Even
as a youngster, a preteen, I was aware that Haiti was a place that was not safe
to go. It was depicted that way in movies at the neighborhood theatre we
walked to every week. Maybe I also garnered that impression from the
stack of every issue of National Geographic magazine ever, that lined the
bookshelves at our house in Long Beach. And now, how is it today?
Gangs and violence running rampant. Not a safe place to go for even a
moment. How did that happen? How can a nation stay lawless and
unsafe for its entire history?
I
looked it up. Once the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the
Caribbean, Haiti gained its independence from France in an extraordinary
revolution in 1804. The native inhabitants and slaves revolted against
the overlords and drove them out. Haiti became the first independent
nation in Latin America and the first black republic in the world. But
there was a catch. An agreement was reached in 1825 that for Haiti to
maintain its independence, it had to reimburse France 150 million Francs for
the value of lost property. That “lost property” included the value of
the slaves France lost. (The slaves that just revolted to gain their freedom
from France.) In return, France promised to stop blockading their harbor
and bombarding them. The citizens of Haiti were allowed to be free, but
only if they bought themselves back from France. In all the years since
their independence, Haiti has had trouble putting together any infrastructure
because any extra money always went to France. It couldn’t pay the entire
debt right away, so it took out giant loans to be able to make enough payments
to keep the warships at bay. So far Haiti has paid nearly 30 billion in
today’s money and still owes 21 billion.
There
is surely a lot more to the story of why Haiti is so lawless now:
political struggles, corrupt leaders, foreign interventions, and natural
disasters, but they sure have had the odds stacked against them for the first
two hundred years.
