Category Archives: Haiti

Debt, Haiti and Jubilee

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Whoever called Paris the city of light definitely wasn’t here on a wet Friday in December like today. You felt you were barely able to wake up. In the subterranean depths of the National Library, I time travelled to 1826 when France imposed an indemnity on Haiti for having declared itself independent. And from those old papers you could begin to sense how the free republic tweaked the nose of the old slavers and monarchists. You could also perceive how the modern debt system was from its beginnings a racialized tool of domination.

Haiti became free in 1804. There’s a few documents available that record the moment, like this text of the declaration of independence:

France did not recognize the new Republic and continued to hope that it might regain its old colony. By 1826, it was clear that this would never happen. Haitians had been free for a generation and what one French colonist called “the magic of slavery” no longer worked.

In return for accepting Haiti’s independence, France demanded an indemnity of 150 million livres, the old monarchist money. However, the true believers in colonial slavery were incensed. They valued their property in the former Saint-Domingue, including human property, at no less than four billion livres so this sum seemed derisory. A pamphlet and newspaper war began, sounding for all the world like Fox News, declaring that a war could easily be won in Haiti, slavery restored and the plantations reopened.

There are dozens of such documents in the National Library. They tell another story as well, one of the post-revolutionary debts of the old slavers, unable to get their hands on the indemnity because their creditors claimed it first or because bailiffs intervened.

Against that, there’s so little from Haiti but what remains is eloquent in its own way. Haiti passed a law in February 1826 accepting the indemnity as a national debt. There are two clauses to the law, which I was able to read today. Above was Haiti’s new coat of arms, which displayed powerful cannon suggesting that the country would defend its motto “Liberty or Death,” and replaced the fetishized cash crops, like sugar and coffee, with a splendid palm tree.

The law declared:

Article One

The indemnity of 150 million pounds consented to France in exchange for the full and entire recognition of the independence of Haiti, is recognized as national debt

Art II

The President of Haiti will take measures which his wisdom will suggest to him to liberate the nation from this debt.

So although the French portrayed the indemnity as compensation for the wrongful abolition of slavery, the Haitians presented it as a contractual exchange for the full and entire recognition of their independence.

And where the French law required an extensive 27 member commission to decide what to do with the indemnity, Haiti devoted one line to the not very important question of repayment. In the first year, they borrowed the money from France to repay to France. For the next two years nothing was repaid. French royalists worried out loud about the possibility that they might refuse to pay it.

Working on that fear, President Boyer (below) had the indemnity reduced to 90 million.

But it was not all détournement and bluff. To repay the debt, Boyer had to establish a national bank of Haiti in 1826 and he compelled the subalterns to do forced labor to raise money.

But the implied leisure of Haiti’s emblem, the palm tree, was not lost on the colonists. The racist diatribes in 1826 against the formerly enslaved, accusing them of living in “indolence,” doing nothing but dance the bamboula, sleep in the sun, and eat tropical fruit prefigures both Carlyle’s widely-cited discourse against the emancipated of 1846–and of course the much desired “holiday in paradise” now sold to Northerners. What an irony: the tropical island depends for its hard currency on the former slave owners’ fantasy of the life of liberated slaves.

At Bowdoin College that same year of 1826, the second African-American to graduate from college gave the commencement address about Haiti. John B. Russwurm did not mention the debt. He was jubilant:

Can we conceive of anything which can cheer the desponding spirit, can reanimate and stimulate it to put everything to the hazard? Liberty can do this. Such were its effects upon the Haitians—men who in slavery showed neither spirit nor genius: but when Liberty, when once Freedom struck their astonished ears, they became new creatures, stepped forth as men, and showed to the world, that though slavery may benumb, it cannot entirely destroy our faculties. Such men were Toussaint L’Ouverture, Desalines and Christophe!

Such jubilant theory was exactly what the former colonists feared. They thought it meant the end of slavery and the Caribbean colonies and it did. Boyer thought he could turn the debt to his advantage and not overly burden his new nation in so doing. If he did not succeed in doing so, it was largely because the new imperialist era of the nineteenth century saw exactly what a threat Haiti had become.

Sandy, Debt and Hunger in the Americas

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So much has been happening in the United States and in New York in particular but we should not forget that some of the most acute crisis post-Sandy is in the Caribbean. Haiti and Jamaica are both facing major challenges of hunger and debt respectively. Unluckily for them, these slow disasters were not accompanied by death on the grand scale, which is the main means by which developing countries gain access to Western media. Jamaican debt should be cancelled to allow that country to recover. Haiti needs just about everything.

Sandy hit neither country directly but its heaviest rain bands passed over them both, causing 20 inches of rain in Haiti. The two islands had already suffered from the impact of Isaac earlier in the year and Haiti is still recovering from the earthquake of 2010. Or we could say that Haiti is still recovering from the indemnity imposed on it by the international powers after its anti-slavery revolution of 1791, whose last payment in 1947 just preceded the disastrous US-backed Duvalier dictatorship. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with 54% of the population in abject poverty and 80% in poverty (estimate dates from 2003, pre-earthquake), according to those radicals at the CIA. Despite debt abolition in 2010, external debt has risen to $600 million, equivalent to 50% of the national budget.

The storm literally washed away the agriculture of both countries. The Guardian reports today:

With harvests destroyed in most of the country, Haiti’s entire food security situation is threatened….

Rivers which flooded during the storm washed away topsoil, fruit trees and cultures. Eroded banks gave way and protective walls were shattered. Of the country’s 140 communes, 70 were affected by the storm.

Plantations of corn, beans, sorghum, pigeon peas, bananas, tubers, peanuts, vegetables and rice were entirely destroyed or badly damaged by wind and water. The government, which declared a state of emergency on 30 October, confirmed that over 64,000 heads of livestock were washed away.

Half a million people face hunger, or severe acute malnutrition in NGO-speak. Food needs to get out there fast, and not just those bags of corn and wheat that government sends, but things that people in weakened condition can actually eat. It sounds like a mission Occupy Sandy could take on, as the next  part of its extraordinary relief effort.

In Jamaica, agricultural damage washed away the premium Blue Mountain coffee crop, which might not seem that serious until you consider the financial condition of the country. Jamaica’s foreign debt is so acute that, together with wages, according to the country’s finance minister yesterday, it

absorbs 80 cents out of every dollar and leaves us with just 20 cents to do everything else in the country.

The IMF are back in town, no doubt demanding more austerity from the tiny ruined former colony. First cultivated for sugar by the British, Jamaica became a banana plantation for United Fruit in the twentieth century until still cheaper fruit could be found in Central America. Now it depends on bauxite (aluminum), tourism and remittances from abroad, a classic postcolonial litany.

Over at the Rolling Jubilee, an amazing $100,000 has already been donated to abolish debt, which should eliminate an awesome $2 million of personal debt. Let’s also think how we can help our American cousins in Jamaica and Haiti recover from the disaster that our emissions helped to cause.

 

 

Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on

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Reconstruction in the US after abolition was, whether it knew it or not, following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has been going. The headlines are bad: multinational sweatshops and mining are moving in, very little of the promised aid has been disbursed, debt continues to be a burden. The glimmer of hope comes from the literally grassroots work of the Haitian peasant movement. It is as if nothing has happened since 1801: capital wants to see a restoration of the plantation, while the peasants want land, water and sustainable employment.

The Haitian revolution was long and violent. By 1801, it was clear that the formerly enslaved would win. Toussaint Louverture issued a constitution, which intensely disappointed his own side. For Toussaint, large scale cash-crop agriculture was vital both to the formation of a nation-state in general and to repaying his loans to the United States in particular. The formerly enslaved were to work as laborers for a wage.

The subaltern rank-and-file revolted against their own revolution, in search of small plots of land they could farm collectively and create a long-term guarantee against re-enslavement, whether as chattel or wage slaves. Toussaint felt compelled to repress the revolt, and even assassinated his own nephew Moïse who was its leader. The Trinidad radical C. L. R. James later saw this as the defining failure of the revolution in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1968).

CLR James

Although Pétion, later President of Haiti, did indeed begin an experiment with land redistribution, until the imposition of a massive indemnity on the country by France in 1825 did away with it. The indemnity of 150 million French francs is widely held to have decimated Haiti’s nascent recovery from the revolutionary wars and pushed it towards the poverty with which it is now synonymous. At the time of the disastrous earthquake in 2010, Haiti had once again accumulated extensive external debt of about $1.8 billion, mostly due to the antics of the U. S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. Although the IMF and World Bank were pressured into cancelling about $250 million of that debt, the bulk remains.

A group of intellectuals, led by Etienne Balibar and Noam Chomsky, reiterated in 2010 the call made by former President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in 2003, for French reparations to Haiti. Needless to say, given that Sarkozy was then President of France, this did not happen. But finally, two centuries after the citizens of Haiti had done so, the op-ed intellectuals began to call for small-scale sustainable agriculture as the way ahead for the country.

At the Rio+20 summit, some information did emerge about what has happened since 2010. The UN has come to be seen as a neo-liberal occupation force. Mining companies have moved in. The Guardian reports:

More than a third of Haiti’s north – at least 1,500 sq km – is under licence to US and Canadian companies.

It’s such a small country, but there is allegedly copper, silver and gold up there and very little of the environmental legislation that is so bothersome to mining elsewhere.

Map of Caracol from the NY Times

The one major financial investment to date is by a South Korean company who intend to create a maquiladora site in Coracel. Needless to say, the plant will use heavy fuel oil for electricity generation (built by the US) and is situated on prime farm land and at a key watershed.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste (1957-2010)

There are glimmers of hope, even if one of most effective intellectual advocates for change, sociology professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste was mysteriously assassinated just prior to the earthquake. He created reading groups like the Gramsci Circle at the State University’s School of Human Sciences and Ethnology, where he taught. He wrote and taught in Kréyol, the local language that emerged out of slavery. Anil had advocated for a $5 a day minimum wage, especially at his university, and for an a new environmentally-centered education program and citizenship. He noted that the ecological disaster in Haiti has accelerated, rather than improved:

In the 1920s, we had 20% of the country covered with forest. In the 1990s,we had less than 2%. We are about 60% short of the land we would need to live in equilibrium with the environment.

The Mouvement paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaye) are another. They advocate for sustainable agriculture, health care, education and a self-supporting Haiti.  MPP’s website appears to be down at the moment but others report on their work educating farmers how to conserve water through the dry period and to create irrigation. However, this is slow work, 60 peasants at a time.

But the multinationals won’t stay once the easy money from the Clinton foundation dries up.

The MPP have been working on this for two hundred years.

Occupy is ten months old today.