Millions around the world cannot help but feel horror and sympathy when they read such headlines as “Bodies on the Streets in Port-au-Prince,” “Smoke Rising Over Port-au-Prince,” “Haitians Struggle Over Relief Supplies,” or “Police in Port-au-Prince Shoot Suspected Criminals.” But had they been paying attention, the news services of the world could have carried any of those headlines during most weeks before the January 12th earthquake. The recent earthquake has hit the poorest metropolitan area in the Americas and brought a new wave of devastation to a country that had already suffered the worst effects of capitalism, poverty and imperial meddling.

The expression “from bad to worse” hardly does justice to the damage done by the earthquake in Haiti. While there have always been religious fanatics declaring the end of days, millions of sane people in Haiti cannot help but acknowledge that the present destruction and suffering is of almost biblical proportions.

Nevertheless, the scale of the destruction and the huge number of casualties cannot be simply chalked up to an ‘act of god.’ The severe crowding of Port au Prince’s slums, the slapdash construction of so many of Haiti’s homes and businesses, and the nonexistent emergency services and public infrastructure are all to blame for the awful extent of the damage and loss of life. Many observers have already pointed out that the World Series Earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1989 was at nearly the same level on the Richter scale yet it killed only 67 people. Death counts from the Haiti quake have already climbed above 100,000. Without a doubt, the humanitarian catastrophe that has followed the recent earthquake must be understood as the man-made outgrowth of Haiti’s neo-liberal social order long propped up by the predatory ruling class, the U.S. state and more recently by the occupying U.N. forces.

A Brutally Unequal Society

A natural disaster this powerful has no respect for persons. While the earthquake brought havoc to the poorest slum districts of Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Jacmel and other towns, it did not spare some wealthy and powerful Haitians in large homes, government offices or supermarkets. The quake trapped and killed some foreigners in the capital’s plushest hotel. It killed the archbishop and it killed the leader of the U.N. mission. In contrast to the relatively powerless and unpopular president René Preval, the head of the UN Stabilization Mission or MINUSTAH, was probably the most powerful political authority on the island.

But as the dust settled, it became clear that the economic and political order had re-emerged much the same. Many of the mansions and upscale stores in Petionville and other more exclusive neighborhoods were relatively unharmed by the quake. As government assistance and millions of dollars of generous private donations started streaming their way towards Haiti, there can be no doubt that the country’s tiny elite of industrialists, importers, and political powerbrokers were preparing to carve up the spoils among themselves.

Capitalists are people too. Like others, they feel sympathy for the victims of a natural disaster. But what they cannot do is stop the suffering that their profit system inevitably creates every single day.

Companies that have been profiting off of Haiti for decades have loosened up for a while. Western Union temporarily suspended the fees for sending money to Haiti. T-Mobile has allowed free calls to Haiti until the end of January. But how long will the profit hiatus last? When the dust settles, all of the big banks, importers, UN officials, NGOs, remittance agencies, tourist enclaves and telecom companies can almost surely be expected to go back to business as usual – which for Haiti means acute poverty for nearly everybody and comfortable profits for a very few.

A History of Colonialism and Imperial Meddling

The media images coming from Haiti are repetitive and awful: poor, injured Haitians receiving assistance from foreign aid workers and scrambling for relief supplies.

None can help but appreciate the magnitude of the present catastrophe. But at worst, the media coverage can amount to a kind of pornography of pain, and it fits into a conventional picture of Haiti as a prostrate nation, the archetypical case of third world poverty, and a helpless economic basketcase.

Most Haitians would be proud to tell you that the country was not always this way. Haiti was founded following a long period of slave revolutions and civil wars that lasted from 1791-1804. Unlike the innumerable slave conspiracies and rebellions that went down in defeat, the slave rebels of Haiti effectively abolished slavery and kicked out successive waves of European colonial authorities. Built on the ashes of the colonial plantation system, independent Haiti was surrounded by hostile powers and beset by continuing cycles of civil war and popular rebellion. Independent Haiti was ruled by shaky despotic regimes that were vulnerable to threats and extortion by foreign powers. The most notable example was the French state who repeatedly threatened to reconquer Haiti and who forced the Haitian state to pay an indemnity of 150 million Francs in 1825.

But for more than 100 years, from independence in 1804 through the beginning of the first U.S. occupation in 1915, while much of the New World was governed by colonialists, slave owners, and their institutional successors, Haiti maintained its territorial independence and contributed to slave emancipation and anticolonial rebellions in the region. Throughout the 19th century, former plantation lands were divided up and much of Haiti’s population became independent peasants. Most of Haiti’s people were relatively poor and the country was beset by political conflict and dictatorships, but, unlike today, the country produced its own food and did not have to depend on remittances, charity and foreign debt.

The international media have always been good at portraying how poor Haiti is. Few can forget how much press attention the country received in 2008 when financial speculators sent food prices skyrocketing and some Haitians were found selling mud cakes meant to hold off hunger. Some joke that Haiti is the only country in the world with a last name: “Haiti, The Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere.” What few in the media or elsewhere understand is how Haiti came to be so poor and crisis-ridden.

During much of the 19th century, on the basis of widely distributed rural subsistence production, Haiti’s life expectancy climbed well above the dismal levels experienced during slavery and may have risen higher than the current figure which stands at just 60. Haiti’s 20th century history was characterized by its neo-colonial relationship with the U.S. In 1915, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the famous defender of the rights of small nations, ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The U.S. controlled the country from 1915-1934, and the U.S. military crushed an armed Haitian uprising known as the Caco Rebellion. Encouraged by increasingly profitable U.S. investments elsewhere in Latin America, U.S. military officials and private businessmen tried to invest in Haitian agriculture. Whereas all 19th century Haitian constitutions forbade foreigners from owning land in Haiti, the 1918 constitution overturned this restriction. Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt was serving as undersecretary of the Navy in Haiti during the U.S. occupation. He considered investing there and he later claimed that he had personally written the Haitian constitution of 1918.

For nearly the last 100 years, the U.S. has played a dominant role in the politics and economic life of Haiti. The U.S. largely backed the dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc. The U.S. intervened diplomatically and militarily during the revolutionary movements and political crises of the 1980s and 1990s. And it was most recently the United States who forcibly removed populist president Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and orchestrated the creation of the U.N. political authority that has ruled there since. As Haiti has sunk deeper and deeper into poverty and crisis, millions of its citizens have migrated to Canada, France, and above all the United States, and a shocking one third of the nation’s GDP now comes from remittances. Aside from reserves of oil, uranium and other mineral wealth, as well as the largely unrealized potential for a tourist industry, many economists point out that Haiti’s only real resource is cheap labor – whether exploited as immigrant labor abroad or exploited in Haiti by the light assembly sweatshops that began springing up in the 1970s.

One Negative Image After Another

Conservative Christian and prominent televangelist Pat Robertson has made news by claiming that Haiti’s revolution of 1791-1804 was the product of a “pact with the devil” that has since condemned them to poverty and hardship of which the January earthquake was merely the latest example. Besides the fact that Robertson’s lunacy actually strikes a chord with the growing evangelical movement that has prospered amidst the political letdowns and economic despair of recent Haitian history, it is an indication of the kind of racism and nuttiness that passes for wisdom among right-wing pundits and religious fanatics.

But the Christian Right are not the only people with more or less racist assumptions about the situation in Haiti. The U.S. media and the U.S. government have repeatedly expressed somewhat bogus concerns about “security” and “violence.” Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat has observed that the media almost assumes that a huge collection of black people represent an inevitable promise of “violence” or “looting.” As they did in the aftermath of Katrina, U.S. news media have again shown their tendency to label black disaster survivors as ‘looters.’ In reality the quake aftermath in Haiti has been relatively peaceful. Rather than rob and pillage, millions of Haitians have struggled to rescue friends, family members, neighbors and strangers.

Around the world, people have correctly criticized the militarized the nature of U.S. aid efforts. Thousands of marines were rushed in up front, while foreign relief supplies have taken weeks to reach some suffering quake survivors. The disaster has not erased the fact that Haiti is still seen as a neo-colonial zone of influence both by traditional imperial powers and recent upstarts. Chinese rescue crews were quick to symbolically plant a flag upon their arrival. Much of the UN occupying forces have been made up of Brazilian troops, sent in part to bolster Brazil’s economic and political prestige in the Latin American region.

Much has been made of the destruction of Haiti’s National Penitentiary and the escape of some thousands of inmates. However, the recent reports and videos of summary police shootings are almost taken to be business as usual in a country that has long known extreme repression from paramilitary death squads, police, and foreign troops under U.N. auspices. Although some hardened, dangerous criminals probably did escape from the collapsed prison, many of the people contained in the hot, overcrowded, dangerous facility were petty offenders, recent deportees, or victims of Haiti’s notoriously unjust and disorganized judicial system.

Haiti and Migrants’ Rights

For many decades, Haitians have been desperately compelled to leave their country. Already the crisis has apparently driven an increased flow of refugees to the Dominican border and it remains to be seen how the earthquake and its aftermath will influence Haitians’ migration attempts. Apparently the U.S. has already begun preparing the Guantánamo naval base for a potential mass migration of boat-people as they did when thousands of Haitians took to the seas to flee the right-wing dictatorships of the early 1990s.

Soon after the quake, the U.S. suspended deportations to Haiti. The U.S. and many other countries have been accepting some orphans and injured Haitians for medical care. All of this is good, but it raises the question of when these exceptional measures will be stopped. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S. immigration process became more difficult and costly. With the recession, and the recent increase in government raids and no-match letters, immigrants in general and Haitians in particular have had a hard time finding political asylum, visas, and work in the U.S. The president of the West African nation of Senegal recently made a bold offer to accept Haitian refugees and offer them land in his country. And while not many Haitians are likely to leave one under-developed country for another, the welcoming openness of a comparatively poor country only highlights the restrictive immigration policies of the rich countries.

Restitution Not Charity

The mountains of cash donated by hardworking people around the world to help the survivors in Haiti stand as one more piece of evidence to prove that humans are not inherently selfish or greedy. If charity or good will were enough to resolve economic and political disasters, Haiti may never have been so poor in the first place. Haiti was not only one of the world’s poorest countries, it is also has more NGOs than almost any other country. While this may be evidence that NGOs are inherently benevolent organizations who flock to the poorest countries, it also suggests that NGOs are hardly capable of resolving the crises of third world capitalism.

While the representatives of big imperial powers are willing to offer many kinds of aid, they have no interest in upsetting or redressing the global order which has kept the poorest countries so poor. While millions of dollars of relief money are flowing into Haiti, including a one hundred million dollar loan from the IMF, they can hardly erase the damage done by all of the money that has flowed out of Haiti in the form of indemnity and debt payments made to the rich countries over the last two centuries.

In 2003, Aristide’s government hired some actuaries to calculate the interest on the $150 million gold francs that Haiti was forced to pay to France in 1825. The figure came out to roughly $21 billion. Shortly before he was forcibly removed by the U.S. in 2004, President Aristide’s government sent France a bill for that amount. Surprisingly enough, the bill has yet to be paid, but many Haitians take that amount as a starting point from which to consider the historic debt that the former slave holding, imperial powers owe to their country.

Today, more than ever, a workers’ and poor people’s mass alternative has to be constructed in opposition to the tiny rich elite. The current earthquake disaster and likely character of the ‘reconstruction program’ under the auspices of the rotten ruling elite and regional capitalist powers will highlight to the Haitian masses the need for democratic control of the resources in society. On the basis of capitalism, the vast majority of people will remain impoverished, jobless, illiterate and hungry and living in shantytowns or in the countryside, without electricity. This barely subsistence existence means that the mass of people are highly vulnerable to ‘natural disasters’ such as the recent earthquake.

Workers and poor need their own independent class organizations – unions and a mass party – a socialist alternative that would fight for real fundamental change, making an appeal to the working class and poor across the Caribbean and the whole of the Americas.

To respond to the earthquake emergency, the CWI calls for:

• Immediate massive funding for earthquake disaster relief and reconstruction
• Democratic control over all aid and emergency; rescue, relief and rehabilitation of the affected people; and massive reconstruction programs, through elected committees of workers, land laborers and poor people in every area
• Build good quality housing, hospitals, schools, roads and infrastructure, and other vital public resources and services
• The cancellation of all foreign debts

The CWI Says:

• End unjust trade policies and the imposed policies of the World Bank and IMF
• State subsidies for struggling small farmers
• Jobs and a living wage for all
• Properly funded education and public health service
• Bring the resources and main planks of the economy into public ownership, under democratic workers’ control and management
• UN forces out of Haiti – end imperialist meddling
• Build a new mass party of the working class and poor, with socialist policies
• For a socialist Haiti, with a democratically-run planned economy, under the control and management of working people, as part of a voluntary and equal socialist federation of the Caribbean