Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

Excellent learning experience of how Haiti was doomed before it existed. Just like a human doomed before being born due to the mother"s intake of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. The roller coaster trip between hope and despair is vividly described with a factual basis. The reader keeps hoping there is a way out for the bulk population of Haitians. But the way out gets shut down. Mainly because the nation was vulnerable to invading battleships against which it had no protection. Haiti had to buy its protection from former oppressors being totally at the mercy of any invader. I like the way the author said that the German naval force held a holdup to extract agreed-to reparations. The tone of the book cries out for justice which never comes. The details of how the U.S. reacted including the Afro American reaction is astonishing. These details add drama to the book. The only recommendation I would make is the addition of a chart of rulers identified by allegiance such as Native, Native Military, Native propertyowner, Corporate of Mega land owner. Something like that. All in all, well worth reading.

It would be one of the greatest acts of moral vandalism in history. A man who had defeated the Ancien Regime in the service of the French Republic and held a territory in its name would die of betrayal by the new regime in a mountain fortress. In real terms he had betrayed the state, as he was governing in the interests of the people. Rare as that is in a statesman. I saw the picture of that man in a resplendent uniform with coal black face on a library bookshelf as a boy. It was the cover art that fascinated me and led me to the reading of Toussaint Louverture's biography. The book was part of a series meant for young students. It was the compelling story of a slave who started a nation. That nation's history has always been as compelling. Some would call it tragic or even comic, but there have been instances of triumph and glory. Laurent Dubois has retold the story in his book, Haiti The Aftershocks of History. There are more romantic books on Haiti. The Serpent and the Rainbow comes to mind with its alternative pharmacology and rural societal persistence. Kenneth Roberts' novel, Lydia Bailey, has an account of the battle of Crête-à-Pierrot that is as inspiring as his description of General Dessalines is menacing. Even Black Bagdad, by the occupying Marine officer, John H. Craige, is a romance of sorts. Of course, a book with the title, Best Nightmare on Earth can only be about a place of chaos and fun. Yet such books are each only a small part of the story. All too many of my fellow citizens only know of Haiti as the place where the earthquake took place. One would suspect that fewer than one in a thousand realize that the country is our oldest sister republic in the new world. The great value in Mr. Dubois' book is that all the players and actions are there in one volume. The book is not written in a sensationalist style. In listening to his interviews on radio, I thought it would be. Even so, it goes along smoothly, not that he does not show his sympathies. Obviously, he feels Haiti has been done hard by. Any observer would find it difficult to avoid that conclusion. Laurent Dubois is not new to the subject. A previous book, Avengers of the New World is a history of the Haitian Revolution. He has written other books about the country. His official positions include Marcelo Lotti Professor in Romance Studies and History and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. He occasionally dabbles in other subjects. Well, more than dabbles. Villains abound. First up are the French. On the island of Saint-Domingue, the Gauls set up the most profitable plantation system in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. They ran it on the backs of Africans, worked so that more had to be constantly imported. Cost control was such that the slaves not only had to toil in the fields for the planter, they had to grow their own food as well. When the French Revolution broke out, the slaves took the opportunity to end their bondage in alliance with the Republicans. When Napoleon took power he tried to reinstitute slavery. After a valiant resistance, the Haitians merely waited until Nap's army was debilitated and gave it a push and secured their nation. France was not done. Having lost the war, they demanded an indemnity. Talk about bad taste. Whatever happened to vae victis? Hungry for recognition, Haiti gave in. Other European powers leaned on Haiti. Germany was stalwart in applying force to get her way. It appears our sister republic could not count on appealing for enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. Uncle Sam's hands are not clean. Recognition was refused until the Civil War. We were slow to the game, but played hardball when we got up to bat. In 1914, a warship sent a detachment ashore to seize gold from the Haitian National Bank. American bankers who had made bad loans had the US Government enforce their contracts in the grand tradition of privatizing profits and socializing losses. Then, Marines would occupy the country. We left eventually, achieving little as we usually do in our occupations. After Duvalier fils' exile and some sub par elections, we came back to make Haiti a better place in 1994, again. We brought some other do gooder nations with us. With all the help the US and the international community had provided, the last thing the country needed was an earthquake. Haitian governments could meet the definition of a failed state, what with almost a constitution du jour with each new chief executive. That does not mean a failed nation. The Haitian peasant held onto the land won from the French with tenacity unrivalled in history. The country folks on their smallholdings fed themselves and exported coffee. Even the vastly powerful United States left after the Haitians tired of us earlier in the 20th Century. Mr. Dubois is a fine writer. Aftershocks was difficult to put down. His book is a history and not a polemic. Still, it is hard for a reader to avoid a conclusion. Intervention well meaning or exploitive is colonialism. The world should leave Haiti to its own devices. They may not build a tourism industry, but why would they want to be our playground? Les Haïtiens may not split the atom any time soon, but neither will the hotshots at the Kennedy School of Government. The message to bankers should be, take your chances and don't expect a bailout. Maybe we should have said that to Morgan and Goldman in 2008. Let Haiti be Haiti.

A good history, but in Kindle form it would have been helpful to have a time-line chart to follow the various changes in government and their respective sources of support.

When talking about Haiti most people including Haitians and foreigners alike have a single (distorted) image in mind that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, no one would dare argue that Haiti's economic and social situation is the most desirable one. With more than half of its population living with less than $1 a day along with an unemployment rate exceeding 60%, Haiti has over many decades been living a Great Depression (far worse than the Great Depression that hit USA in 1929); and also with its broken political system that projects no sign of a better future, it is obviously legitimate to be concerned. However, when academic pundits, daily headlines, and NGOs' holders (owners) relentlessly keep referring to Haiti as the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, this also whispers some great deal of concerns about their desires to really see Haiti moving forward. It seems to me that this kind of dogged trademark constitutes a self-fulfillment-prophecy, which somewhat keeps the country into a poverty trap by the simple fact that poverty is the only way it is being described. And, I am certain that whenever such a label is removed (say, in case that its $20 billion of copper, silver and gold is accurately extracted and the resulting wealth evenly distributed), many developing country's expects will lose their jobs. For, there won't be any convincing rationale to mobilize more aids on behalf of these destitute in this remote area of the Caribbean islands. Who wishes to be unemployed in such a harsh time? Since the response is NONE, the perfect and sound description will always be "Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere," a backward place of disaster, destitution, sorrow, you name it...The worst of all of that is the reason put forward by some famous `development experts' to explain why Haiti is so poor? Haitians, they contend, are lazy, undisciplined and lack the work ethic. In other words, Haitian's culture - defined in terms of "values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among the people"[1] - is the primary obstacle that impedes its development. A fair illustration is Lawrence Harrison's book "Underdevelopment is a State of Mind." Harrison's book used parallel case studies to show that in most Latin American countries, culture had been inimical to development. In the case of Haiti, Harrison is blunt. To him, "while [in Haiti] the caste system has clearly been a major obstacle to national integration and progress, a number of values and attitudes shared by the entire society also get in the way of progress."[2] The former USAID expert further contends that Haiti's culture is inherited from West African values, attitudes and institutions, particularly from the Region of Dahomey, known today as Benin. Cultural values such as the Voodoo is so inculcated in Haitian mind that they refuse to look forward but focusing their attention on the ancestral past.This ethnocentric account regarding Haiti, however, is not new. It has over the times taken different shapes. Victor Cochinat, a visitor from the French colony of Martinique, had painted a similar picture of Haiti at the end of the 19th century. After spending few days in the island, Cochinat came to the conclusion that Haitians were lazy and ashamed of work and this was the reason why they were so poor. He went on to say that Haiti is a farce and a phantasmagoria of civilization. This unsubstantiated claim did not go unchallenged. Our then young eminent intellectual Louis Joseph Janvier offered a sardonic six-hundred-page history of "Haiti and its visitors" in which he asked for a shred of objectify to anyone like Cochinat visiting the country.In Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois sets himself a likewise task. Like Janvier, he writes a four-hundred-thirty-four-page history starting from the nation's independence to the present aftermath of one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history that struck the country in 2010, killed more than 250,000 people and left millions homeless. He intends to demonstrate that the argument of modern-day Cochinats and other like-minded Haitian-phobic intellectuals are ill-informed speculation. For those who are still wondering why the once richest colony in the world is now the poorest country in the hemisphere, Dubois is straightforward: the true causes of Haiti's precarious conditions shouldn't be a conundrum. Haiti's poverty has nothing to do with any inherent problems on the part of the Haitians themselves. Quite to the contrary, "Haiti's present is the product of its history: of the nation's founding by enslaved people who overthrew their masters and freed themselves; of the hostility that this revolution generated among the colonial powers surrounding the country."[3]One should bear in mind that for these ancient slaves to build the first independent black nation on earth could not by any means be a smoothly process. For decades, Dubois recalls, France refused to acknowledge Haiti's independence, and both Great Britain and United States followed France's lead. Haiti represented an imminent threat to these countries that wanted to show it is unlikely for a black nation to succeed. And, stubbornly unwilling to re-taste the cruel savor of slavery, Haiti devoted its utmost to defend itself against potential attack. They hence poured lots of monies into building fortifications and maintaining a large army. "Being Haiti," Dubois suggests, "it turned out, was costly."[4] Pressured by France, they finally agreed to pay an incredible amount of indemnity to compensate the slave-owners for their losses, and "by 1898, fully half of Haitian government budget went to paying France and the French banks. By 1914, that proportion had climbed to 80 percent."[5]Dubois, however, is not a conspiracy theorist. He does not believe that Haiti's predicament stems exclusively from outside. He asserts: "Haiti's current situation is the culmination of a long set of historical choices that date back to its beginning as a French plantation colony. And it is the consequences of the ways that powerful political leaders and institutions, inside and outside of the country, have ignored and suppressed the aspirations of the majority."[6]And Dubois is not alone. Analyzing the failure of Western pundits to come to grips with the problems of many developing countries, Hernando De Soto argues: "the suggestion that it is culture that explains the success of such diverse places as Japan, Switzerland, and California, and culture again that explains the relative poverty of such equally diverse places as Estonia...[Haiti, I add this], and Baja California, is worse than inhumane; it is unconvincing."[7] And I agree...For both native Haitians living abroad and foreigners who are interested in having a better picture (not a distorted snapshot) of Haiti, I can't suggest you a better book than Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois.Claude Joseph[1] See Harrison, L., & Huntington, S. 2000. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, p. xv.[2] See Harrison, L. 1985. Underdevelopment is a State of Mind, p. 84.[3] Dubois, L., 2012. Haiti: The Aftershock of History, p. 4[4] p. 5[5] p. 8[6] p. 369[7] De Soto, H. 2000. 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An excellent introduction to Haitian history, the chapters on Haiti's early history as well as the period of US occupation were particularly informative. The author gives an account that is both sympathetic and objective. In comparison the portion on the Duvaliers was slightly more rushed and less informative I found, though perhaps that just has to do with the subject matter. Overall an excellent book that moves along at fast clip, I felt both engrossed and informed. Highly recommended.

This book is a sweeping portrayal of the history of Haiti from the revolution to the tyrannical rule of Papa and Baby Doc, the rise to power of Jean Bertrand Aristide and the earthquake of Jan 2010. It is well written and outlines the shortcomings of Haiti's former leaders - from L'Ouverture, Dessalines, Christophe and many other unknown leaders who tried and failed to rule in the interests of the majority and were made to fail; those like the Docs who were backed to the hilt by empire and the former colonial masters and pillaged and plundered the country. The aftershocks of the Haitian revolution of 1804 continue to be felt today for that island continues to be punished for the audacity of seeking self-determination in choosing its first democratically elected leader and party in Fanmi Lavalas and Aristide. The Haitian elite and their American backers have continued to hold the Haitian people in contempt. The sympathies of the author lie correctly with the aspirations of the Haitian masses.

Telling the story of Haiti from 1804 to present times. Very good read and makes you realise that although nobody wanted Haiti to succeed, the leadership made many mistakes along the way.

The Haitians have committed many grave crimes against humanity, but two stand out: they planted their island way too close to the U.S. of A. and they accepted to leave Africa to go slave for the Frenchman who had managed to clean this island from the "savages" who had inhabited it from time immemorial before. For these crimes, they have been punished by France, with the obligation to pay their supposed liberty and the U.S, with invasion and constant meddling in their affairs. Mr. Dubois' clear sighted recounting of these events makes for truly great history.

This book was useful in understanding some of the turmoil afflicting Haiti.Sadly it did not offer much hope for that poor country.