History of how Haiti became impoverished
The following paper will show that the
plight now facing Haitians migrants on Dominican sugar plantations has been
created by the government policies of the Dominican Republic and the United
States in their efforts to establish a low wage workforce. They achieved this
by implementing schemes that would keep Haitian migrants vulnerable and
isolated, thus providing the sugar plantations with an easily exploitable
labour pool.
The first part of this paper will bring
to light the circumstances that immediately followed Haiti’s independence that inadvertently
helped cause its economy to collapse and debt to incur. These circumstances
were to be exploited later when the US took over as the majority debt holder. The
second part of this paper will explore the US occupation of Haiti in the early
part of the twentieth century, and will reveal the role the US had in spurring migration
into the Dominican Sugar plantations through their co-opting of the Haitian
government. The third and last part of this paper will focus on the development
of the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry and the numerous means through which
Haitian peasants were formed into a cheap, exploitable labour force and made
into virtual slaves.
Independence by force, destabilization by freedom
In 1793, after two strenuous years of
battle with the nation’s colonial masters, Haiti’s 465,429 slaves threw
off their shackles and declared emancipation for their country (Fick, 2000).
Then in a few years later, in 1804 Haiti’s leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared
independence for the new nation and thus began the massive transformation over
the once dominant plantation economy of Haiti.
With Haiti’s newfound freedom came
great insecurity felt by the nation’s new leaders from the need to maintain their
independence from colonial powers, and this defense, via their military’s strength, would
require a strong economy able to support the growing numbers of soldiers (Fick,
2000). Haiti was the first nation to fight its way to the abolition of slavery,
first by overthrowing and ejecting its white rulers, then in numerous battles
with Napoleon’s armies in 1802-1803 (Fick, 2000). Haiti’s army was then used to
not only continue to protect against foreign enemies who might try to
re-enslave them, but also in efforts to keep up production on the agricultural plantations,
who’s
freed labour was now very reluctant to work on, preferring to tend to their own
small subsistence plots (Fick, 2000). The military had now become so large that
it required over half of the nations budget to sustain it, and so the nation’s leaders felt
great urgency to keep capital flowing from the exports of Haiti’s agricultural
industry (Fick, 2000).
The Haitian economy had been very strong
during its colonial enslavement, as it had the most productive plantations
anywhere in the world (Fick, 2000). Once free of their masters, however, the
country’s economic future was greatly challenged by new laws set in place.
The 1805 Haitian constitution shows the extreme effects felt by the country
from their mass enslavement by white colonialists. This anger and resentment
was formalized and put into law as the 12th article read “No
whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory
with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any
property therein” (Anonymous, 1805). This article of the constitution would
block any possible economic investments from white foreigners and thus the
country was put at further disadvantage in its efforts to stimulate its
economic growth.
The beginning of Haiti’s foreign debt
began in 1825, when France formally recognized Haiti as an independent state
for the price of 150 million francs to make up for the seized, stolen, or lost
property of France in the years since the rebellion (Plant, 1987). This debt
would be reduced over time, but would remain as an obstacle for future economic
growth and leave the country vulnerable to foreign debt holders, a subject
which will be explored later in this paper.
Over the course of the nineteenth
century, the Haitians economy was reduced to the taxes being skimmed off the
agricultural exports from small farmers growing mainly coffee (Plant, 1987).
With the little profits generated by Haiti it had to not only try to meet debt
obligations, but also further had to support an overextended military that
controlled various parts of the Hispaniola throughout the early part of the
nineteenth century (Plant, 1987).
The Haitian Rural Code of 1826 put in
place laws that restricted the mobility of citizens and directed any that were
not employed in sectors deemed of importance to be put to work on agricultural
plantations (Evans, 1837). These new laws displayed the great importance Haiti’s new leaders
placed on maintaining the country’s inward flow of capital from agricultural
exports. These laws were combined with various military-enforced schemes to
reignite the plantation economy, but the freed populations were set against
working for anyone but themselves (Fick, 2000). The large military and police
force ensured that the peasants continued to pay the taxes on their crops,
keeping the elites nicely provided for and just a semblance of respect within
the wider international community by having at least some national production
(Plant, 1987). This was coupled with land ownership policies that divided up
and distributed more and more of the once very prosperous plantation-based
agricultural land holdings to the citizens, first to elites and personnel of
the military, then through to the peasantry, whether through direct ownership
or renting out their lands through crop-sharing schemes (Fick, 2000). And so
within a few decades much of the land was turned into small plots of
subsistence, with a constitution that forbid investments by foreign
corporations, and no sources of internal credit to aid farmers in the re-growth
of the nations once flourishing agricultural export sector (Fick, 2000).
US Occupation
Beginning in 1915 and continuing on
until 1934, Haiti was occupied by United States military forces, with the
official reason given that the US wanted to secure its loans, as they were the
foremost lender now to Haiti, and wished to be closer to Haiti’s customs
revenues to ensure their efficient operation (Plant, 1987). Unofficially, this
occupation has been considered by many to be in efforts to prepare the country
for foreign investment through altering Haitian legislation; land needed to be
legally tied to private landowners by title, so as to be legally binding if
bought by foreign companies (Plant, 1987). This would enable US owned
corporations to buy up land for agricultural production, and would be pushed
through past any resistance met by Haiti’s government through the use of US military
forces (Plant, 1987). At the beginning of the US occupation, the Haitian
constitution still had a ban on all property ownership by whites within the country
(Plant, 1987). Despite resistance by the Haitian Congress, the constitution was
changed in 1918 and these alterations would revoke the previous ban on white foreign
investments (Plant, 1987). Through these changes in the law, US based
agricultural companies bought up much of the arable land in Haiti (Plant, 1987).
The rehabilitation of Haiti’s plantation economy was attempted by US agricultural corporations
with the help of its military, but this would require a proper road network to
connect the various parts of production and shipment of the export crops
(Plant, 1987). The Corvee System of forced labour was resurrected, and parts of the road
system were built with their chain gangs, but within a few years it was
abolished (Plant, 1987). While the subsequent US built agricultural plantations
never grew so large as to compete with the surrounding Caribbean plantations,
they were successful in pushing great numbers of Haitian peasants off the land
and into the Dominican labour migration system (Plant, 1987).
Haitian peasants
attempted many times to protest the US occupation, often resulting in armed
resistance to the US military forces. The consequences of these events likely helped
catalyze the US occupiers to increase their efforts in the recruitment and securing
of migrant labourers for the Dominican sugar plantations to disband and separate
these groups of agitators (Murphy, 1986).
Captive labour pool
The Dominican Republic’s sugar industry,
which had begun production in 1870, was bolstered by both the US military
occupation from the 1916-1924, and from the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo,
who ruled by military force from the 1930s to the 1950’s (Vedovato, 1986). There
were already a few sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic, but it was not until
Trujillo and the US military entered the fore that this industry would become
prominent among the sugar producing nations (Vedovato, 1986). Trujillo’s regime pushed
forward land reforms, which allowed him to vastly expand his property holdings,
which he then used for sugar production (Vedovato, 1986). This was coupled with
legislation that gave the sugar companies control over the nation’s rule whenever
it regarded their industry’s interests (Vedovato, 1986).
When the Dominican Republic first began
its sugar industry there were abundant labour sources from within the country
from which to fill the jobs on plantations (Baud, 1992). Due to the high wages
and seasonal employment, Dominicans were attracted to the work as they could still
tend to their own crops while making additional wages on the sugar plantations (Baud,
1992). Then in 1884 the price for sugar fell dramatically and forced the sugar
industry to reduce their costs if they wanted to continue production in the
competitive world markets (Baud, 1992). The sugar companies attempted this by
reducing the wages offered to their workers (Baud, 1992). The lowered wages
offered to Dominicans brought mass protests, but eventually the Dominicans gave
up and returned to their rural areas, leaving the sugar companies to find other sources of labour
(Baud, 1992).
To
fill the vacancies left by the Dominican workforce sugar companies at first
recruited labour from all over the Caribbean (Baud, 1992). However, the sugar
companies quickly realized that the Haitians were the most exploitable, and
thus they focused their labour strategies on the securing of this group of
migrants (Baud, 1992). By the 1920’s Haitians made up the majority of the Dominican
sugar plantation workforce (Baud, 1992). The Haitian government protested this
mass migration of their peasants at first, but they soon gave up as many were
generously bribed to not only look the other way, but to actively encourage and
recruit their country’s peasants in the migration to the Dominican Republic’s
sugar plantations (Martinez, 1992).
There were two main
channels through which the Dominican sugar companies obtained Haitian labourers
(Martinez, 1992). The first was through the organized shipment of workers by
the sugar companies, authorized by both countries’ governments (Martinez,
1992). The second channel was through the unauthorized border crossing of
Haitian peasants (Martinez, 1992). Once on Dominican soil these unauthorized migrant
Haitians were rounded up by the military and police, to be handed over to the
sugar companies for fees paid to them per person captured (Martinez, 1992).
The Haitian migrants were often left
penniless through their voyage to the plantations from being robbed by police
or military officers (Martinez, 1992). Once on the sugar plantations, the
Haitians found it very difficult to leave; through various fines arbitrarily
set by the plantations, or from other deductions in the highly corrupt ranks of
plantation staff, Haitian workers were left in a perpetual state of poverty,
unable to afford to leave (Martinez, 1992).
Bateyes
were the areas of sugar plantations established as living quarters for the
Haitians migrant workforce (Shoaff, 2009). The bateyes
often lacked potable water, beds, or sanitation facilities (Shoaff,
2009). These bateyes were policed by guards working for
the plantations, and all transportation to and from the remote areas were
conducted by the sugar companies, thus the Haitian migrant were essentially held captive by their
isolated surroundings (Shoaff, 2009).
The Haitian migrants were made further
exploitable by the Dominican government through various implementations set
forth to degrade their immigrant social and political status within the Dominican
Republic (Baud, 1992). Haitians were made into “illegals” through legislation
and anti-Haitian propaganda trumpeted by Trujillo’s regime (Baud, 1992).
Legal working permits were greatly reduced in number by the Dominican Republic
and even those who did manage to obtain one were subject to harassment and
capture by Dominican police and military should they be found outside of the
sugar plantations (Baud, 1992). These measures were never meant to stem the
tide of immigration, only to further strengthen the power of the sugar
companies over the increasingly vulnerable Haitian migrants (Baud, 1992).
During Trujillo’s rule, anti-Haitian
sentiment had been greatly bolstered, which had been growing amongst the
Dominican population since the mid nineteenth century when Haiti had occupied
much of the Dominican Republic (Martinez, 1992). Trujillo’s efforts came to a head
when in 1937 nearly 25,000 Haitian migrants were systematically slaughtered in
the frontier borderland regions of the Dominican Republic by his military
forces (Martinez, 1992). This massacre of Haitians was strategically absent
from any Haitians residing on the sugar plantations, instilling into the minds
of the migrants that only on the sugar plantations would they be safe from execution
(Shoaff, 2009).
The sugar plantations treated the
Haitians with abusive management practices and stigmatized them as a subhuman
group (Baud, 1992). The Haitians were to have no human rights while working on
the sugar plantations, and they were kept in a perpetual state of vulnerability
from their insecure immigration status on top of the brutal working conditions
they were subject to from the sugar companies (Baud, 1992). The sugar companies
further held the Haitian labourers on the sugar plantations dependent and
isolated in their employment from the pay schemes they setup; wages would often
not be paid until the end of the harvest, and credit was issued with interest
to the workers in the form of plantation currency, which could only be used to
purchase goods from the stores setup within the individual plantations (Baud,
1992). These plantation stores would vastly overcharge for their merchandise,
and combined with the interest accruing from the plantations’ debt schemes had
the effect of permanently keeping the Haitian migrants in a state of poverty
(Baud, 1992).
The horrid conditions and extremely tenuous
circumstances forced upon the Haitians by the Dominican sugar plantations are
further brought to light from the experiences of a Haitian sugar plantation
worker interviewed in Shoaff’s (2009) examination of Dominican bateyes:
“Papi
describes the conditions of this time period as reminiscent of esclavitud (i.e.
slave-like conditions). At any moment, la guardia could apprehend contracted laborers and their
family members and either deport them to Haiti in tiempo muerto (dead season) or forcibly relocate them to ingenios in other
parts of the country that required large body numbers in times of intensive
sugar production. Papi recalled the numerous occasions when the entire
community, which continued to expand annually with the settlement of new labor,
were displaced to different areas. Everyone knew the situation and expected it.
Most would eventually return only to relive the experience again and again. The
greatest consequence, according to Papi, was family separation and the
inability of children to continue their schooling with any consistency. The
advantage, however, was the formation of a sense of community because the only
way to reunite with family members was to eventually return to the same batey.”
(pg. 124, Shoaff, 2009).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the fate of
the Haitian peasants, from being the first slaves to see abolition - freed from
the tethers of the colonialists’ plantations - only to become virtual slaves on
the plantations of another country. The disdain caused by the enslavement of
Haiti’s people formed new laws in the birth of the newly freed nation that
would inhibit the sustainment of their economy and further cripple any chance
for rehabilitation through the investments of other nations. From this
vulnerable economic state the peasants of Haiti were co-opted and pushed into
migration to the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic by the US military
and the corrupt governments of both their own nation as well as that of the
Dominican Republic. Once inside the Dominican Republic the Haitian migrants
were isolated, degraded, and made into a severely exploited labour force that
would have little option but to endure the horrid conditions forced upon them
in their indentured employment on the sugar plantations. To this day the sugar
plantations of the Dominican Republic remain in place, and the brutal
conditions faced by Haitian migrants continues on. A number of films and
reports over the past two decades have attempted to bring to attention the plight
of the Haitian sugar plantation workers, but until something as powerful as a
boycott of the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry is established it seems
unlikely that anything will change.
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