The Uses of Haiti

"I am a great fan of Paul Farmer. I think he is amongst the top ten foreigners in Haiti to make a positive and practical contribution there. His charity Partners in Health has saved the lives of innumerable Haitians and is now doing the same in a number of other developing countries. The model has really spread and this is the idea of a community-based health service which takes people seriously and deals with them holistically and believes that people can look after their health in their own right. That is his background and, as he says in the book, he was reluctant to write a political book but he is very well placed because of all the time he has spent in the country. So this book was written during the coup d’état of 1991-1994 which was the last military coup d’état – after that the military was retired (except for the army band!). The book focuses on the role of the international community in Haiti and especially that of the United States. “A lot of people living the US haven’t got the first inkling of the effect its foreign policy has on countries like Haiti.” He looks at the US occupation from 1915-1934 during which time Haitian uprisings were brutally suppressed. He cites an example where a Haitian worker in a forced labour gang set up by the US forces was murdered in cold blood when he was considered lazy by one of the guards. During that period the US restructured the Haitian army to become an oppressive tool for its foreign policy objectives in Haiti for decades to follow, and that was only ended by the dismissal of the army by President Aristide in 1995 (who was overthrown also by officers trained by the US army, at the notorious Fort Benson ‘School of the Americas’). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The criticism that one can have of the book is that it may exaggerate the influence of the US on Haiti’s misfortunes – and it does neglect the indigenous factors – but most people would agree that most of it is factually accurate and leaves little doubt about what tends to happen if you have the misfortune to live in the backyard of a superpower. And that is why I have chosen this book, because a lot of people living the US haven’t got the first inkling of the effect its foreign policy has on countries like Haiti. A key example is the export of US rice to Haiti, which is highly subsidised, and the Haiti government has been forced by the IMF [in which the US plays a large role] to abolish its import tariffs on rice and many other goods so Haitian farmers cannot compete. This led to many of them giving up farming and to move to the slums of Port-au-Prince to look for work. So you could argue that in this way US foreign policy contributed to the increased death toll in the recent earthquake. If more people had been able to stay in the countryside, the city wouldn’t have become so overcrowded and with so many unsafe buildings being constructed. In conclusion I would say Farmer’s book is probably the most cogent analysis of US foreign policy on Haiti from the perspective of those at the receiving end."