How Much Haiti's Freedom Cost: Takeaways From a Times Series - The New York Times - 0 views
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When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.
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But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.
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For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.
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When a French warship bristling with cannons sailed into the port of the Haitian capital in 1825, an emissary from King Charles X came ashore and delivered an astonishing demand: France wanted reparations from the people it had enslaved.
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The demand was for 150 million French francs, to be turned over in five annual payments, far more than Haiti could pay.
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So France pushed Haiti to take a loan from a group of French banks to start paying. That Sisyphean weight came to be known as the double debt.
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Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper.
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For a decade, a quarter of Haiti’s total revenue went to paying debts controlled by National City Bank and its affiliate, according to nearly two dozen annual reports prepared by American officials and reviewed by The Times.
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After half a century of crushing payments tied to the double debt, Haitians celebrated the news that at last the country would have its own national bank, the sort of institution that in Europe had financed railroads and factories.
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“Isn’t it funny,” one Haitian economist wrote, “that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?”
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When the American military invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915, the official explanation was that Haiti was too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices. Secretary of State Robert Lansing made little effort to mask his contempt for the “African race,” casting the occupation as a civilizing mission intended to end “anarchy, savagery and oppression.”
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“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” the general who led the U.S. forces in Haiti, said years later, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.”
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For decades to come, the United States was the dominant power in Haiti, dissolving parliament at gunpoint, killing thousands and shipping a big portion of Haiti’s earnings to bankers in New York while the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived near starvation.
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“Neocolonialism through debt,” is how Thomas Piketty, one of the economists we spoke with, put it. “This drain has totally disrupted the process of state building,” he said.
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The double debt has largely faded into history. Generations of French profited richly from the financial exploits of their forebears, but that is rarely taught in classrooms.
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“This is part of my family history I never knew,” said one sixth-generation descendant of Napoleon’s first wife.
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Even in Haiti, the full story was long unknown. Then in 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stunned Haitians by denouncing the debt imposed by France and demanding reparations.