I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption.

Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which shows 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.

The evidence is striking, especially in the context of France.

The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans fifty years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice, and liberty.

In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state. The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation.

The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place.

The French, also, declared freedom, fraternity and equality as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.

They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery. The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.

All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony.

As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it – and the people.

The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.

Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.

For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.

The French refused to recognize Haiti’s independence and declared it an illegal pariah state. The Americans, whom the Haitians looked to in solidarity as their mentor in independence, refused to recognize them, and offered solidarity instead to the French. The British, who were negotiating with the French to obtain the ownership title to Haiti, also moved in solidarity, as did every other nation-state the Western world.

Haiti was isolated at birth – ostracized and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development. It was the most vicious example of national strangulation recorded in modern history.

The Cubans, at least, have had Russia, China, and Vietnam. The Haitians were alone from inception. The crumbling began.

Then came 1825; the moment of full truth. The republic is celebrating its 21st anniversary. There is national euphoria in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

The economy is bankrupt; the political leadership isolated. The cabinet took the decision that the state of affairs could not continue.

The country had to find a way to be inserted back into the world economy. The French government was invited to a summit.

Officials arrived and told the Haitian government that they were willing to recognize the country as a sovereign nation but it would have to pay compensation and reparation in exchange. The Haitians, with backs to the wall, agreed to pay the French.

The French government sent a team of accountants and actuaries into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands, all physical assets, the 500,000 citizens whovwere formerly enslaved, animals, and all other commercial properties and services.

The sums amounted to 150 million gold francs. Haiti was told to pay this reparation to France in return for national recognition.

The Haitian government agreed; payments began immediately. Members of the Cabinet were also valued because they had been enslaved people before independence.

Thus began the systematic destruction of the Republic of Haiti. The French government bled the nation and rendered it a failed state. It was a merciless exploitation that was designed and guaranteed to collapse the Haitian economy and society.

Haiti was forced to pay this sum until 1922 when the last installment was made. During the long 19th century, the payment to France amounted to up to 70 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.

Jamaica today pays up to 70 per cent in order to service its international and domestic debt. Haiti was crushed by this debt payment. It descended into financial and social chaos.

The republic did not stand a chance. France was enriched and it took pleasure from the fact that having been defeated by Haitians on the battlefield, it had won on the field of finance. In the years when the coffee crops failed, or the sugar yield was down, the Haitian government borrowed on the French money market at double the going interest rate in order to repay the French government.

When the Americans invaded the country in the early 20th century, one of the reasons offered was to assist the French in collecting its reparations.

The collapse of the Haitian nation resides at the feet of France and America, especially. These two nations betrayed, failed, and destroyed the dream that was Haiti; crushed to dust in an effort to destroy the flower of freedom and the seed of justice.

Haiti did not fail. It was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition.
The sudden quake has come in the aftermath of summers of hate. In many ways the quake has been less destructive than the hate.

Human life was snuffed out by the quake, while the hate has been a long and inhumane suffocation – a crime against humanity.

During the 2001 UN Conference on Race in Durban, South Africa, strong representation was made to the French government to repay the 150 million francs.

The value of this amount was estimated by financial actuaries as US$21 billion. This sum of capital could rebuild Haiti and place it in a position to re-engage the modern world. It was illegally extracted from the Haitian people and should be repaid.

It is stolen wealth. In so doing, France could discharge its moral obligation to the Haitian people.

For a nation that prides itself in the celebration of modern diplomacy, France, in order to exist with the moral authority of this diplomacy in this post-modern world, should do the just and legal thing.

Such an act at the outset of this century would open the door for a sophisticated interface of past and present, and set the Haitian nation free at last.

1. HAITI: The Revolution Now
2. HAITI: The Middle Passage
3. HAITI: The Destroyers of Worlds

I was shocked to see our once beautifully kept home overgrown and infested with rats since no one had lived there for some time.

The research centre too was now completely dilapidated and even the great house where the Honourable Dr Thomas P. Lecky once lived looked more like a scene from war-torn Iraq than the famous home of the father of Jamaica’s cattle industry.

The few men still left working the banana fields seemed permanently at lunch, probably because they are now in their 70′s and 80′s, and the whole place was largely deserted. No young men want to work in the banana fields anymore. They prefer (hopefully) to finish school and get a clerical job…or…well, we know the path some others end up taking.

Once the property of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (usually referred to simply as Kew Gardens); the quiet splendour of the Banana Breeding Station is still very much apparent. However, it seems a crime greater than those Jamaican drug dons might commit to let it go to waste in this way.

In fact, the Banana Breeding Station, Bodles, should be made a national heritage site offering paid tours to those who want to know the history of banana and cattle production in Jamaica and throughout Central and South America.

Who would know for example that this little plot of land in the heart of Saint Catherine, Jamaica, was once home to the first examples of genetically bred cattle anywhere in the world?

Or that Ren Gonsalves was partly responsible for cultivating new breeds of bananas resistant to the pathogens most responsible for their near demise in the major producing areas of the world?

Lest we forget, national treasures are hard to come by in Jamaica these days, since those people with the most vision usually end up leaving the country. It is such a terrible shame. Reynold Gonsalves must be turning in his grave.

In memory of Reynold Augustine Gonsalves, born Havana, Cuba, November 4, 1928; died Kingston, Jamaica, February 15, 2001.

No related posts.

A couple of years ago, Martin Henry, while rightly castigating Seaga for his racist, [my word] elitist view that it is “the masses of simpletons who determine election victories and defeats. And since the people are incapable of sophisticated political understanding only simplistic messages can be delivered to them as entertaining sloganeering from the political platform.” (Seaga, quashee and campaigning’ July 19 2007, Sunday Gleaner)

Mr Henry almost proves Seaga’s point by referring to Seaga as “the creator of the first and great Independence Five Year Development Plan, 1963-1968″–apparently blissfully unaware that the plan was the work of Don Mills, Arthur Brown and Raphael Swaby of The Central Planning Unit working to specifications laid down by Norman Manley, David Coore, Vernon Arnett, Allan Isaacs and other members of a PNP Brains Trust.

Mr Seaga has never attempted to publicise the truth. And why should he?

When he now bravely speaks of education it is from his eminence as the pro-Chancellor of the University of Technology and a Distinguished Fellow of The University of The West Indies. Mr Seaga is quoted in a story in the Gleaner of September 2 2009:

“If the IMF is able to address [the budget deficit and the foreign exchange shortfall] and is able to lend other funds to help fund the semi-productive sector, Seaga said, the best way to use that fund is to put it into education.

“That is where I would like to see the funds go, because that is the real resource base of Jamaica that has not yet been fully utilised,”said the former prime minister …’ (IMF the only option, says Seaga)

Mr Seaga’s concern for education is truly touching. Preening himself on the mistaken belief that he is the only political heavyweight of the fifties still extant, Seaga no doubt forgets the big, bold JLP campaign at the end of the fifties – “Saltfish better than education”.

He similarly has no memory space for his government’s unremitting campaign against the UWI in the sixties as a nest of intellectuals and subversives; the campaign against the Jamaica Teachers Association which led to wage-freezes for teachers and the desertion of the classroom by male teachers who turned to selling insurance and liquor or else fled to Britain or Brooklyn.

Turn Them Back

Seaga forgets the assaults he led on the PNP in the seventies when that party proposed extended vocational training in sophistication and coverage; and the fact that he destroyed the Vocational Training Institute and turned it into a college for cosmetologists as soon as he got the chance.

He forgets the destruction of the Jamaica School of Agriculture and any other institution created by Norman Manley by himself and others obsessed by the idea of destroying all trace of the Father of the Nation.

He forgets the corruption and destruction of the Social Welfare Commission and of its community integration and development work and the destruction of the Jamaica Youth Corps and the promise it bore for the future of our country.

Mr Seaga should also remember his part in destroying the Agricultural Extension system and the network of Agricultural Experimental Stations which helped enthuse and invigorate Jamaican farming, producing, inter alia, Dr Lecky’s four world class breeds of cattle, The Jamaica Hope, the Jamaica Black, the Jamaica Red and the Jamaica Brahman.

The loss in brainpower, in expertise, in biological science and in foreign exchange is incalculable. How much to restore the Library at Alexandria?

Seaga forgets the assault he led against free secondary and tertiary education and the fact that as soon as he became prime Minister he reinstated fees for poor children and boasted that these savage cuts in the Jamaican integument were the work of the government, not of the IMF. The destruction of the JBC was a joint venture between himself and Patterson.

Mr Seaga has blamed the PNP for the dreadful state of the economy, forgetting that within three years of taking power in 1980 he had doubled the debt burden and effectively, put it forever beyond human control.

Mr Patterson, Seaga’s only close competitor for the title of worst prime minister in history did his part, playing the Tony Blair to Seaga’s Margaret Thatcher. Despite his faults, many and grievous, Patterson was not a patch on Lord Edward of St George’s, (Grenada).

Jamaica? No Problem!!

Mr. Martin Henry in his more-or-less paean to Edward Seaga two years ago, noted that “The one and only time that Edward Seaga led his party to victory in a
contested general election was when the critical issues at stake were starkly clear and voters/citizens, understanding those issues and their implications, overwhelmingly took a stand. Despite his participation in pandering to the quashee in Jamaicans, this country, including even Michael Manley, owes Eddie a debt of gratitude for clarifying and communicating those crossroads issues in 1980 and winning the vote which turned back a looming disaster.”

It would be nice were Mr Henry to sketch, at the least, the basic parameters of the looming disaster of which he speaks.

I happened to have survived those interesting times and survived Mr Seaga’s attempts to starve people like me into submission. In 1980, the election year, that year of transcendental clarity, 889 murders were registered, more than twice as many as the 351 of the year before.

Within three years – according to Carl Stone, the Gamaliel of the revisionists- Mr Seaga would have lost his majority had there been a free and fair election. Which makes one wonder about Mr Henry’s ‘crossroads’ issues, not to speak of the Halfway Tree issues and the Time and Patience issues that bother people like me.

These issues are provoked, as is so much else, by the Gleaner’s news that
Spanish Gov’t to help agriculture ministry.

The Spanish Ambassador is to hand over a cheque for $35 million Jamaican (about half a million $US) towards a Centre of Excellence in Agriculture. I can imagine what Sam Motta or Hugh Miller could have done with that or Jerry Bell or any of dozens more – some like Buddha Webster who gave their lives in the service of Jamaican farmers, not to speak of Dr Lecky and his world-class cows.

José Martí was to have been a coeducational boarding school for young farme to send qualified students over to the Jamaica School of Agriculture. Seaga changed José Martí into an ordinary school and turned the School of Agriculture into a “Police Academy.”

He sold the Research stations for a song and to build housing schemes.

And now they want to turn the Usain Bolt stadium into a battery-chicken-house for Goldman Sachs.

I tell you! Mr Seaga is FULL of the most wonderful ideas.

Always has been.

I kid you not.

1. The Fall of Minister Pierre