9/22/21
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world today. At the inception of colonization it was a tropical paradise.
It has endured genocide of its native people, and the most brutal slavery of African people, and now: accelerated climate crisis enhanced natural disasters.
During colonization, This small island the size of Maryland, Produced 45% of the worlds sugar and 60% of Europe’s coffee. This production was at the cost of Black enslaved people losing their lives at the rate of roughly 1/4 of the population every year (maybe more), and France unblinkingly kept importing more enslaved Africans to replace them.
In the US war of independence, a group of more than 500 Haitians, known as Les Chasseurs Volontaires de Savannah, voluntarily fought in the 1779 Battle of Savannah, Georgia USA, for US independence. What did the US do? When Haiti had a revolution for its own independence, in 1791, the US Refused to recognize Haiti, and helped enforce an embargo until 1862.
Haiti produced anti-colonial, anti-slavery ideas, through its revolutionaries and intellectuals, gave refuge to the worlds anti colonial people, helped the liberation efforts for Latin American independence from colonial rule, and gave the world hope when it successfully overthrew the French colonizers and declared itself a black republic.
The US banks loaned Haiti money knowing well it is being economically and politically strangled and extorted by France -to the tune of 90 million franks (roughly equivalent to 21.7 billion US dollars today). This is money France demanded for having lost slaves and land in Haiti, which means France was demanding payment from former enslaved africans, for France stolen land (from the natives of Haiti), and France’s kidnapped people from Africa. It took Haiti 122 years to pay it, and is still in debt for it to US and French and German banks.
During the American war of independence, 20% of Black people from the US north, migrated to Haiti. There has always been people going back and forth between the two countries. Today the biggest Haitian Diaspora is in the US. they have given their labor, their intellect, and their art to this country.
The US invaded Haiti, usurped its bank, and installed brutal dictator puppet governments there.
Haiti helped produce the human rights charter of the UN.
Haiti’s free and democratic elections were tampered with by the US. The US occupied the country sometimes alone, and sometimes along with other UN forces, the US trained Haiti’s police, the history of US-Haiti relations is just an endless barrage of interference, and brute force of the US in Haiti’s affairs.
Haiti has so much topsoil runoff from colonial to modern day in logging and agriculture, -and IMF “structural adjustments” -that it cannot feed its people, it imports half of the food it needs to survive, more than half of Haitians live on less than 2 dollars a day, and is hurtling ever faster into climate crisis chaos, which of course is driven by global north countries, the US its prime mover.
What does the US do? What is the latest stunt? Beat Haitian refugees at its border, by police mounted on horseback no less, and send them back to a country in chaos, that has been in turmoil for the last 107 years of US meddling and ever worse chaos for the last 30 years (since the US helped Aristide lose his presidency), not to mention, in the last two months, Haiti’s “selected” president was assassinated, and the country was hit with a 7.1 earthquake too so far rendering 2000 dead and more than 500 still missing.