Haiti became the first Black republic in 1804 and the Haitian Revolution wouldn’t have been possible without its architect, Toussaint Louverture.
Louverture not only succeeded in freeing Haiti, “he helped precipitate the downfall of European colonialism in the western hemisphere.” Over time, other islands pushed for their own freedom. Revolts erupted across the English, Spanish and French- speaking Caribbean.
Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, was under French control since 1697. Louverture was born in 1743 and spent a good portion of his life enslaved before entering the military.
In 1791, revolution sparked. The chief reason was to rid Haiti of the institution of slavery. But supporters also pointed to the revolution taking place in France at the time. If France could rid itself of tyranny and eventually become a republic, then surely Haiti could do the same.
As the island’s enslaved workers organized to burn plantations and kill many owners, the newly-freed Toussaint laid low. He tended to his own land, while continuing to oversee his former owner’s plantation. Eventually, wielding knowledge of African and Creole medicinal techniques, he entered the war as a physician. But he quickly distinguished himself as a canny tactician and a strategist.
Louverture’s military resume was impressive. He not only outfoxed French forces, but British and Spanish ones, too. He united the island’s Black and mixed-race populations under his command, outmaneuvered three successive French commissioners, defeated the British and overpowered the Spanish. Then in 1801, despite suffering serious battle wounds, he authored a new abolitionist constitution for Saint Domingue.
Meanwhile, France’s Napolean Bonaparte saw Louverture as a thorn in his side. Bonaparte dispatched twenty- thousand men to overthrow him in 1802. Louverture ordered one of his generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to set fire to the capital city so that “those who come to re-enslave us always have before their eyes the image of hell they deserve.”
General Dessalines, also a former slave, assumed a more prominent leadership role when the French arrested Louverture and took him to France. Bonaparte wanted to re-introduce slavery, prompting Dessalines to orchestrate a new, crushing revolt. At last, in November 1803, France surrendered, and Haiti became independent on January 1, 1804.
Dessalines declared himself Emperor of Haiti, and did all he could to ensure it would retain independence until his assassination in 1806.
Unfortunately, Louverture never saw Haiti again and preceded Dessalines in death by three years. After the French imprisoned L’ouverture in a prison high in the French Alps, Haiti’s most prominent founding father succumbed to extreme cold, isolation and disease.
The loss of so many of its people during the revolution wasn’t the only injustice for Haiti. Since France couldn’t enslave Haiti anymore, it was determined to make it pay in the most literal sense. In 1825, barely two decades after winning independence, Haiti had to pay ‘reparations’ to the French slaveholders it had overthrown.
The amount was outrageous by any standard, let alone for a young, poor nation with no friends in high places. But the French insisted out of spite, and it was the only way Haiti could avoid further conflict with them. It took until 1947 for Haiti to come out of debt.
Following the last assassination of a Haitian president in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson immediately ordered the invasion and subsequent 19-year occupation of Haiti to “restore order” and “maintain political and economic stability in the Caribbean.” Apparently, the restoration of order required the murder and rape of thousands of Haitians and the looting of the Haitian National Bank, whose funds were used as a corporate kickback for Wall Street.
Despite the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Haiti in 1934, the United States continued to control Haitian political and economic policy through decades of support for Haitian dictators “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc”, whose death squads murdered more than 60,000 Haitians. Less than a year after the first democratic elections in Haitian history in 1990, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a CIA-orchestrated coup.
Bill Clinton’s 1994 invasion to reinstate Aristide was a quid pro quo for the adaptation of neoliberal economic policies. These policies included the 1995 imposed IMF and World Bank structural adjustment program that slashed import tariffs on rice, dooming Haitian agricultural production and transforming Haiti into the fifth-largest importer of American rice. (Most of Haiti’s rice comes from Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s home state.)
In 2004, the Bush administration continued the destruction of Haitian democracy by ousting Aristide for a second time in a joint U.S., French, and Canadian operation. After U.S. Special Forces kidnapped Aristide and dropped him off in the Central African Republic, President Bush announced the deployment of U.S. troops to Haiti to “help stabilize the country,” which was followed by a 15-year UN peace-keeping military occupation.
While the UN Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) introduced a cholera epidemic and engaged in mass rape, the chaotic aftermath of the 2010 earthquake gave U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the perfect opportunity to unilaterally select Michel Martelly as the next Haitian president. This further undermined Haiti’s already tenuous political sovereignty and imposed further neoliberal economic measures benefitting foreign investors to the detriment of the Haitian masses. Clinton’s State Department even went as far as to assist U.S. corporations with factories in Haiti in blocking an already-approved minimum wage increase.
Handpicked by Martelly, Jovenel Moïse was elected in 2017 with just 5 percent of the Haitian vote in an election in which only 21 percent of the population voted. In 2018, massive popular protests erupted following the PetroCaribe scandal, in which government officials embezzled billions of dollars in public investment financing provided by Venezuela. In the face of continued protests, Moïse governed by decree from January 2020 until his assassination, unilaterally replacing judges on the supreme court and attempting to push through a referendum that would have expanded his executive powers.
For decades, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been used by the U.S. and NATO to justify the use of military force to secure regional interests and extract wealth. In response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) launched Operation Unified Response. The operation’s relief phase included the deployment of troops “to mitigate near-term human suffering in support of USAID/OFDA efforts.” However, USAID’s disclosed relief and reconstruction fund data revealed that 77.46 percent of all funds were awarded to firms located within the Beltway (D.C., Maryland, Virginia) raising questions as to the efficacy of this “relief” strategy.
Since the end of the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful nationwide slave revolt, Haiti has been the target of vengeful Western imperial aggression. What we are seeing today is the result of this pilaging. and the threats to send troops, only reinforce the ongoing exploitation. On the other hand. the abolitionist uprising that kicked off colonial France stands out as an important historical example.