Books on the Caribbean
Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a
Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization
* * *
Makes Its Case for Reparations
Francisco Bay View
meter is running at $34 per second
You've got to hand it
to Haiti. Not only was it the world's first country of enslaved
workers to stand up and demand their freedom and independence; now
they are the world's first country to stand up to their former
slavery-era master, France, and demand the return of its stolen
Haiti's president and
other government officials claim their country was held up at
gunpoint in broad daylight in 1825 and now they want the admitted
thief, France, to replace the stolen wealth to the tune of $21.7
billion. his, despite massive attempts, well documented elsewhere,
by the United States and world lending institutions to destabilize
and overthrow the democratically elected government of Jean
also say, due to forced efforts to hand over its wealth in a
timely manner to France, the coerced payments so distorted and
stunted the economy, Haiti feels the effects to this day. They
also say, due to those efforts, Haiti became saddled with a form
of class oppression that resembles racism.
In a soon to be
published booklet provided to a U.S. reporter by the foreign press
liaison to President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haitian government
officials dissect the 1825 "agreement" that initially
forced Haiti to pay to France 150 million francs in exchange for
The booklet, like
Haiti's restitution claim, is based largely on the research of Dr.
Francis St. Hubert, a member of the government's Haiti Restitution
"I did most of
my research in New York at the Columbia University Library and the
Schomburg Center," Dr. Hubert said by phone from
"We are pursuing
this case from three different angles. We are doing publicity and
educational campaigns, we are pursuing our claims through the
diplomatic community, and we are preparing a legal case," he
is not really for reparations for slavery," said Ira Kurzban,
Miami immigration attorney and Haiti's chief counsel in the U.S.,
"but for restitution specifically that happened in 1825. It
is based on the French government's efforts to extract 150 million
French francs (which is equal to $21 billion today) from an
economy the French knew couldn't afford it, through the use of
force. This is impermissible under international law."
"I can't tell
you how we plan to proceed legally," he said by telephone. The Haitians will make their own announcement when they are
ready, he said.
According to the
booklet, which will soon be published under the name of
the Haiti Restitution Commission, following the 1804
revolution that expelled France, Haiti was divided into two
districts, northern and southern, but was re-united following the
death of Henri Christophe in 1820.
Under the new
president, Jean Pierre Boyer, diplomatic notes began to be
exchanged with various French functionaries on the diplomatic
recognition of Haiti.
Finally in 1825,
France, which was being encouraged by former plantation owners to
invade Haiti and re-enslave the Blacks, issued the Royal Ordinance
of 1825, which called for the massive indemnity payments. In
addition to the 150 million franc payment, France decreed that
French ships and commercial goods entering and leaving Haiti would
be discounted at 50 percent, thereby further weakening Haiti's
ability to pay.
According to French
officials at the time, the terms of the edict were non-negotiable.
And to impress the seriousness of the situation upon the Haitians,
France delivered the demands by 12 warships armed with 500 canons.
indemnity was based on profits earned by the colonists, according
to a memorandum prepared by their lawyers. In 1789, Saint Domingue
- all of Haiti and Santo Domingo - exported 150 million francs
worth of products to France. In 1823 Haitian exports to France
totaled 8.5 million francs, exports to England totaled 8.4 million
francs, and exports to the United States totaled 13.1 million
francs, for a total of 30 million francs.
The lawyers then
claimed that one half of the 30 million francs went toward the
costs of production, leaving 15 million francs as profit. The 15
million franc balance was multiplied
by 10 (10 years of lost revenues for the French colonists due to
the war for liberation), which coincidentally totals 150 million
francs, the value of exports in 1789.
To make matters worse
for Haiti, the French anticipated and planned for Haiti to secure
a loan to pay the first installment on the indemnity. Haiti was
forced to borrow the 30 million francs from a French bank that
then deducted the management fees from the face value of the loan
and charged interest rates so exorbitant that after payment was
completed, Haiti was still 6 million francs short.
indemnity represented France's annual budget and 10 years of
revenue for Haiti. One study estimates the indemnity was 55
million more francs than was needed to restore the 793 sugar
plantations, 3,117 coffee estates and 3,906 indigo, cotton and
other crop plantations destroyed during the war for independence.
By contrast, when it
became clear France would no longer be in a position to capitalize
on further westward expansion in the Western hemisphere, they
agreed to sell the Louisiana Territory, an area 74 times the
surface area of Haiti, to the U.S. for just 60 million francs,
less than half the Haitian indemnity.
Even though France
later lowered the indemnity payment to 90 million francs, the
cycle of forcing Haiti to borrow from French banks to make the
payments chained the Black nation to perpetual poverty. Haiti did
not finish paying her indemnity debt until 1947!
According to the
Haitian government's reparations booklet, the immediate
consequence of the debt payment on the Haitian population was
greater misery. The first thing President Boyer did to help pay
the debt was to increase from 12 to 16 percent all tariffs on
imports to offset the French discount.
The next step Boyer
took was to declare the indemnity to be a national debt to be paid
by all the citizens of Haiti. Then he immediately brought into
being the Rural Code.
By Haitian First Lady
Mildred Aristide's account in her book, "Child Domestic
Service in Haiti and its Historical Underpinnings," the Rural
Code laid the basis for the legal apartheid between rural and
urban society in Haiti. With the Rural Code, the economically
dominant class of merchants, government officials and military
officers who lived in the cities legally established themselves as
Haiti's ruling class.
Under the Rural Code
agricultural workers were chained to the land and allowed little
or no opportunity to move from place to place. Socializing was
made illegal after midnight, and the Haitian farmer who did not
own property was obligated to sign a three-, six- or nine-year
labor contract with a large property owner. The code also banned
small-scale commerce, so that agricultural workers would produce
crops strictly for export.
The Haitian Rural
Code was all embracing, governing the lives not only of farmers
but of children as well.
The Rural Code was
specifically designed to regulate rural life in order to more
efficiently produce export crops with which to pay the indemnity.
The taxes levied on
production were also used predominantly to pay the indemnity and
not to build schools nor to provide other social services to the
generators of this great wealth, the peasants.
activists in the U.S. claim that between 1804 and 1990, when
President Aristide was first elected, a grand total of 32 high
schools were built in Haiti, all within urban settings. Since
then, more than 200 have been built, they say, most in the
To this day, the
discrimination between rural and urban areas takes the form of
color discrimination by light-skinned Blacks toward darker-skinned
Blacks, and it remains intense.
St. Hubert and the
national bank compute the exact amount Haiti is demanding from
France as $21,685,135,571.48, at 5 percent annual interest.
getting off easy," St. Hubert told a U.S. newspaper. If Haiti
charged 7.5 percent interest on the money, "France would owe
$4 trillion today and much more tomorrow.
"The French can
debate whether they want to pay as long as they like," he
said, " but at 5 percent interest, it will cost them $34 per
For more information about
Haiti or to learn what you can do to support Haiti, call the Haiti Action
Committee at (510) 483-7481, write them at HAC, P.O. Box 2218, Berkeley CA 94702 or visit their website at
Jean Damu is a
former member of the International Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, taught Black Studies at the
University of New Mexico, has traveled and written
extensively in Cuba and Africa and currently serves as a
member of the Steering Committee of the Black Alliance
for Just Immigration. Email him at
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
The slave revolution
that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti
alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the
Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity
markets to the imagination of poets, from the council
chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia
and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention
with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial
equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence
challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining
legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and
the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from
economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a
small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it.
Fifteen international scholars,
including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and
Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of
slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening
of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas.
Seeking to disentangle the effects of the Haitian Revolutionfrom those
of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was
ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.—Publisher,
University of South Carolina
David P. Geggus is a
professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville and a
former Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellow. He has
published extensively on the history of slavery and the Caribbean, with
a particular focus on the Haitian Revolution. He is the author of
Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue,
1793–1798 and an editor of
A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean.
Geggus lives in Gainesville.
Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804
A Brief History with Documents
By Laurent Dubois and
John D. Garrigus
* * *
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
By Charles C. Mann
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.
* * *
update 6 May 2010