Tag Archives: elites

Haiti: Rebuilding

“What are we? Since that’s your question, I’m going to answer you. We’re this country, and it wouldn’t be a thing without us, nothing at all. Who does the planting? Who does the watering? Who does the harvesting? Coffee, cotton, rice, sugar cane, caco, corn, bananas, vegetables, and all the fruits, who’s going to grow […]

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Haiti: History

A movement toward a restoration of black pride had been stirring in Haiti before Franklin Roosevelt ended the US occupation. But Haiti, styled a “black republic” by outsiders, was never monochromatically that. Madison Smartt Bell, “The Lost Years,” The Nation (August 11, 2009)

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Haiti: State

If Haitian society cannot move forward and cannot realize the dream of modernity that sparked its revolution at the end of the 18th century, it is in part because it had an elite that lived by siphoning off the country’s productivity to support its personal consumption. J. Michael Dash, “Rebuilding Haiti: The Next Two Hundred […]

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Haiti: History

Haitian exceptionalism takes many forms. The most dangerous and resilient is the idea that the Haitian political quagmire is due to some congenital disease of the Haitian mind. Such a conclusion makes Haiti’s political dilemma immune to rational explanation and therefore to solutions that could be both just and practical. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Haiti’s Nightmare and […]

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