Haiti's Political History, U.S. Intervention, and Path to Democracy

Introduction: Freedom, Peace, and Haiti's Colonial Origins

Freedom is the foundation of peace. Without freedom, there is no peace. America, by nature, stands for freedom, and we must always remember that we benefit when it expands. We must stand by those nations moving toward freedom, stand up to those nations that deny freedom and threaten our neighbors or our vital interests, and assert emphatically that the future will belong to the free. Today's world is different from the one faced just several years ago. We are no longer divided into armed camps locked in a careful balance of terror. Yet freedom still has enemies. Our present dangers are less concentrated and more varied, coming from rogue nations, from terrorism, and from missiles that threaten our forces, our friends, our allies, and our homeland.

Since the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick between the kingdoms of Spain and France in 1697, the island of Hispaniola has played host to two separate and distinct societies that we now know as the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. At first encounter, and without the benefit of historical background and context, most observers find it incongruous that two such disparate nations — one speaking French and Creole, the other Spanish — should coexist within such limited confines. When viewed in light of the bitter struggle among European colonial powers for wealth and influence both on the continent and in the New World, however, the phenomenon becomes less puzzling.

By the late seventeenth century, Spain was a declining power. Although that country would maintain its vast holdings in mainland North America and South America, Spain found itself hard pressed by British, Dutch, and French forces in the Caribbean. The Treaty of Ryswick was one result of this competition, as the British eventually took Jamaica and established a foothold in Central America. The French eventually proved the value of Caribbean colonization — in an economic as well as a maritime and strategic sense — by developing modern-day Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, into the most productive colony in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. Haiti today is a country situated on the western third of the island of Hispaniola and the smaller islands of La Gonâve, La Tortue (Tortuga), Grande Caye, and Île à Vache in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba. Its total land area is 10,714 square miles and its capital is Port-au-Prince on the main island of Hispaniola.

Hispaniola's indigenous Arawak population suffered near-extinction in the decades after Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492. The island was eventually repopulated by the late seventeenth century with African slaves to work the sugar plantations. In 1697, Spain ceded the western third of Hispaniola, then called Saint-Domingue, to France. It became one of the richest colonies in the eighteenth-century French empire.

The Haitian Revolution and Its Aftermath

On August 22, 1791, the enslaved population revolted, which led to a war of attrition against the French. They defeated an army sent by Napoleon Bonaparte and declared independence on January 1, 1804, establishing the world's first Black republic. Haiti then embarked on a path to end slavery in the Caribbean and to help Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia achieve independence under the revolutionary leadership of Bolívar and Miranda. Toussaint L'Ouverture soon abolished slavery in the neighboring Dominican Republic as well.

Threatened by this attack on slavery and colonialism, the United States and Europe initiated sanctions. In addition to this economic blow, in 1825 France demanded that Haiti pay the French government 150 million gold francs to compensate French plantation slave-owners for their financial losses, in exchange for France's recognition of Haitian independence. Years later, the amount was reduced to 90 million gold francs. The Haitian elite who had gained control of the country following independence caved in to the pressure, viewing this ransom as an inevitable and necessary financial obligation if the country were to live in peace and resume trade with its former colonizers. It took Haiti close to 100 years to pay off this debt — paid not out of the money made by the elite through the export of raw goods, but rather on the backs of the Haitian people who continued to work the land. All public schools in Haiti were closed in order to make the first payment, the first example of the imposition of a structural adjustment program. Haiti continued to make payments to France until the 1950s.

Today, the people of Haiti have joined with their democratically elected government to demand that France return this debt — $21.7 billion in today's currency. On behalf of the people of Haiti, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide made an official request to France, which has formally recognized slavery as a crime against humanity. French legislators have verbally acknowledged the legitimacy of Haiti's request for restitution. Although several international lawyers are working on the case for restitution, the hope is that France will act according to its stated principles and pay its debt to the Haitian people without recourse to international law. Unfortunately, in an echo of the ugly events of 1825, the French government reacted to this request by placing Haiti on a list of "undesirable" countries. As one observer noted, "Some analysts believe that France's refusal to support the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to Haiti until after the president's departure was linked to Aristide's unpopular — in Paris — demand for reparations." Many people, particularly in France and Haiti, are protesting this vindictive response.

U.S. Occupation and Its Consequences

American President Woodrow Wilson sent sailors and marines to Port-au-Prince on July 28, 1915, and within six weeks, representatives from the United States controlled Haitian customs houses and administrative institutions. For the next nineteen years, the U.S. guided and governed the country. During this period, the legal government of Haiti was, both technically and effectively, the U.S. Marine Corps. The specific order from the Navy to the invasion commander, Admiral William Deville Bundy, was to "protect American and foreign" interests.

Representatives from the U.S. wielded veto power over all governmental decisions in Haiti, and Marine Corps commanders served as administrators in the provinces. Local institutions, however, continued to be run by Haitians, as required under policies put in place during the Wilson presidency. Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, the mulatto president of the Senate, agreed to accept the presidency of Haiti after several other candidates had refused on principle. With a figurehead installed in the National Palace and other institutions maintained in form if not in function, Admiral Caperton declared martial law, a condition that persisted until 1929.

In 1917, President Dartiguenave dissolved the legislature after its members refused to approve a constitution written by U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. A referendum subsequently approved the new constitution by a vote of 98,225 to 768 in 1918. One of the controversial provisions allowed foreigners to purchase land — an arrangement that Dessalines had forbidden since 1804 and that most Haitians viewed as anathema.

The occupation of Haiti had several effects on the country. An early period of unrest culminated in a 1918 rebellion by up to 40,000 people. The scale of the uprising overwhelmed the Gendarmerie, but marine reinforcements helped put down the revolt at the estimated cost of 2,000 Haitian lives. Thereafter, order prevailed to a degree that most Haitians had never witnessed. The order, however, was imposed largely by white foreigners with deep-seated racial prejudices and a disdain for self-determination by inhabitants of less-developed nations. These attitudes particularly dismayed the mulatto elite, who had previously believed in their innate superiority over the black masses. The white North Americans, however, did not distinguish among Haitians regardless of skin tone, level of education, or sophistication. This intolerance caused indignation, resentment, and eventually a racial pride reflected in the work of a new generation of Haitian historians, ethnologists, writers, artists, and others, many of whom later became active in politics and government. Still, as Haitians united in reaction to the racism of the occupying forces, the mulatto elite managed to dominate the country's bureaucracy and strengthen its role in national affairs.

The occupation greatly improved some of Haiti's infrastructure. Roads were improved and expanded through the use of forced-labor gangs. This violent form of "corvée labor," with chain gangs and armed guards permitted to shoot anyone who fled compulsory service, was widely regarded as tantamount to slavery. The education system was redesigned from the ground up, involving the destruction of the pre-existing system of "liberal arts" education inherited from the French. Due to its emphasis on vocational training, the American system that replaced the French curriculum was despised by the elite. Thus, between the two major programs carried out by the occupying government, forced labor enraged the lower classes of rural Haiti, while educational reform enraged the urban elite.

In 1922, Louis Borno replaced Dartiguenave, who was forced out of office for temporizing over the approval of a debt consolidation loan. Borno ruled without a legislature — which had been dissolved in 1917 under Dartiguenave — until elections were again permitted in 1930, when the legislature elected mulatto Sténio Vincent to the presidency.

The occupation continued after World War I, despite the embarrassment it caused Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference in 1919 and the scrutiny of a congressional inquiry in 1922. By 1930, President Herbert Hoover had become concerned about the effects of the occupation, particularly after a December 1929 incident in Les Cayes in which marines killed at least ten Haitian peasants during a march to protest local economic conditions. Hoover appointed two commissions to study the situation. The more prominent, headed by former Philippine governor general W. Cameron Forbes, praised the material improvements the U.S. administration had achieved but criticized the exclusion of Haitians from positions of real authority in both the government and the constabulary, known as the Garde d'Haïti. More broadly, the Forbes Commission asserted that "the social forces that created [instability] still remain — poverty, ignorance, and the lack of a tradition or desire for orderly free government."

For any number of reasons, some still rooted in the experience of French colonialism — which left the island with two radically different societies that literally did not even speak the same language — Haiti has never been well governed and is rife with mutual distrust. In the twentieth century, the United States made three major efforts to change the island's political and economic culture, each of which failed and left resentment and bitterness in its wake.

The Hoover administration did not fully implement the recommendations of the Forbes Commission, but U.S. withdrawal was underway by 1932 when Hoover lost the presidency to Roosevelt. On a visit to Cap Haïtien in July 1934, Roosevelt reaffirmed an August 1933 disengagement agreement. The last contingent of marines departed in mid-August, after a formal transfer of authority to the Garde. As in other countries occupied by the United States in the early twentieth century, the local, U.S.-trained military was often the only cohesive and effective institution left in the wake of withdrawal. This sowed the seeds for a sequence of military-backed dictatorships, all attached to American patronage, which would define the next fifty years of Haiti's history.