This book is a two-fer. You get both a history of Haiti, its revolution, and the subsequent attempts by France and the US to keep it impoverished AND an absolutely crazy story about how US forces kidnapped Jean-Betrand Aristide and dropped him in the Central African Republic (which is not to say that it's untrue.) I'll hit the highlights of each element in turn.
Haiti has the distinction of being the only country in the Americas founded by a slave revolt. Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the revolt successfully ejected their French oppressors in an incredibly costly campaign that claimed the lives of 150,000 of the initial population of 465,000 slaves. (11) Robinson suggests that this success is based on the unusually harsh conditions of French enslavement, the African military experience of many slaves, and the genius of their leadership. (12-14) Unable to successfully assert their ownership over Haiti or its residents, France settled for economic marginalization, and levied an embargo "strengthened by a further demand from France for financial reparations of roughly $21 billion (2004 dollars) as compensation from the newly freed slaves for denying France the further benefit of owning them." (20) This levy had an extraordinary impact on Haiti's development:
" As late as 1915, 111 years after the successful slave revolt, some 80 percent of the Haitian government's resources were being paid out in debt service to French and American banks on loans that had been made to enable Haiti to pay reparations to France.
In 1922, seven years into a nineteen-year American military occupation of Haiti that resulted in 15,000 Haitian deaths, the United States imposed a $16 million dollar loan on the Haitian government to pay off its "debt" to France.
The American loan was finally paid off in 1947. Haiti was left virtually bankrupt, its workforce in desperate straits.
The Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery." (22)
This continued assault on the Haitian revolution also had a sharp effect on Haitian racial politics, where a light-skinned urban elite controlled and exploited the darker-skinned rural population for their own benefit. (40-42)
It is in this milieu that Aristide emerged as a democratically-elected leader that replaced a series of exploitative, violent dictators. Aristide, himself a villager, attempted to refocus Haitian public policy on the advancement of the rural population (and ended the practice of stamping "rural" on the birth certificates of the peasantry). This did not make him especially popular with the elites, who conspired to remove him.
This is the second part of the book, which gets absolutely crazy. Apparently, rebels trained in the Dominican Republic and armed with American weaponry made a series of assaults on Haitian government facilities. These culminated in a campaign in which a group of a couple hundred rebels moved through small towns shooting up police stations and releasing prisoners. Then, before they entered the capital, Aristide disappeared and ended up in Africa.
The author is a friend of Aristide's, and asserts that Aristide had no plans to leave the country -- in fact, quite the opposite, immediately before his departure, Aristide had scheduled radio interviews with Tavis Smiley for the next day and told friends that he absolutely intended to stay in Port au Prince. According to Aristide, his wife, and their personal pilot (a former US serviceman and Vietnam veteran), a group of white men with beards and snazzy firearms showed up at the Presidential palace in SUVs and told them it was time to go. They were then kept in the dark about their destination and flown from place to place until they ended up in CAR, where the author, Rep. Barbara Boxer (CA), and two journalists negotiated their release to exile in Jamaica and, eventually, South Africa.
Overall, the historical and sociological analysis are extremely interesting. The links between national debt, military occupation, and neo-colonialism are especially relevant in light of Bill Cooke's critique of the World Bank. The latter part, about the kidnapping, is written in a very breathless fashion, and discussions of Aristide read like panegyrics. However, this chain of events was taken seriously enough by Chris Dodd (Conneticut) that he launched investigations into where the guerrillas arms and training came from, and, in the Cheney era it is certainly not outside the realm of believability that the US would brazenly kidnap a world leader.
