Haiti – 200 years of bad luck.
January 20th, 2010
I went to Haiti in 2003 for the Saut d’Eau Vodou festival. Back then Haiti was in ruins. Not from an earthquake, but because the entire country was falling apart after years of dodgy governments, lack of any significant industry and it’s own people stripping the land bare. Here is an extract from my book The Naked Man Festival which describes Haiti’s turbulent and troubled history:
‘The streets around Champs de Mars were packed with men standing around doing nothing. This didn’t surprise me. Not after I’d read that a staggering 80 percent of the population is unemployed. Because of all this standing around, Haiti claims the unenviable title of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Throw in some political unrest, flaming barricades, murders, drug-related shootouts, kidnappings, armed robberies, break-ins, carjackings and a few stabbings and the country is, to be perfectly frank, screwed. As it has been for almost 200 years.
Only 500 years ago Haiti was an untouched Caribbean paradise. Christopher Columbus soon put an end to that, though. He and his Spanish mates in tights landed there in 1492 and proclaimed it ‘The New World’. When the prospective invaders finally realised that the island of Hispaniola wasn’t continental America (the lack of McDonalds gave it away), they lost interest and allowed pirates to vie for control until French men in tights turned up. By the middle of the 17th century, the Haitian third of the island had become a French colony. The French administrators needed someone to wash their tights so, over the next 100 years, they imported over 200 000 slaves from the West Coast of Africa. By 1780, Haiti was one of the wealthiest regions in the world. A class system arose, however, with the light-skinned, Catholic, French-speaking minority bossing around the dark-skinned, Vodou-worshipping, Creole-speaking masses. In 1791, the French Revolution inspired a successful slave revolt and by 1804 Haiti became the world’s first post-colonial independent black nation. In 1844, another revolt threw Haiti into a state of anarchy. It stayed there for most of the time until 1957 when Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier declared himself ‘President for life’. There was no anarchy now, just fear as Duvalier used his armed thugs called the Tontons Macoutes to help him keep control. Terror, torture, murder and all those fun things were very much the order of the day. When Papa Doc died, his son Jean Claude—‘Baby Doc’—came to power. Life under Baby Doc wasn’t much better. After he was exiled to France, the country endured a succession of mass massacres and rigged elections. Today, sadly, not much has changed. There are just more holes in the footpaths.’
And even before the earthquake Port-au-Prince was a mess. I wrote:
‘The streets were filthy. I had never in all my travels seen so much squalor. I’m not sure what day ‘rubbish day’ was. And, by the looks of it, neither did the local garbage collectors. The garbage looked as if it hadn’t been picked up since 1982. It was piled so high in places that cars had to drive over giant mounds of it just to turn into one of the side streets. And this wasn’t even one of the ‘slum’ suburbs. Stalls had been set up on the footpath by people selling all sorts of odd things, including empty bottles, broken chairs, old pots without handles and more bald tyres. One fellow was selling what looked like a pile of rocks (they were nice rocks, though). On the outskirts of the city we passed some buildings under construction, but they were being made from such shabby materials it was hard to tell if the buildings were going up or coming down.’
But, I loved the country. I loved the warmth and joy of the people and, although much of Port-au-Prince was a mess, there were some beautiful buildings including the wonderful Hotel Oloffson where I stayed for a few days. The Hotel Oloffson survived the quake and is currently home to many journalists and aid workers. There are so many, in fact, that they are sleeping in the gardens and even the driveway. For a very interesting insight into life in Port-au-Prince at the moment the owner of the Hotel Oloffson Richard Morse has been twittering regularly. At the time of the actual quake Richard is talking about his band RAM recording a new CD, when suddenly there is a break from twittering for a few hours then:
‘were ok at the oloffson..internet is on !! no phones ! hope all are okay..alot of big building in PAP are down!’
And then: ‘Just about all the lights are out in Port au Prince.. people still screaming but the noise is dying as darkness sets.’
You can follow Richard’s Twitter here.
I do hope that at least this terrible disaster will finally turn around the fate of the Haitian people by the rest of the world helping to re-build this poor and poorly run nation.
On January 21st, 2010 Epiphanie said: