Haiti

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Haiti

Caribbean nation that was the first modern black republic.

Haiti is a predominantly black Caribbean nation with a population that was estimated at 7.5 million in 2003. It occupies the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, southeast of Cuba. The remainder of Hispaniola is another nation, the Dominican Republic.

In 1804, after the Haitian Revolution, one of the most successful slave rebellions in history, Haiti emerged as the first independent black-led republic in the modern world. In shedding the yoke of slavery and French colonial rule, the revolutionaries of Haiti inspired people of African descent around the world, particularly those who remained in slavery, yet Haiti is a challenge to historians. Western historians have not always recognized Haiti's importance to the history of the Americas. The Haitian Revolution, for instance, is seldom remembered or taught at universities in the United States. On the other hand, Haitian historians often tailored their accounts to suit the country's pro-Western elites, who wanted to achieve respectability in Europe and North America. Both positions have had a lasting effect on how Haiti is viewed in modern times, as have the country's persistent problems with poverty, corruption, and political upheaval.

Native American Presence

Before the arrival of European explorer Christopher Columbus in December of 1492, Hispaniola was inhabited by between 300,000 and a million Arawaks, a Native American people. The island—called by the Arawak names Ayti, Bohio, and Kiskeya—was divided into five caciquats, or kingdoms. Columbus named it La Isla Española (Spanish for “The Spanish Island”) in honor of Spain, which had funded his voyage, and it became known as Hispaniola.

The Arawaks resisted Spanish efforts to colonize the island. Their first major battle with the foreigners took place in 1495 at Santo Cerro, in the eastern part of the island, and ended in defeat for the Arawaks. The pattern was set: Spanish conquest, followed by colonization. The Arawaks resisted in a series of uprisings but eventually took refuge, along with some newly arrived African slaves, in the Sierra de Bahoruco, a mountain range in the southwest. In 1533, Spain officially recognized the independence of these African and Arawak escapees, who were called maroons. By that time, only a few hundred Arawaks remained on Hispaniola.

Colonization and Slavery

The first black slaves were brought to the island by the Spanish governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1502. Mostly ladinos, or Spanish people of African descent, they performed various tasks, such as gold mining and agricultural work. But ladinos, because they understood Spanish and were at home in the colonial culture, could arrange rebellions and escapes, which occurred frequently. For this reason the Europeans preferred Arawaks as slaves. In 1516 Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish missionary and historian, tried to help the Arawaks by writing a document that criticized the abuses of Native Americans in the Spanish colonial system. As a solution for the shortage of labor, Las Casas urged that Spain import African-born slaves into its American colonies.The Spanish crown embraced this suggestion, and by 1520 African slaves were used throughout the colonies. But Hispaniola was no longer producing gold, and the island became an undeveloped region of the Spanish Empire, taking a back seat to the mineral-rich territories of Mexico and Peru.

After an Arawak raid destroyed an early Spanish settlement near present-day Cap-Haïtien, the Spanish concentrated their colonizing efforts on eastern Hispaniola. Meanwhile, the French gained a foothold on the northern offshore island of Île de la Tortue (Tortuga Island), and in 1697 they acquired the western third of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti. They called it Saint-Domingue. (The Spanish-held eastern section of the island, now the Dominican Republic, was known as Santo Domingo.) As the French settled Saint-Domingue and began growing coffee and sugar, they imported more enslaved Africans, often from well-organized African states. The ethnic groups contributing to Haiti's cultural heritage included the Fon, Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Bakongo, and Akan, groups who in Africa had been town dwellers, textile and metal artisans, and agricultural workers.

Haiti

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By 1701, Saint-Domingue's plantation system was developing rapidly. In the 1750s the colony led the world in sugar production, and France controlled about 40 percent of the worldwide sugar trade. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Domingue was the world's richest colony, accounting for approximately 40 percent of France's entire trade. It also had about 500,000 slaves, or almost half of the total slave population in the Caribbean. France's economic growth and industrial development were largely based on wealth from its colonies, notably Saint-Domingue.

Enslaved Africans lived and worked in dehumanizing conditions on the colony's sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, and indigo plantations. The harsh conditions led to a high death rate among the slaves, which, together with rapid growth of the colony's economy, created a need for even more slaves. By the end of the eighteenth century, between two-thirds and three-fourths of Saint-Domingue's slave population had been born on the African continent—specifically, in West and Central Africa—not in the colony. The constant arrival of new African slaves meant that African ideas, religions, and customs were still strong, forming the foundation for an evolving national culture after the end of colonial rule.

The colony's white population at the end of the eighteenth century numbered about 30,000 people in three classes. The “plantocracy” was the social class made up of the plantation owners, many of whom spent much or all of their time away from their plantations. The French colonial administrators formed a second group, and the blancs manants, or poor whites, were a third. Relatively few white women lived in the colony, especially in the lowest ranks. In addition to the white population, Saint-Domingue had about 28,000 gens de couleur (French for “people of color”) or affranchis (“freedpersons”); most were of mixed African and European descent, but some were black. A small but influential proportion of the affranchis owned property and slaves. Class differences followed skin color, with darker people concentrated in the lower classes. The colonial militia reinforced the authoritarian system that kept power in the hands of the wealthy white elite.

The affranchis, even when they were members of the plantocracy, were never accepted by the white elite. Although officially free, affranchis suffered many limits on their freedoms. In the 1780s, for example, the colonial regime issued laws prohibiting affranchis from holding public offices and carrying firearms. These and other restrictions caused widespread resentment. Furthermore, the French had devised hundreds of color categories between “pure” European and “pure” African, reinforcing the link between color and class and making “passing” a necessity for those who could pass as white. But the enslaved population suffered the worst conditions, including physical mistreatment and rape. Approximately 40,000 of the colony's 500,000 slaves in 1791 were mulattoes, the result of sexual unions, usually forced, between white male slave owners and their female African slaves. The slaves, however, responded to harsh treatment with resistance and rebellion. Bosals, or African-born blacks, formed the majority of rebels in slave uprisings. Slave sellers capitalized on that fact to charge 25 percent more for Creoles, or American-born blacks, than for bosals. The slave vendors argued that Creoles, who had been Christianized and “housebroken,” had had the fighting spirit taken out of them.

Significant slave uprisings occurred in 1691, 1697, and the late 1750s. The leader of the 1750s rebellion was a maroon named Makandal, who was a Muslim as well as a Vodou priest and the son of an African chief. He is said to have used his knowledge of medicinal herbs to poison whites, causing many deaths in what amounted to a hidden uprising. Colonial authorities captured Makandal in late 1757 and burned him at the stake early the following year.

Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)

On August 14, 1791, a Vodou priest named Boukman led a ceremony that signalled the beginning of a slave revolt. One week later, the uprising began in the northern part of the colony. In a matter of weeks it had spread to other areas. The first phase of the fighting killed an estimated 10,000 slaves and 1,000 whites, as an army of 100,000 rebels sought to destroy the plantations and the symbols of the colonial regime. The Africans fought with religious fervor against not only the French armies but also Spanish troops that invaded the colony in 1792. The following year, British forces arrived to aid the slave-owning plantocracy. The Spanish and British hoped to gain some advantage in the colony while France was weakened and distracted by its own revolution, which had begun in 1789. Even more important, they joined the fight against the rebellious slaves of Saint-Domingue out of sheer horror at the possibility of an independent black state in the Americas—and fear that the rebellion would spread to their own slave colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America.

The tormented and exciting first phase of the Haitian Revolution saw the rise of François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, a freed slave turned landowner, who joined the rebellion months after Boukman's original uprising. Toussaint opposed the French colonial regime until the local French commissioner, seeing no other way to end the rebellion, abolished slavery on August 29, 1793. (Upon learning of his action, the French legislature formally abolished slavery the following year.) Toussaint then allied himself with the French and rose as an officer in the ranks of the colonial army. After forming and then breaking a brief alliance with the Spanish army in the colony, Toussaint defeated the Spanish forces in 1795. Three years later he defeated the British forces and negotiated Saint-Domingue's first diplomatic agreement with Great Britain and the United States. In 1801, Toussaint proclaimed Saint-Domingue a self-governing state, still under France's overall rule but with considerable independence, and named himself its governor-general. But the new status that Toussaint had created for Saint-Dominque was unacceptable to France and to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become the French leader. In 1802 Napoleon sent an army of 22,000 under the commaned of his brother-in-law, General Charles LeClerc, to reconquer the island. The French ambushed and arrested Toussaint, who died of pneumonia in a French prison the following year. Once Toussaint was taken captive to France, LeClerc intended to restore slavery and the slave trade and to reestablish economic production on the large sugar and coffee estates. He died of malaria in 1802, however, and was replaced by General Donatien Rochambeau, whose brutality—along with rumors about the restoration of slavery—sparked a second and final uprising in 1803.

This time the affranchis, resenting the criticisms and racial insults of the restored French colonial establishment, joined the revolt. They were led in part by military veterans from among the 1,500 Haitian affranchis who had fought in the American Revolution (1775–1783), notably at the battle of Savannah, Georgia, under French officers. But the alliance between slaves, who were mostly black, and affranchis, most of whom were freeborn mulattoes, was fragile and complicated. As early as 1799 André Rigaud, an affranchi leader, had led a massive uprising against Toussaint. Some prominent affranchis, including Alexandre Pétion, Jean-Pierre Boyer, and Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard, had supported Rigaud, keeping the uprising going with their military skills. Others, notably the generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe, had sided with Toussaint. About 10,000 of Rigaud's affranchis had perished in that insurrection. After Toussaint was taken to France, however, affranchis and blacks formed a new alliance. Pétion, born free of a French father who never recognized him, and Dessalines, born a slave, agreed in October of 1802 to renew the war against the French under Dessalines's command. Together the slave and affranchis leaders had a broader array of military skills, strategies, and tactics than the slaves and maroons had had in the earlier guerrilla warfare. On May 18, 1803, in the small town of Arcahaie, the Haitian national flag was created using two of the same colors as the French flag, blue and red, which Dessalines hoped would symbolize the union between blacks and mulattoes. Another interpretation linked the colors with the Lwa, or Vodou deities: blue for Ezili Dantò, the Dahomean deity of motherly love, and red for Ogou Feray, the Yoruban and Fon deity of war.

Under Dessalines and Pétion, Haitian forces succeeded in winning their independence. After driving the French armies from the colony in December of 1803, Dessalines and other revolutionary leaders declared its independence on January 1, 1804, in the western city of Gonaïves. They called the independent state Hayti, from the Arawak name meaning Land of Mountains. Hayti was the second independent country in the Americas (after the United States), the first black-ruled state in the modern world, and the only nation to have arisen from a successful slave revolt.

At the time Haiti became independent, its neighbor Santo Domingo was under French rule, and French forces there threatened the security of the new republic. In 1805, Dessalines invaded Santo Domingo but met strong resistance from the French colonial military and local white planters, who drove the Haitian forces back into the western part of the island and punished captured Haitians by enslaving them. Dessalines's retreating forces responded by massacring Haiti's last remaining whites, between 2,000 and 3,000 people. During the thirteen years of revolutionary warfare, about 100,000 black Haitians and some 71,000 European soldiers and mercenaries had lost their lives, almost half of the former colony's population had fled, and the colonial economy had been destroyed.

Early National Period (1806–1844)

Dessalines, known as the father of Haiti, at first made himself Haiti's governor-general for life. Then, in September 1804, after Napoleon had become emperor of France, Dessalines named himself emperor of Haiti. In an attempt to reorganize the economy, he placed the former slave plantations under state ownership and ordered all non-soldiers to become agricultural workers. The affranchis and other landowners felt threatened by Dessalines, believing that he was closer to the former slaves than he was to the mulatto elite, some of whom were former slave owners. His assassination on October 17, 1806, brought the mulatto elite to power.

The small Haitian elite soon split along racial lines to establish two separate dominions. Christophe, unsatisfied with his appointment as figurehead president of the new republic, broke away and established a black-ruled kingdom in the north, crowning himself King Henry I in 1811. Pétion, meanwhile, established himself as leader of a mulatto-ruled republic in the south. Between 1809 and 1814 Pétion carried out Latin America's first agrarian reform, giving individuals small parcels of the farmland that had become state-owned under Dessalines. This land reform established a system of small holdings occupied by a strong peasantry. In 1816, the southern republic adopted a new constitution that replaced the elected president with a president for life. Pétion held that office until his death two years later.

In 1815, the South American independence leader Simón Bolívar visited Haiti. Bolívar sought Pétion's aid in his fight against Spanish colonial rule in Latin America. Pétion granted that aid in exchange for Bolívar's promise to abolish slavery wherever his armies were victorious. Haiti gave Bolívar men, money, munitions, and a small printing press on which Bolívar's emancipation of slaves is rumored to have been printed. Despite Bolívar's promises, however, slavery was not entirely abolished in the former Spanish colonies of South America until the 1850s. Furthermore, when Bolívar organized the first Pan-American Congress in 1826, he left Haiti out because of pressure from the United States. This exclusion further isolated Haiti, which had not received official recognition from most world powers because the existence of a black-led independent republic challenged an international system based, in part, on colonization and slavery.

When France failed to regain control of Saint-Domingue, Napoleon abandoned efforts to build an empire in the Western Hemisphere. France recognized Haitian independence in 1825 but imposed a heavy debt to be paid to former slave owners. France abolished slavery in its remaining Caribbean possessions in 1838, and at that time it cut Haiti's debt in half. Still, Haiti did not complete the payment until 1922—a long financial burden that contributed to the nation's economic underdevelopment. The United Kingdom, which had been involved in trade with Haiti from the beginning, extended official recognition soon after France did so. The United States—fearing objections from its slave-owning Southern states and blinded by prejudice—did not recognize Haiti until 1862.

The palace of Roi Christophe at the Sans Souci Castle was constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the Haitian Revolution. This monument was one of the first edifices built by former slaves who had won their freedom and, as such, has come to be regarded as a symbol of liberty.

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Meanwhile, unrest continued in Santo Domingo, now a Spanish colony in eastern Hispaniola. Some groups—mainly nonwhites, including the slaves who made up 15 percent of the population—favored unification with Haiti. In 1821 several towns along the Haitian border began flying the Haitian flag, raising slave owners' fears that abolition was imminent. That same year proslavery nationalists declared independence from Spain, calling the nation “Spanish Haiti.” Haitian military forces entered Santo Domingo in 1822 and remained for twenty-two years. During that time the slaves of Santo Domingo were freed and Hispaniola was unified under one government. This government became unpopular with many Santo Domingans, however, because it discriminated against the church and required Santo Domingo to pay the debt owed to France. Some whites fled Santo Domingo, while others stirred up a movement for independence from Haiti. But when the pro-independence forces tried to restore slavery, black leaders threatened to fight alongside the Haitian army. In June 1844 slavery once more was declared abolished on the entire island, and Santo Domingo became the independent Dominican Republic, with a population of 50,000 whites, 50,000 mulattoes, and 25,000 blacks. When Spain tried to regain control of its former colony in 1865, Haitians stepped in to help Dominicans maintain their freedom.

Haiti's concern for freedom abroad did not necessarily apply at home. The affranchis held political control, while the new peasantry—made up of former slaves—could do little but rebel again and again, as in the colonial period. The most significant rebellions occurred in 1844 and 1859. Meanwhile, the wealthy mulatto elite distanced themselves from the poverty-stricken masses, widening the gap between social classes and reviving the distinctions that the French had established during the colonial era. The wealthy elite were generally light-skinned, well educated, French speaking, and Roman Catholics. The poor masses were predominantly black, speakers of Haitian Creole, practitioners of Vodou, and largely illiterate because they lacked access to education.

Christophe, ruler of Haiti's northern kingdom, died in 1820. His kingdom was then united with the southern republic under General Boyer, who had succeeded Pétion as president for life. This brought all of Haiti under one leader. President until 1843, Boyer made the mulatto elite the most powerful segment of the nation's population and reduced access to political and economic power for the black majority.

Power Struggles in the New Republic (1844–1915)

After a revolt against his rule, Boyer resigned, launching a series of bitter struggles between competing black and mulatto factions. From 1844 to 1915, Haiti had twenty-two governments. None improved the lives of the ordinary Haitians, who suffered from growing poverty and from lack of education, health care, and other social services. Protesting these circumstances, peasants in the south rebelled in 1844. The rebels were called Piquets (from a word for their weapons, wooden poles called picks). Their goals were to reduce the power of the mulatto elite, to place a black in the presidency, and to further distribute state lands among the peasantry. They forced the mulatto-dominated National Assembly, a legislature composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies, to meet some of their demands.

In 1847 the National Assembly elected a black, Faustin Élie Soulouque, as president of Haiti. The legislature had expected to manipulate Soulouque, but instead he established a strong regime. In 1849, he unsuccessfully invaded the Dominican Republic, and that same year he proclaimed himself Faustin I, emperor of Haiti. His tyrannical rule continued until 1859, when a mulatto general named Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard deposed him and restored republican government. Power struggles continued, however, and Geffrard was in turn exiled in 1867.

In the 1860s, northern peasant rebels known as the Cacos fought to decentralize the Haitian state. Just as the maroons had represented slaves' dissatisfactions and desires during the colonial period, the Cacos came to stand for all peasants' discontent with their circumstances. Many of their leaders were Vodou priests, and their ideas about government and society recalled traditional West and Central African social organization.

Intervention and Occupation (1915–1934)

Haiti's history entered a new chapter in 1915, when the United States sent 400 Marines to the island in support of the Haitian elite, which had been unable to regain control of rebel-held areas. U.S. forces occupied Haiti until 1934, both to protect European and American business interests there and to restore power to the Haitian elite. The United States defined the Haitian rebels as “bandits,” something like an early version of “terrorists,” and blamed them for the island's political and economic instability. But in a different view, Haitian instability can be seen as the result of interplay between rival social classes, the elitist political system, and a foreign-dominated economy.

Both political and economic interests contributed to the U.S. invasion of Haiti. In political terms, the United States had already begun establishing control over the Caribbean basin, disregarding the integrity and independence of Caribbean countries. Under the Roosevelt Corollary, an addition to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 in which the United States declared its willingness to interfere in the politics of other American states, the United States had interfered in or taken control of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, Panama in 1903, Nicaragua in 1912, Mexico in 1914, the Dominican Republic in 1916, and the Danish Virgin Islands in 1917. The United States had not overlooked Haiti—it had repeatedly expressed interest in building a naval base in the Môle Saint Nicolas, located in the northwestern tip of the country.

Two economic disputes, however, were the immediate causes for the U.S. invasion. The first was between the Haitian government and the U.S.-owned Haitian National Railroad. In 1910 the Haitian government had signed a contract granting giving an American investor permission to build a railroad in Haiti and to cultivate the land along the tracks. The agreement broke Haitian law, which forbade foreigners from owning national land, and caused a stir. Many Haitians opposed it, pointing out that similar arrangements in the Dominican Republic and Cuba had led to these countries losing much of their independence to the United States.

The second dispute was between the Haitian Banque Nationale (National Bank) and the National City Bank in New York. The Banque Nationale was in charge of paying the foreign debt. Despite political instability during the early twentieth century, it had always met the payments, but it owed a large sum to the National City Bank in New York, and in December of 1914 a unit of U.S. Marines seized Haiti's gold deposits, valued at $500,000 in U.S. currency, to secure that debt. The National City Bank demanded the control of Haiti's customs houses, which accounted for most of the country's income. The Haitian government refused to give up control.

The final excuse for an American invasion came in July of 1915, when U.S.-backed Haitian president Vilbrun-Guillaume Sam was killed by a mob angered by his earlier assassination of 167 political prisoners. In the words of U.S. Admiral William Caperton, the U.S. Marines were deployed to Haiti “to protect property and preserve order.”

The United States arranged for Philippe-Sudre Dartiguenave, a mulatto who headed the Senate, to be elected president of Haiti. It also seized government ministries, engineered fraudulent votes, changed the Haitian constitution to allow foreigners to own land, dissolved the National Assembly, censored the mail, jailed journalists, and created the Haitian army, then called the Garde d'Haiti (National Guard), by decision of the U.S. Senate in 1916. When the Haitian government resisted certain U.S.-ordered reforms, the occupation forces withheld salaries from cabinet members and diplomats. Representatives from the United States wielded veto power over all governmental decisions in Haiti. Marine Corps commanders administered the provinces. Besides their American military salaries, they received commissions from the Garde d'Haiti and salaries as employees of the Haitian state. The United States directed public-works projects, using recruited Haitian laborers who were often forced to work longer hours than the law allowed. Some road-building projects were designed to allow troop movements against peasant guerrilla activity.

Although the Haitian elite had sought U.S. protection, even they were shocked by the occupiers' racism. They saw that to most North Americans, all Haitians were the same, whether members of the light-skinned elite or black peasants. American racism awakened a new pride in Haiti's African heritage among middle-class intellectuals such as Jean Price-Mars, Emile Roumer, and Georges Sylvain. Unable to resist racism and the occupation by force, they forged a cultural movement in the late 1920s called Indigénisme (Indigenism). Together with the Harlem Renaissance and Afrocubanismo, Indigénisme strongly influenced the development of Négritude, a movement that gave new value to blacks' African heritage, with special significance for blacks living outside Africa. And when Latin American governments failed to protest the U.S. occupation of Haiti as they had protested its earlier occupation of the Dominican Republic, Haitian intellectuals began to find Pan-Africanism, the commitment to political and cultural unity among Africans and people of African descent, more attractive than the earlier Pan-Americanism. These artistic and cultural movements formed in the emerging black middle class, which was angry about being kept out of political power by the U.S.-backed, light-skinned elite.

While the intellectuals were forming a cultural resistance, peasants took up arms for guerrilla warfare against the occupation. They fought under the leadership of Charlemagne Masséna Péralte until U.S. troops killed him in 1919, and then under Benoît Batraville, killed in 1920. As during the Haitian Revolution, many leaders of the insurgency were Vodou priests. The guerrilla fighters were finally overwhelmed in 1929 by U.S. forces, which used all means—including aerial bombing, heavy weapons, indiscriminate killing of civilians, and U.S.-operated forced-labor camps—to crush the guerrilla war.

The United States withdrew from Haiti in August of 1934, after U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the Good Neighbor Policy, which called for the United States to seek more cordial relations, based on mutual respect, with Latin America. The nineteen-year occupation had had devastating effects. At least 15,000 (and perhaps as many as 50,000) Haitians were killed; the United States suffered a dozen casualties. Countless peasants fled to Cuba's Oriente Province and the Dominican Republic. They ended up working on U.S.-owned plantations, and their meager salaries undermined Cuban and Dominican incomes, fueling antiblack feeling in both countries. The United States had also tried to undermine Haitian institutions. It worked against the Vodou religion by sponsoring Protestant missions, and it attacked the credibility of the Court of Cassation, Haiti's highest court. During the occupation, land had been seized to establish U.S.-owned industries. The light-skinned elite had been restored to power, making Haiti more stable in the judgment of the United States. In the end, the occupation blocked both the middle classes and the peasantry from acquiring political power and achieving a more even distribution of wealth.

The Marines were gone, but Haiti remained firmly under U.S. influence. National finances were still controlled by U.S. overseers, and the Haitian army remained deeply loyal to Washington. Haiti was now defined by a centralized state, a dominant army, a Roman Catholic Church weakened by the introduction of Protestant missions, and a triumphant light-skinned elite. International corporations invested in Haiti, stimulating the economy. Growing prosperity and improved public schools led to the emergence of a middle class that demanded a share of national power.

Duvalier Dictatorships (1957–1986)

The middle class finally came to power in the mid-twentieth century. But although the black middle class won some elections and successfully challenged the brown upper class in the political arena, the economy remained in the hands of the mulatto elite and foreign owners, and the Haitian army continued to be the deciding factor in national politics, ensuring that Haiti would not stray far from U.S. influence.

Dumarsais Estimé, elected president in 1946, was supported by Haiti's small socialist party and strongly opposed by the United States. His government favored Haitian businesses, paid the debt owed to the United States, and took state control of the central bank. It established an income tax, passed social-security and welfare laws, increased the minimum daily wage from 30 cents to 70 cents, promoted labor unions, and recognized, at least for a while, left-wing parties. The Haitian military, officered by light-skinned aristocrats, threw Estimé out of office in 1950. Seven years later, François Duvalier became president in a fraudulent election. Duvalier came to power with the support of the United States, which saw him as a defense against communism in the Caribbean. He established totalitarian rule in Haiti by killing tens of thousands of Haitians who opposed him and by creating the Volunteers for National Security (commonly called Tontons Macoute), a semiprivate militia that he directed. Duvalier also Haitianized the Roman Catholic church in Haiti, replacing the white Frenchmen who held high church offices with Haitians loyal to him. Under Duvalier, Haiti's legislature, already weakened by the American occupation, was stripped of more power and reduced to one chamber instead of two. In 1964 Duvalier, widely known as Papa Doc, declared himself president for life, as seven heads of state had done before him. In April 1971 he was succeeded by his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc).

The Duvaliers claimed to be pro-black, but they were brutal against all resistance, across lines of both race and class. Their regime used terror randomly against all its opponents, including the peasantry and the urban working class, although some historians have focused on their persecution of the Haitian elite. Seldom had such repression been experienced in Haiti. Between 1958 and 1986, hundreds of thousands fled the country to seek political asylum. As a result, about a million Haitians ended up living outside Haiti—elsewhere in the Caribbean (including the Dominican Republic) and in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The United States government was disturbed by the arrival of thousands of Haitian refugees, yet it was also reluctant to criticize a noncommunist government that it had supported. Instead, it tried to make the Duvalier regime improve its behavior in the area of human rights. Other forces were working toward the same goal. Vodou communities and Catholic grassroots communities based on the teachings of Liberation Theology provided ready-made organizational networks that helped undermine the regime. They received a boost from a 1983 visit to Haiti by Pope John Paul II, who called for political change and inspired greater political and social action by the Roman Catholic Church. Haiti's crumbling economy and the rise in social and political tensions turned the business community against the Duvalier regime. Also dissatisfied was the bourgeoisie, a class that included the old nineteenth-century aristocracy of families descended from the affranchis, the more recently wealthy black middle class, and merchants of many ethnic backgrounds who had settled in Haiti. The Duvalier regime could not control all of these forces, and in 1985 widespread anti-Duvalier riots proved that it had lost control. “Baby Doc” Duvalier declared a state of siege in January 1986. A month later he fled to France on a U.S. transport plane, after looting the national treasury.

Contemporary Haiti

After Duvalier's departure, Haiti underwent a period of political instability, with seven different governments in four years. This period is remembered as “Duvalierism without Duvalier” because most civilian and military leaders were former Duvalier supporters. In 1987 a new constitution replaced the 1983 Duvalier constitution, restoring the two-chambered legislature of Senate and Chamber of Deputies.

First in power after Duvalier's departure was a military government under General Henri Namphy, who promising democratic reforms. Then a civilian government took power, with university professor Leslie F. Manigat as president. The military removed Manigat four months later, in June of 1988. General Namphy, who had been dismissed by Manigat, again assumed power and canceled the 1987 constitution. He was replaced in September in a military upheaval that brought General Prosper Avril to the presidency. Avril's regime grew increasingly repressive, and in January 1990 he declared a state of siege. When his regime began arresting and deporting prodemocracy activists, Haitian resistance to him increased, and so did international pressure. After a closed-door conference with the American ambassador, who urged the president to step down to resolve the political crisis, Avril turned power over to General Hérard Abraham and left Haiti in March 1990. Further negotiations led to a temporary government led by the only woman in Haiti's Court of Cassation, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot.

Pascal-Trouillot was supposed to hold the country's first popular presidential elections, and she did so in December of 1990. Of the eleven presidential candidates, only Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest, came out strongly against Duvalierism. Aristide enjoyed wide popular support. He was the leader of a coalition of center-left parties called the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD) and also the leader of Lavalas (Cleansing Flood), a collection of grassroots movements supported by the poor. Born a peasant, Aristide had become Haiti's leading spokesperson for liberation theology. The U.S. government, Haiti's army, and the country's traditional elite all distrusted Aristide, but he was elected president in a landslide victory, with 67 percent of the vote and a majority in all nine of Haiti's political departments. Sixty percent of eligible Haitians had voted in the elections, held under intense international scrutiny. Inaugurated on February 7, 1991, Aristide took the oath of office in Haitian Creole, promising justice, participation, and forthrightness in state affairs. The FNCD controlled the legislature by a plurality—it did not have a majority of the votes but was the largest of the parties in parliament.

Soon after Aristide took office, tension arose between the executive and legislative branches of government over social and political reforms. Aristide warned the traditional elite of dire consequences if they did not contribute to Haiti's development. The business sector worried that he would raise wages, apply the tax code, and move against corruption. During Aristide's years as a priest, he had challenged high church officials and no longer had support from the Roman Catholic institution. Meanwhile, the army and Aristide disagreed over the defense budget and the question of civilian control of the army and police forces. Aristide's refusal to compromise on these and other issues led to his overthrow in September of 1991 in a military coup led by General Raoul Cédras. Aristide went into exile first in Venezuela, then in the United States.

The Haitian military named Court of Cassation judge Joseph Nérette as president. Human rights advocate Jean-Jacques Honorat was made prime minister. Except for the Vatican, however, the international community refused to recognize the new government. Honorat was replaced by banker Marc Bazin, who had received the backing of the United States in the 1990 elections, and Nérette was replaced by Emile Jonassaint. These moves also failed to win international approval. However, the military regime proceeded to undo steps that the Aristide government had taken.

In the wake of the coup, Haiti's army and semiprivate militias were responsible for killing approximately 5,000 men and women who opposed the military regime. A disturbing light was shone on Haitian-U.S. relations in October and November of 1993, when articles in The Nation and the New York Times claimed that Haitian generals had received money from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some for as long as twenty years. It appeared that different agencies or factions in the U.S. government had conflicting policies with regard to Haiti and its leaders. Meanwhile, the chaos in Haiti continued, and 40,000 people fled the country in makeshift boats and rafts, heading for the United States. Most were returned to Haiti, although dozens were allowed to plead their case for political asylum in the United States.

Aristide maintained a government in exile, headquartered in Washington, D.C. and paid for by Haitian assets seized by the U.S. government. Talks sponsored by the United Nations (UN), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United States failed to return him to office in Haiti. So did efforts to impose an embargo, or economic blockade, on Haiti. Finally, three American political leaders—former President Jimmy Carter, General Colin L. Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn—persuaded the Haitian military regime to step down in September of 1994. U.S. military forces began an occupation of Haiti and eventually stationed more than 20,000 troops there. Aristide resumed his presidency on October 15, receiving a hero's welcome.

In response to popular demand and the efforts of women's organizations, Aristide appointed several women to top posts in his new government. Claudette Werleigh became Haiti's first female prime minister in 1995, and women also headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance and Development. Aristide's government created a new Ministry for Women's Affairs, giving it the headquarters building that formerly belonged to the army's high command. It also carried out three policies opposed by the U.S. government: dismantling the Haitian armed forces, establishing official relations with Cuba, and resisting the privatization of state-owned industries and public utilities as required by the World Bank in order to receive economic aid. These three policies won widespread support in Haiti.

Presidential elections were held in December 1995. Aristide was not a candidate in the election because the Haitian constitution of 1987 forbids two consecutive presidential terms. His first prime minister, agronomist Rene Preval, became president, but things did not go smoothly for the Preval government. The issue of privatization raised conflict within Lavalas, which had won a majority of votes in the legislative elections earlier in 1995, and as a result the legislative chambers would not approve a prime minister, the government's second-in-command. Preval responded by declaring most legislators' terms in office at an end and giving the office of prime minister to his own choice, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, in March of 1999.

In May 2000 Haiti held parliamentary elections, and Lavalas won a majority of seats in both houses. However, Haiti's election council charged that the votes had been counted improperly. Runoff elections were held in July, but the opposition parties boycotted them, still claiming that the original vote had been fraudulent and demanding new elections. Lavalas won the runoff. Then, in November, the opposition parties boycotted the presidential election in which Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president for a second time. Aristide took office in February 2001, but the opposition continued to demand new elections.

Dissatisfaction with Aristide's regime grew in the early years of the twenty-first century. Haitian critics claimed that Aristide harshly repressed political dissent and mismanaged the nation's fragile economy. Even many of the president's supporters were forced to admit that he had failed to live up to their expectations. By late 2003, the capital of Port-au-Prince was the scene of frequent anti-Aristide riots. In early 2004, an armed rebellion threatened to topple Aristide from power by force. Under strong pressure from the United States to resign, Aristide left office for the second time, bound for exile, although his supporters continued to demonstrate violently for his return. As an international force, including U.S. Marines, arrived in Haiti to restore order to the insurgent nation, Boniface Alexandre, chief justice of Haiti's high court, became head of a temporary government until new elections could be held.

Troubles and Trends

Haiti's political and cultural life has been shaped by various trends since the mid-twentieth century. One trend is the rise of the middle classes, now a vital part of Haitian politics. Another is the decrease in French cultural influence. The influence of the United States, however, remains strong in all aspects of Haitian life, due in part to the half-million Haitians living in the United States. The money they send to Haiti not only enables many families and individuals to survive, but also is a key source of the nation's foreign exchange.

Despite the political gains of popular movements since the end of the Duvalier era, a very real gap exists between what Haiti's rural and urban working classes and poor demand—a higher standard of living and greater political power—and what the new global economy will allow. While recent Haitian governments have found it increasingly difficult to balance domestic and foreign demands, the Haitian people grow restless and cynical as their standard of living falls.

Haitians may not be doing well politically or economically, but culturally they have made significant gains since the U.S. occupation of the early twentieth century. The rise of the middle classes and the recognition of the role of African civilization and cultures brought new ideas about what lies at the core of Haitian culture and society. The old order of pro-French and pro-Western forces seemed to die with the social philosopher Dantès Bellegarde, while a new order, rooted in Indigénisme and Pan-Africanism, came alive in the work of Jean Price-Mars. The literary and performing arts entered a renaissance in which the Haitian Creole language has played an important part. Art became an important form of cultural resistance. Both Vodou, the national religion, and Haitian Creole (no longer considered “bad French” by scholars) have become signs of individual and national identity. Popular music—the méringue and particularly the Compas (konpa)—has remained vigorous and original, while Vodou sacred music has gained wider audiences through the highly political misik rasin, or roots music. Groups such as Boukman Eksperyans have given Haiti a role in the World Beat music movement, and Haitian literature is being translated into languages other than French. These are rays of hope on an otherwise bleak horizon.

See also African Ethnic Groups in Latin America and the Caribbean; Afro-Caribbean Migrations to the United States; Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Complexities of Racial and Ethnic Terminology in Latin America and the Caribbean; Dominican-Haitian Relations; Pan-Africanism and Afro-Latin Americans; Slave Rebellions in Latin America and the Caribbean; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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