French Reparations, US Occupations, Haitian Assassinations
Hello, and welcome, wondrous subscriber,
To what may very well be your first extra dose of Skipped History. Thank you for your support, and for giving me yet another chance to nerd out about the past!
I’m in the middle of writing the first episode of Season 3 of SH (coming out in September!), but let’s take a moment to chat about Haiti. I had a sneaking suspicion that Haitian President Jovenal Moïse’s assassination a few weeks back had a littttle to do with the US occupation that began in 1915. Of note, the country’s ongoing instability is also connected to les French, who first colonized sugar-rich Haiti, then known as St. Domingue, in 1659.
On the backs of slaves, St. Domingue turned into France’s most profitable colony. However, in 1791, Toussaint Louverture, a general born into slavery, led Haiti's slaves in a rebellion against their not-so-sweet, sugar-loving enslavers.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), as the conflict became known, was the first and only successful slave revolt in modern history.
If only the success lasted longer. In 1825, twenty years into Haiti’s newly Black-led republic, the French forced Haitians to pay reparations to them in exchange for official recognition, kind of like being served a finger at a restaurant and then having to pay extra for it (all digits should be on the house!). Haiti, isolated in a world economy still dominated by slave-owning countries like the US, had little choice but to accede to French demands.
The reparations led to crippling debt, and in another outrageous turn, by the 1900s, the continued payments caused the US to fear that Haiti was too closely tied to its former colonizer. So, in 1915, Woodrow Wilson, whom you might recall was keen to make “new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas,” launched an invasion of Haiti under the guise of stabilizing the country, whose president had just died. The Wilson administration soon moved Haiti’s financial reserves to the US, rewrote its Constitution to give foreigners land-owning rights, and initiated an occupation that lasted 19 years.
Although it appears US soldiers had fun bicycling around the island, from 1915-1934, 15,000 Haitians died at the hands of US-installed governments that crushed dissent by any means necessary. One of the chief architects of the occupation, the Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, later confessed that he spent thirty-three years as “a gangster for capitalism” and a “high-class muscle man for Big Business.”
The muscle men left Haiti in 1934, and Haiti settled its debts with France in 1947 (!), but the misadventures on Hispaniola didn’t end there. The US invaded Santo Domingo in 1965 and propped up authoritarian Joaquín Balaguer; carried out an intervention in Port-au-Prince in 1994 that, per a Haitian historian, was “a key contributor to many of the problems that now endure in Haiti”; and allegedly manipulated the results of the 2010 Haitian Presidential elections to secure the victory of candidate Michel Martelly.
Martelly’s handpicked successor? Jovenal Moïse, the president who just died, shot in his bedroom in the middle of the night.
Now, that hardly means the US is culpable. But as one author alludes, frequent US meddling in Haiti combined with onerous French reparation demands “helped to create a pervasive climate of instability from which the country still hasn’t recovered.” And undoubtedly, as the Guardian adds, “It is a bitter paradox that the people of the world’s first black republic, born of a successful slave revolt, have rarely had a chance to seize their destiny since.”
Amen. Would you be interested in learning about this history in an episode of SH? There’s a lot of meaty material here, and I’m not just saying that because I’m digesting some toes. Let me know, and see you next week with a post for all subscribers!
Your skipper,
Ben
More sources / further reading:
I’ve read many books that mention the Haitian Revolution, but I would give a shoutout to Silencing the Past, by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. One review reads, “If Marx, Foucault, and Howard Zinn wrote a book together, it would probably look something like Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past.”
Yes, an episode about Haiti (and maybe all of Hispañola) would be most welcome!
Yes, I WOULD be interested in learning more about this in a episode of SH! Thank you!