Haitian State Research Articles

Stealing the Citadel

Abstract This essay analyzes popular Haitian tales about sovereign theft by stealth which seek to expose machinations of graft and usurpation by outsiders and politicians. The foundational act for this genre of popular narratives in Haiti I argue is the indemnity that the Haitian State was forced to pay France of 150 million francs in exchange for international recognition to compensate for losses in property incurred by the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) which Haitian statesman Frédéric Marcelin described as an “act of dispossession.” But popular rumors of national theft kept returning. I argue that these stories linking sovereignty, debt, and theft represent truth claims on the part of those who have long been “hermeneutically marginalized” and should be seen as a call for testimonial justice that challenges the triumphalist story of Haitian independence through revealing and denouncing deceitful chicanery on the part of those in power.

Haitian State Hospital Orthopedic Grand Rounds Series: A Virtual Curriculum to Address Global Surgery Needs.

Orthopedic Relief Services International (ORSI), in partnership with the Foundation for Orthopedic Trauma and the department of Orthopedic Surgery of La Paix University Hospital in Haiti, has developed a year-round Orthopedic Grand Round series. This series is moderated by Haitian faculty, features presentations by American orthopedic surgeons, and is broadcast to major state hospitals in Haiti for residents and attendings. To introduce clinical concepts and increase knowledge in an area that is medically underserved, especially in the field of orthopedics, through lectures that tailor to the educational needs of Haiti. Topics for lecture series are requested by Haitian attending orthopedic surgeons and residents in collaboration with American orthopedic surgeons to meet the educational needs of the residents in Haiti. These lectures reflect the case mix typically seen at state hospitals in Haiti and consider the infrastructural capacity of participating centers. Grand rounds are held an average of twice per month for an hour each, encompassing an educational lesson followed by an open forum for questions and case discussion. Feedback is taken from Haitian residents to ensure the sessions are beneficial to their learning. To date 95 sessions hosted by 32 lecturers have been completed over Zoom between the US and Haiti. The fourth year of the lecture series is currently ongoing with an expansion of topics. In an underserved medical area such as Haiti, programs that educate local surgeons are crucial to continuing the growth and development of the medical community. Programs like this have the potential to contribute to the educational infrastructure of countries in need, regardless of the specialty. The model of this program can be used to produce similar curricula in various specialties and areas around the world.

The Haitian Neoliberal State

This work attempts to understand the contemporary Haitian state, which is a paragon of the neoliberal state model. Haiti’s neoliberal state is a colonial state impoverished to serve American global capitalist hegemony under the auspices of a Haitian comprador bourgeoisie and oligarchy composed of professionals, managers, intellectuals, and business elites in Haiti and the diaspora. However, unlike Chile, which the West points to as the success of the neoliberal model and process, Haiti’s model is a complete failure, similar to the attempt to neoliberalize Russia post the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Russia, under Vladimir Putin, was able to combat the deleterious effects of the neoliberal process, Haiti is unable to do so. The work posits that Haiti’s failures rest on its colonial experiences under mercantilist and liberal capitalism and the embourgeoisement of its population on the island and the diaspora.

The Early Haitian State and the Question of Political Legitimacy: American and British Representations of Haiti, 1804–1824, by James Forde

The Early Haitian State and the Question of Political Legitimacy: American and British Representations of Haiti, 1804–1824, by James Forde

Telling the Untold Story: Jewish Wartime Refuge in Haiti in Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent

Abstract Literary narratives of Jewish refugees in the Caribbean uncover a forgotten chapter of wartime history. A key example is Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017), which tracks the traumatic dispersion of a Polish Jewish family to Haiti, Cuba, Israel, and the US in the late 1930s. Dalembert interweaves the tale of his Jewish protagonist’s flight to Haiti with portrayals of the Haitian émigré community in Paris and the Haitian concentration camp prisoner Jean-Marcel Nicolas. Blending fact and fiction, the novel highlights the Haitian state’s little-known efforts to aid Holocaust refugees and connects those efforts to the island nation’s own revolutionary history. In this article, I argue that fiction’s unique traits as a medium of cultural memory enable Dalembert to reframe the wartime past from a Haitian perspective. Avant que les ombres s’effacent harnesses the fictional privileges of literary narrative, mediating between the real and the imaginary and combining Jewish and Caribbean memory systems in unexpected and often startling ways. Generating images of the wartime past that transform our perception of it, the novel moves Haiti to the center of the story and in so doing uncovers global dimensions of Jewish experience.

Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti

Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti Miranda Frances Spieler (bio) Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xii + 302 pp. $40.00. Jean Alix René, Haïti après l’esclavage : formation de l’état et culture politique populaire (1804–1846). Port-au-Prince: Communication Plus, 2019. CAD50.00. As this essay goes to press, Haiti, the subject of both books under review, is in turmoil after the slaying of its president, Jovenel Moïse (“I am not a dictator”), by Colombian hitmen.1 At least three people have put themselves forward as successors. The country is under martial law and without a government. Meanwhile, in quite a different spirit, Haiti has been an unusually prominent theme of discussion in France, Haiti’s defrocked overlord, for months. In April 2021, the French media and political class began reckoning with the legacy of Napoleon on the two hundredth anniversary of his death. The link between Bonaparte and Haiti opens from the first consul’s failed attempt to reenslave the Haitian people. In 1802, a French expeditionary force comprised of fifty thousand soldiers reached the island of Hispaniola under the command of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Charles-Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Tasked with reimposing slavery, the invaders triggered an anti-colonial war. By making reenslavement a key to French colonial policy, Napoleon hastened the founding of the independent Haitian state.2 With Haiti paralyzed by gang violence and political infighting, it seems fitting that both books under review should chronicle the survival strategies of Haitian peasants in their struggle against Haitian officialdom since independence. ________ In the era of slavery, the word maroon or marron denoted slaves who fled from his master, temporarily or permanently. In some colonies—Surinam, Jamaica, French Saint Domingue, French Guiana, Mauritius—maroons lived in remote forests or mountains, grouped around charismatic leaders or in small kingdoms. In Maroon Nation, Johnhenry Gonzalez uses a term associated with the era of slavery to describe the identity of nineteenth-century peasants, who [End Page 413] exited bondage and attained national sovereignty and yet remained unfree. For Gonzalez, rural folk after the abolition of slavery and especially after 1804, when Haiti declared independence, created a social, religious, and economic world based on clandestine anti-institutional practices. The ruses of Haiti’s peasantry made it possible for them to resist and evade Haiti’s predatory post-colonial state. In writing of rural life this way, Gonzalez challenges stereotypes of Haitians that are commonplace in the literature of underdevelopment, in which rural Haitians figure as hide-bound traditionalists who refuse all agricultural innovation, to their peril, out of mere stubborness. For Gonzalez, by contrast, Haitian peasant culture is defined by stealthy modernity. Marronnage, originally a term for slave flight, looms large over Haitian history, first as historical experience, later as metaphor and national myth. The mid-20th-century dictator François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) turned the figure of the marron or runaway slave into the embodiment of the Haitian state, including his own regime, with the inauguration in Port-au-Prince of the now famed monument by Albert Mangonès, Le marron inconnu (1967). Haitian historians of their Revolution, beginning with Jean Fouchard, have traced the origins of the 1791 slave revolt, which lauched the Haitian revolution, to maroon resistance. 3 The supposed importance of maroon groups to the 1791 revolt has been debunked by the historian David Geggus and is unrelated to Gonzalez’s book, which focuses on the period after slavery and independence.4 The use of the word marronnage as a metaphor for the struggle of emancipated peasants against the Haitian state originates with the Haitian historian Gérard Barthélémy, in his classic work L’univers rural haitien: le pays en dehors (1989) [Rural life in Haiti: The country outside]. Gonzalez is indebted to the work of earlier Haitian historians, but takes an original approach to marronnage. Where Barthélémy emphasizes continuity between the folkways of African slaves and peasants in independent Haiti, Gonzalez is interested in marronnage as a form of modernity. The new marronnage was a reaction against authoritarian regimes of the post-emancipation and post...

Toward a Decentralized Haitian State: The Promises and Shortcomings of the Post-Duvalier Constitution of 1987

Toward a Decentralized Haitian State: The Promises and Shortcomings of the Post-Duvalier Constitution of 1987

Between the state and the yard: gender and political space in Haiti

This article examines the gendered political geography of postcolonial Haiti. It draws from the author's long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasants' movement established in 1973, to highlight the experience of rural women on Haiti's high Central Plateau. It mobilizes foundational work in feminist geography to address a lack of attention to the political in analyses of gender and rural life in Haiti. In so doing, it shows how militant women question and challenge patriarchal power in their daily negotiation and transformation of political space. This article proposes that women's practices of economic and sexual autonomy enact a vision of liberation that seeks to resolve the tension between the anticolonial and patriarchal dimensions of political power in Haiti. It first traces a political genealogy of the postcolonial Haitian state, and then shows how women have long been active, if unrecognized, participants in left political struggle. Next, it looks more broadly at how patriarchal power inflects agrarian space through gendered norms of property and personhood. Finally, it proposes the lakou (yard) as a space of transformation in relations between gender, land, and capital, and shows how women have cultivated and defended political space between the state and the yard.

Haiti, MINUSTAH e democracia: a técnica de governo biopolítico na operação da Organização das Nações Unidas

Resumo: Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a Missão das Nações Unidas para a Estabilização do Haiti (MINUSTAH) como um mecanismo de governo biopolítico e continuidade da prática, por parte das nações tidas como grandes potências ocidentais, de intervenção nos processos políticos haitianos desde sua Independência, em 1804. Para isto, realizamos análise bibliográfica acerca do tema, bem como análises de documentos da Organização das Nações Unidas, de instituições envolvidas na operação e do governo brasileiro. Abordando os conceitos elaborados por Michel Foucault, o trabalho apresenta as diferentes técnicas de governo – como racismo de Estado, dispositivo de polícia e disciplina – utilizadas pelos países estrangeiros nas intervenções no Haiti, ao longo dos séculos XIX, XX e início do XXI, para impor valores democráticos liberais, prescrever condutas ao Estado haitiano e aos indivíduos. Ademais, apontamos os interesses do Brasil em comandar a face militar da MINUSTAH.
 Palavras-chave: MINUSTAH. Biopolítica. Racismo de Estado.

The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty

Abstract The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these discriminatory ideologies became increasingly more explicit in international law.

Leading through Chaos in a Neocolonial Context

Academic and public discourses often oversimplify the complex historical, social, and discursive forces that have created the current realities in Haiti. These discourses ignore or distort the role that foreign governments and international agencies have played and continue to play in the creation of the Haitian state. They portray the Haitian government as singular and static, corrupt and incapable, and fail to acknowledge changes in leadership and the diversity of individuals who exist within the government. This “single story” about Haiti privileges the international community and overlooks the stories from Haitians who are working to rebuild and reimagine their own country. This article examines the personal stories of Haitians in order to better understand the nature of Haitian leadership in a neocolonial, post-disaster context.

CONSIDERACOES SOBRE A DIVIDA EXTERNA E SUBDESENVOLVIMENTO NO HAITI

After the Haitian revolution that took place in the late 19th century, more precisely in the year 1804, France as a former colony forced Haiti to pay compensation to recognize its independence. This indemnity took more than a century to be paid, as its value corresponded to ten years of Haiti's tax revenue, at that time, with that indemnity ended up creating debts, since Haiti had to borrow to pay it . Today we have a Haitian society where 60% of the population is living in urgent conditions, with less than $ 2 a day. There is another portion of the population, about 25%, more impoverished who are living in conditions of extreme urgency, with less than $ 1 a day. These data show that Haiti today is one of the poorest countries in the world and the poorest in Latin America, as the Haitian state is not able to meet the basic needs of the most needy population. Therefore, in this work, we sought to understand whether there is a relationship between the external debt and underdevelopment in Haiti. In this sense, understanding that the fiscal capacity of the State, the capacity of national defense, the strength of public institutions and the capacity of the State to promote democracy are key factors for development, the impact of debts in these state segments was analyzed. We understand that there is a possible relationship, considering the negative impacts it had on the country's tax revenues.

Silence and Specters

This essay examines contests over Haitian history between Haitian state actors and British observers—such as diplomats, travel writers, and “journalists”—around the time of Haiti’s commemorations of the centenary of independence in 1904. This was a time for the Haitian people to reflect on the great achievement of Haitian independence and the exploits of Haiti’s past heroes, and for the Haitian state to remind its people of the commitment to remaining independent in the face of mounting imperialist intervention. British observers reacted to Haitian memories of the Wars of Independence and the calls to maintain that independence in accordance with their imperialistic ambitions in the Caribbean. The contest over Haitian history thus became a means through which to discuss the nature of imperial control and black independence in the Atlantic world. In the creation of each of these narratives of Haitian history, this essay argues, were “bundles” of silences.

“A soldier of fortune”: Henry Christophe, British loyalism, and the troubling question of political legitimacy

ABSTRACTThis article explores the multiple ways in which the legitimacy of Haiti’s first and only king, Henry Christophe, was debated in Britain in the 1810s. Recent scholarship has led to a better understanding of how Christophe presented himself as a legitimate monarch in his efforts to gain diplomatic recognition of the Haitian state. However, exactly why British observers came to not only accept, but also write approvingly of the Haitian kingdom, is still unclear. This article argues that representations of Christophe and his court need to be read against a backdrop of British concerns regarding effective and legitimate governance in the early nineteenth century. In a range of newspapers, periodicals, and literature, Haiti’s latest form of government became a central frame of reference in British debates concerning political legitimacy in the Atlantic world. In particular, at a time when post-revolutionary forms of power threatened conservative ideologies, British loyalists turned to the Haitian kingdom in their assertions of the superiority of Britain’s monarchical government. In these conservative narratives, the figure of King Christophe was a fluid and often contradictory entity, and representations of him were formed to suit different assertions of what constituted political legitimacy. This article, therefore, highlights the wide-ranging frames of reference that British conservative observers looked to as they evaluated legitimacy in an age of revolution. These narratives also demonstrate how Haiti’s different modes of government in its early years of independence influenced its attempts to gain recognition from the powers of the West, as well as how the Haitian state impacted – and was susceptible to – debates concerning sovereignty and the concept of good governance in the Atlantic world in the early nineteenth century.

"Nous l'avons gardée en nous, la tranche blanche": Rethinking the Time of the Haitian Flag in Jean F. Brierre's Le Drapeau de demain (1931)

The main difficulty facing national literatures today, as they are defined here, is that they must combine mythification and demystification, this primal innocence with a learned craftiness.-Edouard Glissant, Caribbean DiscourseSince the 1980s, historians studying the Haitian flag have written a relatively thorough, if not altogether complete, account of its development.1 Much is known of the circumstances that preceded Dessalines's creation of the blue and red bicolor in February 1803 and of the significance that can or cannot be legitimately surmised from this gesture.2 The core narrative claiming that Dessalines created the Haitian red and blue bicolor at the Archaie Conference on May 18, 1803, by theatrically tearing out the white strip from the French tricolor has limited historical support among contemporary historians. Despite this, the of the Haitian flag continues to form the basis of popular, literary, and even academic recounting, just as it continues to serve as the basis of commemorative ceremonies produced by the Haitian state.3 The question, then, is why? What is at stake in this particular account of the flag's history? What values does it aim to instill in the citizens for whom it is the emblem? And, importantly for this paper, what are the potential limitations of drawing upon this particular fictive past when imagining alternative futures for Haiti?Both the spread and the particular tenacity of this core narrative owe, in no small part, to the allegories of national union and anticolonial action that are taken to reside in the tale of the creation of the Haitian flag. On one hand, the very image of what Philippe Girard has called a swashbuckling Dessalines sabering out the white strip from the French tricolor and creating a red and blue emblem for the rebels of the last phase of the Haitian Revolution (1802-1804) certainly invites an anticolonial reading.4 The new bicolor suggested the dramatic emergence of a uniquely Haitian national consciousness that saw continued identification with the French metropole as incompatible with the aims of radical antislavery.5 In short, the flag's creation has been conflated with the expression of a project leading to Haitian independence.6 On the other hand, the remaining two colors-blue and red-have also been given a particularly potent allegorical significance. As Doris Sommer argues in her now-classic account, the Latin American romances of the nineteenth century imagined national unification as the sexual union of a couple drawn from the diverse ethnic groups of the new nation. In these allegories, which she termed fictions, the romantic challenges faced by the frustrated couple were meant to stand as problems hindering national cohesion (and vice versa).7 In contrast, the first Haitian novel, Stella (1859), which retells the story of the Haitian Revolution as the allegory of two half-brothers- one Black, one mulatto-who must learn to unite to defeat the white colonist who murdered their mother, suggested that the foundational fiction in the case of Haiti would be an allegory of fraternal, not sexual, union.8 Similarly, the red and blue stripes of the Haitian flag have been assigned racial or color valences such that, when placed side by side, they represent fraternal unification across difference. In a reappropriation of the French Republican symbolism that had once equated the French tricolor's blue, white, and red bands with the three racial categories of the colony- mulatto, white, and Black-in harmonious union, the newly red and blue bicolor has been taken to signify the unification of Black and mulatto military forces under the command of Dessalines and, by extension, the imagined community of all Blacks and mulattos as a nation.9Simply put, the story of the Haitian flag might be difficult to rewrite in light of new historical evidence because it functions at the intersection of several consequential national allegories. …

Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat uses a Haitian vernacular of Vodou to represent sexual violence against women as a human rights issue. The term vernacular joins earlier commentary on the novel with current theories of human rights discourse. Critics note that Danticat uses domestic vernaculars such as folklore, storytelling, and cooking to reveal Haiti’s hidden history of sexual violence. Similarly, human rights theorists explain that states and advocates use a moral vernacular to negotiate how to apply human rights principles in particular contexts. I claim that Danticat uses Vodou tropes of the Marasa twins and the lwa Ezili to connect Sophie’s virginity testing and Martine’s rape to the Haitian state’s political violence against its people. In this way, Danticat’s Vodou vernacular links the private and public to demonstrate that sexual violence constitutes a violation of human rights that cannot be bracketed as personal or cultural. The novel thus participates in the transnational feminist movement of the 1980s-1990s that sought recognition for rape as a war crime and as a justification for political asylum. Moreover, the novel’s Vodou vernacular resists the normativizing effects of liberal feminism and Western humanism to constitute Haitian women as human rights subjects.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield

Reviewed by: The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield Anne Eller (bio) The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy Edited by Julia Gaffield Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 280 pp. In The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy, Julia Gaffield has gathered a diverse collection of essays that both engage with extant historiography on the Haitian Revolution and, crucially, push discussions forward into state making after 1804. Few Atlantic scholars are unaware of the flourishing scholarship on the course and impact of the revolutionary fighting itself, which has become rich and transnational. This scholarship has influenced and transformed other fields in turn, not only provoking a surge in interest in the revolution’s impact on nearby slave societies but also bringing the fighting into comparative and integrated frames with North Atlantic revolutions and independence movements throughout the hemisphere. Treatment of the early Haitian state(s) after the fighting ended in 1804 has to this moment, especially in English-language scholarship, been less developed. The scholars gathered in this anthology join those working through the revolution’s putative “unthinkability” in the minds of contemporary elites toward elaborating popular perspectives, specifics of postrevolution state making, and reassessment of the independent nation’s economic and diplomatic interactions. The anthology represents a signal contribution to this valuable and growing dialogue. The organizing motif of the collection is the January 1804 Declaration of Independence, a document that authors and signatories intended to announce the independent state of Haiti after more than a decade of fighting. As a post facto proclamation, the independence statement is distinct in its genre, as introduction coauthor David Armitage and other contributors point out. The document’s authors grappled with the predicament of how to narrate and project the normative unity of a new nation in the wake of the “overlapping wars” and imperial interventions that made up the revolutionary fighting. That the new polity was culturally and linguistically heterogeneous, devastated by war, and still confronting a constant threat of French aggression made consolidation a degree more difficult, although not exceptional, as the scholars in the collection rightfully caution. [End Page 223] Contributors to the book’s first part pay special attention to the crafting and dissemination of the independence proclamation itself and an antecessor of several months prior, to great effect. For example, John Garrigus’s essay, in which he seeks to reconstruct some of the familial and political milieu of one of the document’s principal authors, benefits from the author’s decades-long engagement with Saint-Domingue’s notarial archive and highlights how such detailed expertise can furnish valuable context in the absence of direct biographical information. Other contributors to this part do similar careful legwork amid sparse and hostile sources. Deborah Jenson concludes the first part with a creative and willfully theoretical intervention on cognition in which she offers a reflection about the revolutionary—and popular—province of poetic metaphor. The entry sets the tone for interdisciplinary exploration and hypothesis in following analyses. The authors of the second part, “Haitian Independence and the Atlantic,” are responding to a well-developed historiography, and their more pointedly revisionist entries highlight expanding debates of recent years. “If any group is to be held responsible for introducing the practice of racially motivated mass killing into Saint-Domingue, it is certainly the whites,” Jeremy Popkin concludes, in a piece that ideally topples a historiographical albatross, scholarly preoccupation with violence in the last years of fighting (118). Philippe Girard’s entry asks of the reader a fair amount of contortion to minimize the revolutionaries’ direct regional impact, which he argues principally from the reasoning that the small new administration did not launch regional antislavery invasions. Yet that Haitian leaders’ pragmatism in foreign policy existed simultaneously with emancipation, as a survival fight still raged, is a mark of the magnitude of the struggle, not its limits. Nor does it seem logical to conclude that that revolution was a “one-off event” as a result, unless the definition of revolutionary struggle (or parameters for success) are so limited as not to include the very massive and concrete expansion of revolutionary imagination and...

Haiti: trapped in the outer periphery

The inability of the Haitian state to deal with the devastation of the January 2010 earthquake brought into sharp focus Haiti's desperate social and economic conditions-and raised perplexing questions. What accounts for the country's continuing predicament? Why have repeated attempts at democratic governance failed so abysmally? And what role has the international community played? Addressing these questions, Robert Fatton focuses on Haiti's long history of predatory rule and also introduces the concept of the outer periphery to explore the impact of a world economy shaped by neoliberal policies. The result is an insightful analysis of contemporary Haitian politics and society with significant implications for the broader study of comparative politics.

The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan Katz (review)

Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. By Jonathan Katz. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2014. ISBN 9781137278975. 336 pp. $18 paperback.Review by Alyssa Goldstein SepinwallJonathan Katz's Big Truck That Went By received a great deal of attention when it appeared in 2013. Katz, the only full-time US journalist in Haiti at the time of the 2010 earthquake, had broken several important stories about Haiti. These included the first news reports to the United States that an earthquake had happened, and later identifying MINUSTAH soldiers from Nepal as the source of Haiti's deadly cholera outbreak. Big Truck That Went By won numerous prizes, and was named a top book of the year by the Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews and Amazon, com. Katz was interviewed about it on MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, and numerous public radio shows.The book's coverage begins in late 2008 with a previous disaster, the collapse of a school in Port-au-Prince. It continues through the elections of 2011, with a brief discussion of the Caracol industrial park and the dismissal of charges against Jean-Claude Duvalier in 2012. Katz explains the predominance of NGOs in Haiti, and foreign governments' preference for giving aid to these organizations rather than to the Haitian government has led to a weakened state. As Katz notes, the Haitian state is often powerless in the face of NGOs' desires: The aid groups' power to act without oversight or accountability was almost absolute. There was no way for Haitians to appeal an NGO decision, prosecute a bad soldier, or vote an unwanted USAID project out of a neighborhood (51). Katz adds that UN soldiers in Haiti are paid much more than the country's own police, and are proportionately much more powerful.In many ways, specialists in Haitian studies are not Katz's target audience. Katz's lively prose seeks to show general readers who donated to Haitian earthquake relief where your $20 went (4). He also wants to explain to readers how a massive humanitarian effort . . . could cause so much harm and heartache (4). Furthermore, he wants US consumers to understand their complicity in the forces reshaping Haiti, and that the low-wage Haitian garment industry would not exist ... if [they] were willing to pay more for their clothes (278). Katz does not presume any background knowledge among his readers; he sketches the basic contours of Haitian history, society, and culture. Another way in which the book seems aimed at a general audience is its form. book is presented not as an impersonal scholarly analysis, but as a first-person memoir, in which Katz recounts his experiences in the earthquake's wake alongside the story of his falling in love with an NYU grad student in Haiti (who later became his wife).Certainly, Katz is not the first person to analyze the failure of reconstruction in Haiti, let alone the shortcomings of NGOs and of the neoliberal economy. Numerous scholars have called attention to these issues since the earthquake (for instance Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Eloi and Lyonel Trouillot, eds., Refonder Haiti? [2010]; Martin Munro, ed., Haiti Rising [2010]; Paul Farmer, Haiti after the Earthquake [2011]; Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, eds., Tectonic Shfts [2012]; Mark Schuller, Killing with Kindness [2012]; Jean-Germain Gros, State Failure, Underdevelopment, and Foreign Intervention in Haiti [2012]; and Beverly Bell, Fault Lines [2013]).1 In addition to these works, Katz covers much of the same ground as Raoul Peck's film Assistance mortelle {Fatal Assistance), which recorded the mistakes of foreign agencies while they were being made. It is thus an overstatement to call Big Truck That Went By THE book on Haiti's devastating earthquake and its bungled reconstruction, as one blurb on the book's back cover does.And yet there are many ways in which Katz adds substantially to existing literature; in my view, several aspects of the book deserve careful reading by Haitian studies specialists. …

Haiti’s Prized Presidential Legacies

Throughout Haitian history, the country's presidents have not been viewed as effective heads of state. When they are acknowledged at all, they are not recognized for the progress made in Haiti. As of today over fifty heads of state have acceded to the Haitian leadership position, and all have been accused of corruption in one way or another, as any random reading of Haitian history will reveal.1 Such a conclusion, if true, would be quite a disheartening aberration. Is it believable that over fifty successive Haitian presidents, in over two hundred years of independence, were nothing more than corrupt people? Aside from the canonized founder and second chief of state Henry Christophe from 1807 to 1820, were there no celebrated post-founders, say a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy of Haiti? Foreign accounts of Haitian history seem to suggest a resounding NO!2 Haitian accounts of their history certainly make such mention, but one would be hard pressed to find a consensus surrounding one or more presidents among a group of Haitians in the homeland or migrants living abroad.This essay briefly reviews some of the achievements of lasting significance of seven such chief of states: Christophe-the reigning King of Hayti (as it was spelled until 1890)3; Boyer-the Unifier of Hayti; Geffrard-the Redeemer of the Republic; Salomon-Leader of the Black National Party; Hyppolite-the Panama Hat- and Iron Pants-wearing horseman; the 1946 Revolution of Estime; and Magloire-the military man who led the way to Haiti's Golden Age. These men represented seven instances of a functioning Haitian state, yet the positive impacts of their leadership have been minor footnotes in historiographies of Haiti. I will focus on these seven chiefs of state since they have some notoriety among Haitians in the country and abroad.Henry Christophe, King of Hayti, 1807 to 1820Probably the best known of these seven leaders is Henry Christophe, a self-proclaimed monarch. Christophe's major accomplishments include establishing a monarchy in northern Haiti as well as amicable relations with the British and the Germans.4 He also created a trading partnership between Haiti and Jamaica, constructed the Citadelle fortress and SansSouci palace, and recruited teachers for the nation's schools. The lasting significance of Henry Christophe's rule is immortalized in the Citadelle and Sans-Souci, which now symbolize Haitian nationality.Christophe was the King of Hayti from 1807 to 1820. His legacy was forged during the slave abolition movement emerging in Great Britain. Having secured their independence in 1804, Haitians emerged as crusaders for Black people under bondage, but this fact angered slaveholding nations, which feared slave revolts, and Haitians as well, who feared imperial retaliation. More than Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines before him, Christophe became concerned about securing Haitian independence and protecting the country from another assault, which seemed ever more vulnerable (as the French seemed ever more determined) to a reinvasion after the failed French invasion of 1802.Christophe seems to have felt that Great Britain was a nation that advanced the abolition of slavery-far more than imperial France, which had offered earlier plea deals of slave emancipation during the Haitian Revolution, and the United States and Spain, which as slaveholding nations lagged behind the antislavery movement. Moreover, Christophe believed that if a kingdom such as Britain could do more to abolish slavery than France and the United States, Haitians might be better off within a kingdom.5Christophe thus modeled northern Haiti after a monarchy. This move was as much as to venerate Black independence as it was to incense slaveholding powers in the international realm. As the first-ever Negro of a liberated colony, however, Christophe sought the respect of the international community, sending several letters requesting national leaders to address him as such. …