What's the Matter with Haiti?

Haiti isn’t as poor as some African countries like Burundi and Somalia in terms of GDP, but it’s fallen well behind the better sort of sub-Saharan countries like Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Kenya. And it’s far behind its neighbors like similarly black Jamaica and Barbados. It’s GDP is only one-eighth of its neighbor on Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic.

With Haiti much in the news, I looked up something I wrote after the 2010 Haitian earthquake and did a little to update it:

The single most important cause for why Haiti is a mess is probably that Haiti attained its independence as early as 1805, culminating in a massacre of the remaining whites, before the end of the slave trade. Despite theoretically being a French-speaking, Roman Catholic, Western Hemisphere country, Haiti remains culturally rooted in Africa. Wikipedia's article on the “History of Haiti” notes:

At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo, and Dahomey.

Similarly, voodoo, with its black magic curses, makes up much of the substance of Haitian religion, with West African deities, such as the stylish and ominous loa "Baron Samedi", demanding placation.

Thus Papa Doc Duvalier (president of Haiti from 1957-1971), a brilliant black doctor and sociologist turned maniacal dictator, used his study of voodoo and his resemblance to the popular depiction of Baron Samedi to convince the black masses that he was a powerful sorcerer and take power from Haiti's mulatto elite.

Unfortunately, Duvalier began to believe his own propaganda about the power of voodoo. For instance, as Time Magazine reported in 1963, when Duvalier had a falling out with Clement Barbot, the head of his notorious goon squad, the Tonton Macoutes:

But in voodoo-entranced Haiti the whisper went around that no one could kill Barbot. He had the strange power, they said, to change himself into a black dog and escape at will. In Port-au-Prince, Duvalier's policemen went around shooting black dogs on sight.

Much of the educated classes emigrated, leaving Haiti brain-drained.

Papa Doc died in 1971, making his somewhat less sinister son, Baby Doc, the 19-year-old President-for-Life. This playboy squandered his popularity with the black peasants in 1980 by marrying a daughter of the mulatto elite, a stylish Lena Horne-lookalike with expensive tastes. By 1986, Baby Doc was in exile in France.

Since then, American Presidents have spasmodically hired and fired Haitian dictators. At the request of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bill Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 to restore the black radical defrocked priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide, who had been overthrown in 1991 by mulatto military leaders. The Bush Administration apparently more or less kidnapped Aristide in 2004 and sent him into exile in South Africa. Bush turned nominal power over to a shadowy band of "rebels". UN peacekeepers were brought in to occupy the country and keep the gangs from running quite so amok.  …

A new book edited by Jared Diamond, Natural Experiments of History, focuses heavily on the comparison of Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic that Diamond began in his last bestseller, Collapse. Diamond, the author of the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, is both smart and about 90 percent honest. That makes him the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind that is contemporary intellectual discourse.

Diamond's January 15th article in the leftwing U.K. Guardian, “A Divided Island: The forces working against Haiti,” summarizes his thinking on how Haiti's quantity and quality of population have hurt Haiti compared to the D.R., which has a moderate per capita GDP.

It's dry, but more frank than most of what you've heard:

But Haiti's area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double its neighbour's population density.

(Economist Tyler Cowen blogged that until the turn of the century, when kidnappings became routine, he hadn't been afraid of crime when he visited Haiti because the population density was so extraordinary: "There's just not enough room for anyone to mug you, at least if you exercise due caution. Nor, for that matter, were there very many beggars, since usually there was no one to beg from.") 

Diamond goes on:

"The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side."

Diamond made notorious this aerial photo of deforested Haiti on the left and the verdant Dominican Republic on the right:

In Collapse, Diamond praised the D.R.'s old megalomaniacal dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) for stealing much of the forestland and exploiting it cautiously in a rational manner. Dominican kleptocracy helped avoid the tragedy of the commons that contributed to the ecological ruin of Haiti, where the common folk chop down all trees for cooking fuel.

Diamond goes on to point out,—cautiously!—another advantage the D.R. has over Haiti: it's whiter.

"A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic – with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry – was both more receptive and more ­attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves."

The relative whiteness of Dominicans isn't widely understood in the U.S. because we are mostly familiar with the largely black Dominican baseball players, such as Sammy Sosa. [Sammy has gone transracial in retirement.] But Dominicans generally tend to look more like the American-born Dominican mulatto slugger Alex Rodriguez than the black slugger Manny Ramirez. The current president of the D.R. [as of 2010] looks like the fat guy in the Laurel and Hardy movies crossed with Muhammad Ali, and he's the only one of the last five presidents with any clear black ancestry.

Update: Here’s the current president of the DR in 2024:

Haiti currently has no president since the last one was assassinated in 2021, just a Transitional Presidential Council, but mostly a lot of gangs.

The mulatto Trujillo had an explicit policy of whitening the Dominican Republic's population through immigration from Europe—and expelling Haitian illegal immigrants. He was the only national leader actively to recruit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Diamond continues:

Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country's development.

 To summarize Diamond, Haiti has more people per fertile acre of farmland and less human capital per capita.

That human capital can be purely cultural. Thus another former sugar-growing black Caribbean country, Barbados, independent since 1966 has an average life expectancy of 79 years compared to Haiti’s 65 years.

As Lawrence Harrison, head of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts University, told me in 1999:

The culture of slavery, as well as zero-sum traditional African culture, powerfully sustained by a religion (Voodoo) without an ethical code, are palpable to any foreigner who has lived [in Haiti], as I did for two years. Barbados, which I have visited several times, remained a British colony until 1966, by which time it had substantially absorbed British values, attitudes, and institutions. The Barbadians are sometimes referred to as Black Englishmen or Afro-Saxons.

(Still, that raises the question of why Barbados has a lower crime rate and a higher literacy rate than some other ex-British colonies like Jamaica. The late Robert MacNeil's PBS series The Story Of English suggested that selection played a role: "[Barbados] was the first main port of call for the slave ships. It is said that unruly slaves from the least domesticated tribes were progressively shipped up the 'claw' of the West Indies until they reached Jamaica." [p. 220])

Barbadian blacks were cut off from fresh infusions of African culture when the British Parliament voted the end of the slave trade in 1807. Sugar plantation owners could no longer afford to work their slaves to death and replace them with new slaves from Africa. The British government carried out an orderly emancipation, with compensation for slaveowners, in the 1830s.

Although 90 percent of Barbados' population is said to be "Afro-Bajan", Barbados has a fairly large mixed race middle class who typically call themselves "white" (for example, the Barbadian pop singer Rihanna, who is considered black in America, recently complained "I Was Bullied At School For Being White") and espouse traditional white standards.

Ironically, more than few of these West Indians who call themselves white in the Islands have gone into the civil rights business as black leaders in the U.S. For example, President Obama's "African-American" Attorney General Eric Holder called America "a nation of cowards" for not talking enough about race, is a light-skinned Bajan-American.