By KEVIN BALDEOSINGH

The American evangelist Pat Robertson drew sharp criticism, both within the United States and around the world, when he claimed that Haiti’s problems were caused by a pact made with the Devil 200 years ago. “That’s a true story,” said Robertson on his TV show. In Trinidad, many Christians publicly rejected this “explanation” (what they might have said within their churches is a different matter). Yet the historical account of Haiti offered by Caribbean academics is, for the most part, a secular superstition that is just as tendentious.
Principal of UWI’s Cave Hill campus Hilary Beckles in an article circulating the week after the 7.0 earthquake which devastated Haiti asserted that “Haiti’s independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.” Other commentators have taken a similar tack, focusing on white racism, the refusal of the rich nations to trade with Haiti, and France’s 1825 indemnity demand as the key reasons for Haiti’s poverty today.
Even if these assertions fitted the historical facts - which they do not—none of them can confidently be declared as causal. Take the French levy of 150 million francs. Germany after World War One also had a punitive reparation imposed on it, to the tune of 32 million marks a year, yet this did not prevent that nation from re-building so that within 20 years it was able to launch a war against the main European powers. It can be argued, correctly, that Germany had institutional advantages which Haiti did not: but that argument in itself proves that the causal factor was not the levy per se. Indeed, Beckles contradicts himself even within his own article, writing that the Haitian government agreed to pay France the indemnity because “the economy is bankrupt”  but that “payments began immediately”. Good trick for a collapsed economy.
In fact, Haiti at the end of the 18th century was in more or less the same socio-economic position it is in today—i.e. the leaders were rich, the masses poor. The British vice-agent in Port-au-Prince reported in 1799 that Dessalines rented some 30 sugar plantations at 100,000 francs a year, while Christophe was worth US$250,000. Toussaint himself owned several properties from which he got a good income. But he was committed to re-building the Haitian economy and he did so by imposing a rule as strict, if not stricter, than had obtained under slavery. “On the plantation, the work was organised in a military fashion…The worker who ran away from a plantation was dragged before a court-martial… Marronage was fought intensively. For Toussaint, marron and vagabond were synonyms. Both were considered bandits,” writes historian Mats Lundahl in an essay titled Toussaint and the War Economy of St Domingue.
But this system successfully revived export agriculture in Haiti. By 1802, sugar production was back to 38 percent of its 1789 level, coffee was at 45 percent, and cotton at 58 percent. Historian Robert K. LaCerte  argues: “It was not a lack of markets which frustrated Toussaint and others, but the failure to secure capital, labour, and technical expertise.”

The Haitian blacks were also disaffected by being forced to work on the plantations, wanting instead to get land for subsistence farming. The mulatto leader Pétion, who ruled the west and south when the island was divided after 1806, gave the blacks what they wanted. “By meeting the demands of the ex-slaves, Pétion decided the agrarian future of Haiti,” LaCerte writes. “The first black republic emerged from the long wars of independence as a society of peasant proprietors given over to a subsistence economy except for coffee…This in turn placed the new nation in an adverse competitive position with the better capitalised Brazilian coffee planters and ensured its economic decline.”
In his article, however, Beckles assigns a different cause to this decline: the indemnity demanded by France, which he describes as “a merciless exploitation that was designed and guaranteed to collapse the Haitian economy and society.” But in a 1996 academic essay titled Divided to the Vein, Beckles is more circumspect, saying only “This debt, generally described as a burdensome levy on the economy, added considerably to the further productive decay of Haiti by draining away foreign exchange earnings.” In any case, this debt was paid off in 1922. If it was such a potent cause of Haiti’s poverty trap, what has been the keep-back during the past 87 years?
A further example of  the intellectual dishonesty that attaches to this issue is the claim that the 150 million francs is worth over US$20 billion in reparations today. That figure, which comes from former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and has been repeated uncritically by Caribbean commentators, was arrived at by calculating compound interest rather than, as is the more usual practice, by converting the 19th century worth of the francs into an international dollar equivalent at current prices.
Beckles in his article also claims that “Haiti was isolated at birth - ostracised and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development.” In his essay, by contrast, he sticks to the facts: “The United States emerged as Haiti’s principal trading partner during the first year. English merchants…jostled with the Americans for the larger share of Haitian trade.” Thus, as is too often the case with UWI historians, ideology tramples on fact. So you won’t hear how in 1793 the Spanish government offered the blacks an alliance against the French. You won’t hear how Toussaint joined the French in 1794 and was made a general by that government in 1796. You won’t hear that Toussaint wrote the American president John Adams in 1798 to restore trade relations, and how the US, along with England, gave Toussaint the arms and supplies he needed to defeat the mulatto leader Rigaud. In other words, racism, which was indeed a factor in Haiti’s history, was nevertheless always trumped by realpolitik.
In fact, the most significant event where both racism and realpolitik meshed is rarely referred to: in January 1805, all the white people in Haiti were massacred on orders from Haiti’s self-declared first emperor, Dessalines. In this context, consider a counter-factual: suppose the apartheid government of South Africa had killed every black person in the country. Suppose that all African nations, as well as the rest of the world, thereafter broke all links with South Africa, thus impoverishing that country. Would the same people who condemn Europe and the US for supposedly isolating Haiti apply the same argument to this imaginary South Africa? Or would they say that impoverishing the apartheid regime was a just punishment?
The facts of Haiti’s history demonstrate that ideological interpretations based on race and exploitation are not necessarily true, and indeed are likely to be no more than half-truths. Such interpretations implicitly, and explicitly, absolve Haitians from all complicity in their own parlous state. Yet a reasonable historical interpretation is that Haiti has always been ill-served by its leaders, including Toussaint in some respects. Reginald Dumas, in his book An Encounter with Haiti, writes: “History and culture are central to a country’s behaviour. What they must not be permitted to do, however, is manacle the country in conduct that does not take sufficient account of the views of a changing world…You cannot credibly say that the world must help you but that you alone must decide how that help is to be utilised…”

The fact is, Haiti will never escape its poverty trap without outside assistance and, if we agree that Haiti’s leaders are a key part of the problem, then rule from outside may be a necessary part of re-building that nation. In this regard, I find it ironic that so many of these Afrocentric commentators like to cite CLR James’s The Black Jacobins when talking about Haiti, while ignoring the message James himself emphasised: “I have written in vain if I have not made it clear that of all formerly colonial coloured peoples, the West Indian masses are the most highly experienced in the ways of Western civilisation and most receptive to its requirements in the 20th century.”
Although this is also a half-truth, James’s recommendation is clear: Haiti, and by extension the Caribbean, needs to adopt the ways and values of the same nations we like to blame for the region’s woes.