last week’s Presidential debate about Haitian immigrants eating pets, his community has been plagued with harassment, bomb threats, and constant insipient violence. Springfield’s Haitians, mostly factory workers and their families, are reputedly afraid to walk outdoors.

Those who know me best, know that Haiti and Haitian issues weigh heavy on my heart. I learned of the country in 1991, when a military junta under General Raoul Cedras, overthrew the legitimately elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I became curious about why Haiti, the second-oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, hasn’t become as prosperous, democratic, and free as the United States. So I set out to learn.

Unfortunately, few sources publish much about Haiti outside close-knit foreign policy circles. Most public libraries have only two authors: Wade Davis and Paul Farmer, who perceived Haiti very differently. Despite being within spitting distance of Florida and Puerto Rico, Haiti remains terra incognita to most Americans. Therefore I don’t proclaim to be a Haiti expert or Haitian studies scholar; I’m some guy who cares deeply and seeks information wherever it dwells.

In that capacity, a friend asked me this weekend: why do politicians single out Haitians, specifically, to embody their paranoia about immigration? After all, Trump previously identified Haiti by name in his notorious “shithole countries” comments, and conservatives from Ted Cruz to Ted Turner have name-checked Haitians as diseased, criminal, and otherwise generally undesirable. In today’s fraught world, what makes Haitians so noteworthy?

I cannot encapsulate Haitian history into a 750-word blog without performing a gratuitous disservice. Though rebellious slaves drove French colonial powers from the colony formerly known as San Domingue in 1804, France withheld diplomatic recognition until 1824. The United States didn’t recognize Haiti until 1862, because before then, Southern slaveholders couldn’t stomach a republic born of slave rebellion on America’s back porch.

The United States came into existence with a landed aristocracy, a veteran diplomatic corps, and allies in France and Spain. Haiti had nothing like that, and developed in isolation for its first generation. Without experienced governors, the country’s founders bungled the launch, and the nation never fully recovered. Though San Domingue’s slave-driven sugar plantations made it the richest colony in the Caribbean, the liberated slaves couldn’t sustain the economy.

Springfield, Ohio, mayor Rob Rue has become a national celebrity this
week. One suspects he probably didn't want the notoriety.

This dispossession opened Haiti to manipulation. Especially during the Cold War, America propped up military strongmen throughout the Western Hemisphere as safeguards against communism. This includes Haiti’s Duvalier dynasty, which governed through terror of its secret police, the Tonton Macoute. When Baby Doc Duvalier, manifestly incompetent, finally fled Haiti, American intelligence forces collaborated to shelter him in France. Later, future dictator Raoul Cedras attended the School of the Americas.

The United States and France have feuded for economic dominion over Haiti, as most populous Francophonic nation in its region. America currently holds sway in that regard, as President Clinton made President Aristide sign a free-trade agreement as a precondition for American intervention. As usually happens when agrarian nations sign free-trade agreements with America, cheap American produce ramped rural poverty above seventy percent.

Throughout the 1970s, tourists from France, America, and Quebec flocked to picturesque Haitian beaches, mostly around Cap-Haïtien and Tortuga. As often happens in chronically impoverished countries, tourists began paying for sex with cash-strapped locals. The timing was unfortunate. A strange, little-understood sexually transmitted virus was just gaining ground in North America at the time. By the 1980s, AIDS was rampant among Haiti’s poor.

Notice the pattern. European (and later American) powers imported slavery, political instability, poverty, and disease into a once-thriving nation. Literally from the very beginning, as some historians believe Christopher Columbus made his first Western Hemisphere landfall in Haiti. “Ayiti” is the native Taino name for the island of Hispaniola. Wealthier, stronger powers spent over five centuries exporting our worst sociopolitical outcomes to Haiti, then blaming Haiti for receiving them.

Whenever strongmen like Donald Trump look at Haitians, they don’t see people. They see the outcome of Euro-American policies that target the poor, the non-White, and the distant. They see the living, walking embodiment of Western imperialism’s consequences for the most disadvantaged. Haiti, by its existence, convicts Western imperialists of their sins.

Given an opportunity to make even the most nominal repairs to the damage Empire causes, they instead turn blame outward. Imperialists, apparently, will always punish the poor among us for being poor.