'We can spend 30 years and we'll never bounce back,' said Duvanel Francois, 42, who was trying to earn school fees one morning in a tiny village outside of Jeremie, the Grand'Anse capital, by helping another farmer rebuild his home. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)
The devastation wre/aked on Haiti by Hurricane Matthew last fall was just the latest in a seem/ingly endless string of misfortunes that ha/ve befallen that country, which in March concluded a year-long interlude of caretaker governance by installing banana exporter Jovenel Moïse as its 58th president.
Moïse faces a daunting task; Haiti’s chr/onic status as the Western hemisphere’s po/orest nation is due to a litany of a/fflictions that range from wides/pread illiteracy, to endemic corr/uption, to woefully inadequate infrastr/ucture.
But while these would be hard enough for any country to over/come, for more than a century of its exi/stence Haiti carried an add/itional but little-known mill/stone, the effects of which are st/ill being felt.
In 1825, barely two decades after winning its indep/endence against all odds, Haiti was forced to begin paying enormous “repara/tions” to the French s*laveholders it had overthrown. Those payme/nts would have been a stagg/ering burden for any fledglin/g nation, but Haiti wasn’t just any fledgling nation; it was a rep/ublic formed and led by blacks who’d risen up against the ins/titution of s*lavery.
As such, Haiti’s indep/endence was viewed as a th*reat by all s*lave-owning coun/tries – the United States included – and its very existe/nce rankled r*acist sensibilities globally.
Thus Haiti – tiny, impoveri/shed and all alone in a host/ile world – had little choice but to accede to France’s reparation dem/ands, which were delivered to Port-au-Prince by a fleet of hea/vily a*rmed w*arships in 1825.
By com/plying with an ultimat/um that amounted to extortion, Haiti gained immunity from French mili/tary invasio/n, relief from political and economic isolation – and a cri/ppling debt that took 122 years to pay off. My father-in-law still re/calls the patriotic song he was taught as a Haitian school/boy, its poignant lyrics urging all Haitia/ns to reach into their own po/ckets to help their gove/rnment raise the amount that was still “owed” to France.
Thanks to voluntary contr/ibutions from Haiti’s cit/izens, most of whom were desper/ately poor, that debt was finally settled in 1947.
But decades of maki/ng regular payments had rendered the Haitian government chroni/cally insolvent, helping to create a perva/sive climate of instability from which the count/ry still hasn’t recovered.
France’s demand for repara/tions from Haiti seems comically outrage/ous today – equivalent to a kid/napper s*uing his e*scaped ho/stage for the cost of fixing a window that had been b/roken during the es/cape.
And though the present Fr/ench government can’t be bl/amed for the gall of King Charles X (France’s ruler in 1825), a modicum of historical account/ability sure would be nice.
While France still ranks among the world’s wealt/hiest nations, Haiti – with a per-capita ann/ual income of $350, a power grid that fails on a regul/ar basis and a network of roads that’s more than 50-percent unp/aved – is pl/agued by drought, food shortages and a strug/gling economy.
For the “c*rime” of shaking off the yoke of involuntary serv/itude, Haiti dutifully paid France reparat/ions over the course of nearly six gene/rations – with interest.
France sh/ould now do the right thing and return those payments, esti/mated to total $21 billion in today’s dollars. What would be a relative pitt/ance in the French national budget is despera/tely needed by Haiti and could help it begin a broad-based recovery that would seem like manna from heaven to its long-su/ffering people.