3/9/2010 - Another U.S. Occupation in Haiti?

Haiti: A History Lesson on Past and Present Colonialism

by L. Withers

 

The first white-skinned visitors to Haiti arrived on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in 1492.  Describing it as an earthly paradise, they named it Hispaniola - “Land of Spain.”  The native Arawaks had called the island Haiti - “Land of Mountains.”

 

The mountains remain, but the indigenous Arawak People are lost to contemporary insignificance.  Less than half a century after the Arawaks were discovered, they were  vanquished by European diseases and overwork in Spanish mines.  They were replaced  by African slaves who were stolen away from their homeland to mine the gold buried in Haiti’s mountains. But, after the gold and other precious natural resources that were mined to finance Spain’s Renaissance were depleted, even the mountains felt the impact of European conquest. 

 

Stripped of their abundant hard-wood forests, their precious metals exhausted, the bare, rocky hillsides were slowly washing into the sea.  While raping the land and its people for 300 years, the Europeans were also fighting among themselves for the rich spoils of the “New World.”  Eventually, the French would win control of Haiti from the Spanish and renamed the island St. Domingue.  Half a million West Africans were shipped in like animals by the French to work vast plantations cleared from the mountainous jungles as  St. Domingue became the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean; its prosperity firmly rooted in slavery. 

 

Plantation owners grew wealthy exporting sugar and coffee and importing African slaves, abusing the land and the slaves until both rebelled.  In 1791, the slaves revolted, led by Boukman, a Voodoo priest. (note: Voodoo or Vodou, is / was simply a merging of African AND Christian beliefs and practices, not a “pact with the devil” or witchcraft. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Vodou) 

 

The revolt, though put down, sent shivers of alarm along the spines of slave holders throughout the hemisphere.  In 1803, in order to finance the continuing suppression of rebellion in its colony, France sold all of the land it had claimed on the North American continent to the United States.  Among the lands in the Louisiana Purchase were tribal lands that were home to the Lakota, Ojibwe, and other Native Americans in what is now Western Minnesota and the Dakotas. 

 

The White Earth Ojibwe Reservation in Minnesota came into U.S. possession when the French sold their claim to these lands for the cash needed to maintain control over St. Domingue, but efforts to put down the rebellion failed.  The colony won its independence in 1804, kicked out the remaining French colonists, and became the first independent African Nation in modern times. 

 

When Boukman led the first slave revolt, the Mulatto or mixed race population of Haiti had sided with the plantation owners.  Often given freedom by their French fathers, Mulattos were allowed to own property, and many even owned slaves.  But though they amassed wealth and property, they were still not considered worthy of citizenship, and European racism eventually forced them to side with the African slaves. 

 

In 1804, the Mulattos and Africans together defeated the French and brought independence to the country, which they reclaimed and renamed Haiti (a valuable contemporary lesson for fractured Diasporan Africans today).   

 

Though African slaves had led the way, and died in massive numbers fighting for their freedom, the Mulattos became Haiti’s new ruling class.  Haitians found they had traded their cruel and corrupt white masters for a homegrown elite who quickly began imitating the worst excesses of their former masters (yet another lesson for contemporary African Diaspora generations).

 

The British, meanwhile, were learning that there are better and cheaper ways to exploit people than slavery.  After losing its American colonies, Great Britain turned eastward to India.  As it conquered the subcontinent, Britain found it could manipulate native populations into working for wages lower than the cost of maintaining slavery.  Military conquests, followed by economic domination and exploitation, became the new model for Colonialism.  And just as Haiti’s elite became imitators of their former masters following independence, the government of the United States came to imitate their former overlords, the British.  It was called Manifest Destiny. 

 

A relevant 19^th century chronology points to the control over decimated native populations of the Great Plains, which was finalized in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890.  Then, the U.S. challenged Spain for control of the hemisphere with the blockade of Cuba in 1898, which marked the beginning of the Spanish-American War.  Establishing a “Great White Fleet” of 16 battleships in 1907, the U.S. invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912, blockaded Mexico in 1913, sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and established a military government in the neighboring Dominican Republic in 1916. 

 

These conquests came in the name of the Monroe Doctrine, which made the U.S. a world power with unlimited access to the resources of the other nations in the western hemisphere (see http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/jd/16321.htm).

 

Haiti was important to the U.S. in 1915 because it controlled the windward passage (see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_Passage) and guaranteed access to the new Panama Canal, which was completed in 1914.  So a little more than a century after kicking out the French, Haitians found themselves under the not-so-benevolent control of the U.S.  The United States was picking up French leftovers in Haiti half a century before trying it in Vietnam. 

 

Then, the U.S. Marines defeated a peasant uprising led by Charlemagne Peralte in 1918.  Haiti’s ban on foreign ownership of land and property, adopted in the early days of independence, was revoked, and Haiti’s economic and political dependence on the U.S. steadily increased.  A 1934 treaty recognized Haiti’s independence but provided for a “special relationship” with the United States. 

 

During occupation the U.S. dominated every aspect of Haitian life, paying special attention to transforming the Haitian military, which repeatedly crushed Haitian efforts to throw the U.S. out.  After 1934, the Haitian military guaranteed “stability” and backed rulers favored by the U.S. 

 

From the democratic election(s) and multi-coup overthrows of the Aristide administrations to the time of recent earthquake devastation, the U.S. has continued to rule Haiti indirectly and controls its finances through a succession of military and civilian dictators –  a pattern recognized as similar to that in Nicaragua and other Central American and Caribbean nations.

 

“Manifest Destiny” – the idea that the United States has the god-given right to control the affairs of other nations – is reinforced by racism, a concept that first evolved to justify the slavery and genocide that characterized the European conquest of the Americas and other world nations.  In Haiti, the racism of U.S. occupiers reinforced a dominant position of the lighter-skinned Mulatto elites.  The resulting resentment among darker-skinned Haitians gave rise to a Black Nationalism which resulted in bringing the infamous   Duvalier family to power, with nightmarish consequences. (to learn about the oppressive Duvalier regimes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier)

 

By the end of World War II, the U.S. aspired to control, not simply this half of the world, but all of it.  Thus, when France found itself unable to maintain control of its colonies in Southeast Asia, the United States took over.  But the small nation of Vietnam fought for its independence for more than a decade and, like Haiti, found itself battling the United States.  Nations then began to challenge western governments’, including the government of the United States, right to determine the future of other nations.

 

Of course, Haiti’s continued independence from United States domination seems like a hallucination now that U.S. soldiers seem to oversee not only Haiti’s airport runways and infrastructure, but also its overwhelmed government and citizens: Again.

 

Is this truly a benevolent humanitarian effort, or just another opportunistic occasion for another U.S. occupation of the Haitian Nation?