Thinking of a volunteer devoted to medical mission
By Steven Shu
Facts and statistics tell us this: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of US$729 in 2016, which is one-ninth of that of the not-rich neighboring Dominica. But when I followed Dr. Doug Stein to a Haiti medical mission five years ago, when I first set foot on this land, I was shocked and confused by its poverty and backwardness. I clearly remember the sad mood when I saw Haiti with my own eyes.
When the plane slowly landed in Haiti, we saw a clear picture of Haiti that was severely damaged by the earthquake and partially repaired, and never truly recovered. It is almost impoverished and withered. Walking out of the rudimentary airport is a damp, muddy, and bumpy dirt road. The roadside is full of rubbish, and there are rudimentary dirt houses everywhere. There is an unpleasant smell of burnt plastic in the sultry air. The streets are full of wandering, Listless people. I felt sad in my heart, tears rolled in my eyes. I doubt, do you live on the same earth with us? Such a huge difference.
By the end of this year, it will be my 14th visit to Haiti. For five years, I have been thinking about this question: Why is Haiti so poor? I think many people who care about Haiti must have thought about this issue. Among Chinese American physicians, I often hear individual doctors desperately saying that the countries in Haiti and Africa are not worthy of our help. They think that people in these places are lazy, and their culture and ethnicity are inferior. I think it is necessary for more Chinese Americans to understand the history, culture and painful reality of Haiti. I also hope that more Chinese American will support and participate in our international medical misison. Just like China more than a hundred years ago, many missionaries introduced the suffering China to the West, attracting more medical missionaries to help China and establish and develop modern Chinese medicine.
The reasons for the overall poverty of a country must be complex and multifaceted. Living in this poor country, the Haitian people have suffered unimaginable long-term sufferings that no one in any other country has experienced. We don’t know how many of these are natural disasters, how many of these man-made disasters, how many are oppressed and exploited by colonists, and how many are caused by the bad habits or culture of the Haitians themselves.
The purpose of my writing this article is to try to analyze the causes of poverty and their causal relationship to understand the current situation in Haiti (maybe you don’t agree with it). Just like a doctor treating a patient, he must first make a clear diagnosis, because only in this way can the treatment be effective.
Let me first take time as a clue to review colonial history and independent revolutions and their impact on the economy and society, international sanctions and isolation, US troops stationed and intervention, frequent government changes and political instability.
1. The origin of Columbus and Haiti
Haiti’s suffering and today’s tragic fate is closely related to its early colonial history.
I go to Haiti many times a year for medical volunteering, so I have the opportunity to make some local Haitian friends. I also met some American pastors and tourists who spread the gospel. Frequent exchanges have given me a deeper understanding of poor Haiti. In the restaurant of the hotel in the early 2019, I was fortunate to have a long conversation with a pair of American historians who studied the history of Haiti, which helped me see Haiti from various perspectives.
“Haiti” means “mountainous” in Indian language, which is what the Indians originally called the entire island. In 1492, during Columbus’s first round-the-world expedition, one of its flagships ran aground and was unable to sail. He set up camp near today’s Cap Haitien. He named the entire island Hispaniola.
Cape Haiti, now the second largest city in Haiti, is also a place for us to go for medical mission every year. When Columbus returned the following year, the original man and horse no longer existed, so he began to establish a colony on the north coast of the island. It can be said that Haiti was the first place on the American continent to bathe in European civilization. Later, Spaniards gradually migrated to the island. A large number of Native Indians were directly slaughtered or died in labor. These immigrants also brought smallpox, a fatal disease in Eurasia. A large number of Indians died tragically because they had no immunity to smallpox, and finally disappeared.
The labor force on the island was lost with the extinction of the Indians. The plantations and pastures in the west of the island were abandoned by Spanish landlords and became barren no man’s land. They gradually became strongholds for pirates in Britain, France, and the Netherlands. There are more and more pirates and immigrants. In 1665, France declared that this area of Haiti is now a French colony, called “Saint-Domingue” (Saint-Domingue). Spain could not beat France, and more than a decade later, it accepted this fact. Therefore, the eastern part of the island was still a Spanish colony, which became the Dominican Republic. After the victory of the Black Revolution, as a tribute to the American Indians, leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines officially changed the name of Saint-Domingue after independence to Haiti.
2. The richest colony and the cruelest slave labor
Every time I set foot on this poor land and looked at the thin Haitian patients, I could not imagine that Haiti in the eighteenth century was the wealthiest colony in France and the world at that time. It was called the Jewel of the Antilles.
In the early days of colonization, there were not many residents in Haiti, and most of the white people on the island were indentured laborers. There are also slaves from Africa on the island. Whites and blacks usually work side by side in the fields. At that time, sugar cane was in short supply in the world and the profitability of sugar cane was very high. Columbus brought sugar cane to Haiti on his second voyage. Planting and harvesting sugarcane requires a lot of labor. Starting in 1503, the French had bought slaves from Africa one by one, and sugarcane gardens were cultivated. In 1726, due to the hot demand for coffee, coffee also began to grow in Haiti. Sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, dye indigo, France imported these and other exotic products from Haiti, then refined and packaged in France, and then sold to all parts of Europe. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Haiti supplied 40% of Europe’s sugar and 60% of coffee, accounting for two-thirds of France’s total foreign trade, more than the combined trade of all British colonies at that time. In 1788, Haiti’s exports were 214 million francs, equivalent to half of France’s national income and more than the United States, which was many times larger.
The accumulation of these wealth was at the expense of excessive land reclamation, repeated planting of single crops, and excessive slave labor, which laid the roots of soil erosion and slave uprisings in Haiti.
In order to squeeze more profits, French plantation owners carried out brutal enslavement of black Haitians. The average life span of a black slave in Haiti was only 5-7 years. This is one of the important reasons leading to the black revolution. Compared with slave owners in the American South, Haitian slave owners were more ruthless and ruthless to their slaves. The reason is that Haiti has developed shipping and transportation, and slaves were easy to transport, so it was cheaper; in the plantations in the South of the United States, the land was big with the fewer people, and the slave owners lived on their own farms, so they saw slaves working and living every day. In their eyes, slaves gradually became part of their large family. In the Caribbean, slaves could only live in slave areas. In the eyes of slave owners, they were just a number, a live animal. . At that time, the cultivation industry in Haiti was booming and needed a large number of slaves to be added from Africa. By the French Revolution in 1789, Haiti had only 40,000 whites but 650,000 black slaves. The French system allowed some slaves to gain freedom through special work to increase productivity.
Freed slaves and mixed-race children-white masters and slave women’s children, they are “colored people” (mulatto), there are 28,000 colored people, the number can be compared with white people. These free slaves could receive some education, run enterprises, own property, and act like the French. Because these people wanted to gain more freedom for themselves, they did a lot of lobbying for the liberation of slaves after the French Revolution, which played a lot of inspiring effects in the independence revolution , but in the later social class, they became the upper elite class. This imitation of the French became the symbol of these free people, and they learned the value of slave labor. This was also another important factor for the suffering in Haiti..
3. Haitian independence revolution, a curse?
The earliest scattered information about Haiti comes from historical books. Because I like history, I read a lot of history books in college. Many years before I became a mission volunteering doctor, my family visited Dominica Republic once. Before leaving, my wife asked me to learn Dominica in advance. To understand the history of Dominica, we must also understand some of the geography and history of Haiti.
Many sufferings in the world are similar. Although China and Haiti are two different countries, they can be said to be completely different in terms of size, history and culture, but the suffering caused by the ultra-left ideology and ultra-nationalist political correctness are similar. After 1949, dozens of political campaigns, large and small, and political games with Western countries and the Soviet Union (CPSU) brought countless sufferings to the Chinese people.
The Haitian Revolution took place from 1791 to 1804. It is praised as the only country in human history where a nation was founded by slave uprising. Haiti is also the second independent regime in the Western Hemisphere (the first is the United States) and the first black republic in the world. The reason why the Haitian Revolution took place and succeeded at that time, I think, 1) it was a French colony, the French Revolution took place in 1789 in France, and not other countries, and 2) the cruel oppression of slaves by slave owners. 3) France was at war with Britain at the time, and was a little overwhelmed with Haiti.
The process was first led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of the most outstanding black leaders, and began with a slave rebellion in a manor on August 21, 1791, on January 1, 1804. It was Jean-Jacques Dessalines who declared the independence of Haiti , who was originally a slave. It is worth mentioning here that Dessalin’s hatred and massacre of whites: after Haiti’s independence in January, Dessalin immediately gave a secret order: kill all whites in Haiti. In the beginning, only white men were killed, women did not. Later, a deputy of Dessaling said: “If white women are left, they will give birth to white children.” So all the women were killed. From January to April in 1804, Haiti almost killed all whites, about 3,000 to 5,000. This is the “1804 Haiti Massacre.” The Haitian flag originally had white stripes. Because it was white, he ordered it to be stripped away (strip away all whites). Dessalin never concealed his massacre. In a manifesto in 1804, he called white people a barbarian who cannibalism. He said: “For white people, it means to pay blood for blood and tooth for tooth.” Describing this period of history can better understand Haiti’s future plight, which is not unrelated to France’s subsequent revenge.
4.International Boycott, French debts and never missed opportunities
After the independence of Haiti, its own population has also lost one-third. The wealth of Haiti was not in the hands of these poor blacks. There was no investment and foreign aid inside and outside the country, and no effective economic development could be achieved. After Dessalin came to power, he forced the blacks to return to work in the plantation. In contrast, many people of color became government officials and managers because only people of color could read. Everything is not much different from slavery.
Although the blacks of Haiti were liberated in January 1804, the United States was still a country with slavery, as was England. Although France released Haitian slaves during the revolution, France and other European countries had slaves in Africa and Asia. The international community believes that the model of a free slave country in Haiti was a dangerous precedent. Thus began the international boycott and sanctions on Haitian goods and commerce, and its export-oriented economy was immediately paralyzed. The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner himself and refused to recognize Haiti as a legal country. The United States 60 years later During the Civil War in 1862, President Lincoln recognized its legal status.
The United States and Napoleon, who came to power in France, tried to restore slavery in Haiti. Haiti’s successors very much hoped to be recognized by France and Europe. In 1825, France threatened to attack Haiti again and asked the new Haitian government to pay compensation for the land and slaves of the former slave owners, otherwise France would not recognize Haiti. Finally, in 1838, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer accepted a debt of 150 million francs to pay this compensation. This debt has plagued the Haitian economy for more than 80 years, and it was not finally repaid until 1922. In order to repay debts, 80% of Haiti’s income was used to repay debts and almost all public schools were cancelled. This is disastrous for the long-term economic development of Haiti.
Haiti prohibits foreign investment and foreign property ownership, but foreigners are also afraid of Haiti after the slave uprising and were not interested in investing in this country.
In addition to the above direct reasons, we should also see that the world economic pattern has changed: Haiti’s agricultural products and slave trade were very important to the European economy in the last century, but with the development of the industrial revolution and free trade, it has been Those prosperous industrial advantages have gradually faded, and Haiti, as an independent country, has no resources and foundation to welcome the new world. It lacks natural resources suitable for industrialization, lack of capital and skilled workers.
The hostility of the international community towards Haiti and the deliberate marginalization of her would mean that the industrial revolution will hardly reach Haiti. If one looked at Haiti in mid-1995, one would only see a small number of power services and telecommunications, and a few assembly plants. However, nearly 200 years after the Haitian Revolution and the main period after 150 years when the Industrial Revolution was active, Haiti is a country where the Industrial Revolution has never come. After Dessalin ‘s death, Haiti was renamed the Republic. However, the political situation in Haiti has been turbulent, with coups one after another. In the hundred years from the independence of Haiti to 1915, nearly 90 rulers came to power one after another. Many rulers were assassinated and exiled. The economy was almost stagnant, chaotic, without framework changes and progress.
