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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone understand why Haiti is in such bad shape, and continues to be in such bad shape, year after year, disaster after disaster?

It sounds (and feels) harsh, but until that question is answered, what's the point of sending aid?

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>Haiti was the richest and most productive European colony in the world going into the 1800s.[1][2] Haiti’s legacy of debt began shortly after a widespread slave revolt against the French, with Haitians gaining their independence from France in 1804. President of the United States Thomas Jefferson – fearing that slaves gaining their independence would spread to the United States – stopped sending aid that began under his predecessor John Adams and pursued international isolation of Haiti during his tenure.[3] France had also pursued a policy that prevented Haiti from participating in trade in the Atlantic.[2] This isolation on the international stage made Haiti desperate for economic relief.[4]

>France, with warships at the ready, sailed to Haiti in 1825 and demanded Haiti to compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony.[5][6] In exchange for French recognition of Haiti as a sovereign republic, France demanded payment of 150 million francs.[5] In addition to the payment, France required that Haiti provide a fifty percent discount on its exported goods to them, making repayment more difficult.[4] In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property; the 2004 equivalent of US$21 billion.[5][4][7] Historians have traced loan documents from the time of the 1825 Ordinance, through the various refinancing efforts, to the final remittance to National City Bank (now Citibank) in 1947.[2]

Founding fathers btw.

The problem with explanations for Haiti's poverty that use events from the 1800s is that Haiti had a GDP per capita as high as South Korea until the mid-1960s, and as high as China's until the mid-1970s. Even as high as Vietnam until 2010 - I visited Vietnam in 2010 and it was quite poor but overall quality of life seemed relatively decent considering and you could see signs of development and progress. Vietnam's GDP per capita has more than doubled since then.

It's odd how Haiti had the same GDP per capita as now up-and-coming Vietnam just 10 years ago and yet most of the explanations for why Haiti's a hopeless basket case are citing events in the 1800s.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=haiti%2C+china%2C+sout...

South East Asia became a key geo-polotical theater in the Cold-War right around that time. Hence two different East/West wars (Korea, Vietnam). US strategically became strong ally/supporter of S Korea and enormous growth in US/Korea trade policy, particularly textiles, dramatically grew S Korean economy.

1800s is a long time ago, but it's consequences continued long after. Debts were still being paid until almost 1950. It's easy to underestimate debt impact. US Debt to GD ratio, is about 100% and there is a lot of concern on long term US economic health. Venezuela is essentially a failing economy and is at 350%. France came and instituted a debt of 300% debt to GDP as reparations for slaveowners. That's essentially Venezuela territory.

What happened to Haiti between 1950s to 2010 was the Duvalier family who came to power on a movement that grew out of the US occupation of Haiti in the first half of the 1900s. Not the same, but similar to Castro coming to Cuba post US actions there, and Iran post US propping up the Shah of Iran, US occupation created a groundswell against. It took a bit more time, but it eventually enabled the Duvalier family dynasty. And they were horribly corrupt, but they rode the wave.

Haiti finally got rid of them and things started to look better. So why has it diverged from Vietnam since 2010? An enormous earthquake hit in 2010 and devastated the country. 3% of the population was killed. 15% of the population had their homes destroyed.

>3% of the population was killed.

8% of Germany died during WW2, and they suffered under enormous foreign debt afterwards. Two million Vietnamese died during the Vietnam war. 4% of Japan died during WW2, and they also happened to have nuclear weapons used against them. The Korean war was enormously destructive, and after the cease fire, most of South Korea's industrial base ended up on the wrong side of the border. South Korea operated under a military dictatorship for decades. Vietnam is still a single-party Communist state, with attendant corruption and looting.

All four countries are dramatically richer today than Haiti. Disasters and foreign debt don't explain the difference.

Why are you comparing recovery between countries 50-60 years post incident with a country that just had the event 10 years ago? That makes no sense to me. Of course they will be different.

What is the significance of having a high GDP per capita? GDP is a metric of economic output, it is unwise to extrapolate it so far -- after all, Syria has a GDP 2x that of Haiti.

Where is this from! Wikipedia? Want to read more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti

You can find the source of a text just by picking a random sentence from it, put it in quotes and google for it.

https://www.theroot.com/as-haiti-burns-never-forget-white-pe... covers it in some more detail.

Like the article says it sounds unreal and almost to suspend disbelief, however if you independently look up the major events outlined they pencil out.

I read about some of the history of Haiti on the Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/2018/09/shades-of-gray/

It is interwoven with describing an interactive fiction game, so not every word on there represents reality, but there are sources. I found it riveting when I first read it.

This comment sounds similar to what I read on reddit about the current problems in India are mostly because of the colonial British rule who left 70 years ago.

How long will you keep blaming colonial rule and start accepting that the local people have to fix the problems.

> President of the United States Thomas Jefferson – fearing that slaves gaining their independence would spread to the United States – stopped sending aid that began under his predecessor John Adams and pursued international isolation of Haiti during his tenure.[3]

This skips over the context of why people absolutely feared the idea of slaves gaining freedom after the Haitian Revolution.

The reason for that was the genocide carried out against non-black Haitians. [1] Even those people who actively opposed slavery, including children, were murdered. Americans feared that if slaves were freed, they'd all be raped and murdered as well

I'm not here to justify slavery or anything. But people 200 years ago didn't consider all races equal, and they were especially put off by the events that transpired in Haiti and wanted to actively prevent anything similar from happening in their own hometown.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

Yep, a few years later Haiti invaded my country and did the same thing, some towns still tell the stories of the massacres hatians committed in DR, they closed down schools and universities, killed blacks, whites and mulattos, by the time we got rid of them our economy was in shambles and the population was about a third of the population when they invated DR, I think this is the single event that has caused the most damage to my country ever.

And let's not forget for those 2 decades we also payed Haiti's dept to France, something we had nothing to do with.

Haitians love to bring up slavery and their treatment by France and USA as the only and main cause of why they're so poor, but the elephant in the room is how corrupted Haitian politicians and business people are, in the 1950s DR and Haiti had about the same GDP, and now DR is about 10 times richer. Corruption is the main cause of why Haiti is so poor nowadays, I should know, my own country is full of it. For some reason they never bring up Papa Duc and Baby Duc and all the other dictators and corrupt presidents they've had in recent decades.

I really hope some day Haiti can get their shit together and start to develop their country, that'll be the best for everybody on the Hispaniola island.

Was this one of the reasons the DR has removed Haitians citizenship a few years ago?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/dominican-...

That certainly doesn’t justify slavery, and also doesn’t really provide any useful context in my opinion. There isn’t a big difference between “they didn’t want their slaves to gain freedom” and “they didn’t want their slaves to gain freedom and be angry at their former masters.”

Children and abolitionists weren’t masters and were still killed. There’s a big difference between being angry at slave owners and carrying out genocide. The latter is what happened in Haiti and people in the US actively feared that for decades.

>> The reason for that was the genocide carried out against non-black Haitians.

That seems over the top to call a slave revolt genocide against the opressing group.

The Poles who switched sides and fought with the Haitians seem to get ignored for some reason.

They systematically murdered every last white person in Haiti - whether they were involved with the French or not. Women and children included.

It was very literally genocide. There's no other word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre#Massacre

To be clear, this was a horrible event - but frequently like here it leaves out any other events during the period.

Killing 2000 whites at once is horrible. It came the end of a fight for independence / freedom from slavery that had been killing on average 10,000 blacks per year for 100 years. Over 1 million blacks died in Haiti during slavery.

Killing does not justify killing, but at the same time 2,000 in the context of 1 million is something different. And yes those 1 million included women and children as well.

This was not peaceful treatment:

> Torture of slaves was routine; they were whipped, burned, buried alive, restrained and allowed to be bitten by swarms of insects, mutilated, raped, and had limbs amputated.

The life expectancy of an enslaved person was 3 years. Yes that level of absurd. It's almost unfathomable.

And during that same war Napoleon's armies were also committing massacres - and the thing that stopped them from elevating to genocide was that they kept losing battles/territory. Ie one army succeeded at what the other failed at.

What happened in Haiti and the major powers treatment of the colony was disgusting and severely understudied/unknown by most people.

>> Killing does not justify killing,

I think the rest of your lengthy post refutes that. Or maybe it means "but we understand why they did it."

Nope, not that. It means history does not happen in a vacuum.

But I don't want this to devolve into an internet argument, especially not on this topic, and I feel it tip toeing towards that line - so I'll gracefully end my replies here. Cheers.

This is a simplistic take. Haiti has been buffeted by serious internal political forces which have negatively effected its growth trajectory and stopped it from having a viable economy.

To blame it purely on France enforcing the debt is missing a fair amount of Haitian politics. It's not it wasn't a factor but it's way more complicated than just France bleeding Haiti dry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti#Political_str...

It’s one of the poorest countries in the world, probably bc they had to pay debts for slave plantations for 100 years - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti

It also sits in both earthquake and hurricane areas, so frequently has disasters and then no money to recover.

France seems to have been attempting an honest reckoning with its past, recently. Returning the present value of those debts to Haiti would bring tangibility to that effort.

Very corrupt political and wealthy class for starters. If you want to do some research look into the Petrocaribe scandal and the recent assassination of the president. I lived there for five years (until 2019) and everything got a little more worse month after month. By the end, we were lucky if we had 10 hours of grid power in a typical week (when we arrived we had consistently 14 hours per day).

St. Domingue (now Haiti) was France's wealthiest overseas possession in 1790. It was a human meat-grinder as slave life expectancy was low from being worked and whipped to death on the plantations. The slaves rebelled, fought the French and won. But then France was her enemy and tried to extract any remaining wealth in Haiti as "repayment" for their lost plantations. That set Haiti back really bad in development deficits that are still very present.

Interesting article and discussion about that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916733

Although the article carefully avoids any mention of race as a factor, and comments mentioning this even in the mildest terms ("maybe it's hard for Haiti to get investment when they don't have any potential investors who look like them and speak the same language?") were promptly flagged.

Some good content in that link from people who've lived there. It makes sense to me that the problem is fundamental and cultural, and not racial. The thread implies that there's a thick strand of anti-science, anti-outsider bias that prevents even the most basic improvements to...anything. And the effect is so overwhelming that those who come to know better (e.g. the Haitian geeks), just leave.

An incredible tragedy, but there are some good lessons here. In particular, that you should accept value from anywhere, including your enemies. Call it the "von Braun ethos". The brutality of Euro slave holders is appalling, shocking, horrific. But to use this as an excuse to ignore the lessons of Euro science is an extraordinary case of cutting your nose off to spite your face.

So extremely sad.

They're now aligned to be the stage for a proxy war between the US and China, as Haiti is now involved with Taiwan. Their future isn't looking any brighter, unfortunately.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/09/haiti-assass...

There is an excellent documentary called Fatal Assistance, directed by Raoul Peck, which shows how foreign aid and the nonprofit/NGO industrial complex have not helped Haiti. The money often comes with strings attached, and the "experts" think they know better than locals about what Haiti needs, so they build projects that are useless at best, and actively dangerous at worst. The UN was even found spilling untreated sewage into the environment, contributing to a cholera outbreak that killed thousands of Haitians [1]. The point of aid is not to help, but to keep Haiti dependent and poor.

As other commenters pointed out, the reason for this is that Haiti was an immensely profitable (and terrifyingly exploitative) slave plantation, and they dared to rebel against their Western colonial oppressors -- and win. They've been punished for it ever since.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/leaked-un-repo...

The point of sending aid is that many thousands of innocent people will die without it.

We are asked, daily, by the moderators of this site not to invite and participate in nationalistic flame wars.

Every single possible reason you could possibly imagine but the real one.

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