On Saturday, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti warned American citizens, volunteers and missionaries in Haiti to stay in place and hunker down after angry demonstrators attempted to get past a barricade and security guards at a Port-au-Prince hotel.
Understanding what America and France, two of the most powerful countries in the world, did to Haiti requires a suspension of disbelief because it is so insane that it sounds like fiction. But it is a historical fact that France’s and the United States’ approach to Haiti would devastate the Haitian economy, thrusting Haiti into a poverty that would last to this very day.
Haiti is poor because America and France instituted the most racist economic foreign policy that ever existed.
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In 1825, France sent warships to Haiti and demanded 150 million Francs. Not only did the United States agree, but they backed up France’s demands for the debt on the international stage, imploring European countries to ignore Haiti’s existence until it paid this money.
One could argue that this crippling debt, which thrust Haiti into poverty and took 122 years to pay, was partly the fault of the European countries who silently allowed France to enact this racist policy. One could even blame America for allowing France to extort Haiti. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine explicitly stated that “any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States.”
Perhaps Haiti’s predicament is due to America’s fear of slave uprisings. Maybe it is at least partly America’s fault.
Nah, B. This is white people’s fault.
In 1804, when Haiti became an independent country, it scared America. The U.S. feared the Haitian uprising would inspire black slaves to do the same, believing “ a revolution by Blacks definitely was something that could not be.” Andrew Johnson wanted to annex Haiti and make it part of America, and the U.S. sent troops to Haiti’s doorstep 17 times between 1862 and 1915.
In 1947, two years after America liberated the last concentration camp, 82 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 143 years after dismantling the shackles of their own slaveowners, the Republic of Haiti made the last payment toward its independence debt.
Those payments didn’t include the money that was taken by U.S. Marines when they marched into the Haitian National Bank in 1919, took $500,000 and deposited at 111 Wall Street New York, N.Y., for “safekeeping.”
The cost of German soldiers who assisted the American army in occupying Haiti from 1915-1934 don’t count either. Neither does the 40 percent of Haiti’s national income it was forced to pay to the United States and France when the U.S. occupiers wrote the demand into Haiti’s constitution.
Whenever Haiti couldn’t make the payments, it would take out loans, sending it deeper into poverty, because the loans could only come from French banks. Over the years, French banks would lend the Caribbean nation money so often that Haiti wasn’t simply repaying its original reparations debt, it was paying the loans, interests and fees.
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