In December of 1492, on his first voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola for the first time in what is now Haiti. Columbus sailed on; the Spaniards who remained behind on Hispaniola immediately set about enslaving and ultimately extinguishing the native Taino population, setting the brutal tone of human exploitation that would be emulated by many others in the New World for generations.
Within little more than a dozen years of the arrival of Columbus, the first captured Africans were brought in shackles to the island as slaves in 1505 by Columbus's son Diego to replenish the dwindling population of Taino. The practice continued in spite of the fact that on protest from a cleric who had witnessed it first hand, Spain had made forced labor illegal; but then the law existed only on paper. By 1700, when after years of contention, France had won the western third of the island by treaty from Spain and re-dubbed it Saint Domingue, there were 2000 slaves in the territory. After 100 years of French colonization, there were nearly 500,000 -- approximately half of all slaves in the Caribbean. The forced labor of enslaved Africans fueled the Island's coffee and sugar production making it one of the economic powerhouses of the new world.
To sustain this supremacy, treatment of slaves was necessarily brutal. Slaves were crammed by the dozens into small, windowless huts by night, roused at dawn for backbreaking work until dusk. By royal decree, owners were only required to give slaves what amounted to 3 days worth of food per week, but even this meager regulation was not enforced and so was frequently flouted. The little time slaves had to themselves had to be taken up with using what little they had to cultivate food to supplement what they got from their enslavers. As historian C.L.R. James noted:
The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety.In spite of this, the common rationalization for the practice of slavery was that Africans were better off in the Americas than they had been in the lands they were ripped from-- always an easier lie to tell themselves than a truth to be lived up to. Aside from escape to the hills which happened often enough, it was only through hard labor, saving of resources through deprivation and luck that a slave could occasionally gain freedom recognized by colonial society, but this freedom did not extend to the full rights enjoyed at the level of even the poorest whites. As with the Europeans, life in Saint Domingue was equally stratified for those of African birth and descent. As a result of white plantation owners sexually enslaving the African born women, a caste system evolved in which those of mixed race, called mulattoes, were granted privileges and statuses denied those of darker skin.
In contrast to the British Colonies of North America which preferred to replenish the population of slaves through birth, the French began toward the latter part of the 18th century to rely increasingly on expanded annual importation of slaves as a means of increasing sugar and coffee production. The practice was to literally beat and work slaves to death or incapacity and replace them with new captives from Africa when there was no more work left in them. As a consequence, for far longer than in the British colonies, slaves in Saint Domingue had fresh memories of the cultures they were torn from -- mostly those of equatorial Western Africa from the Guinea coast to Dahomey in present day Benin. In this environment, the spiritual practices of the Africans captured and sold into slavery were transplanted to the island and grew into a form of ritual and devotion known variably today as vodou, vadou, vodun or voodoo, described by one of its 20th century scholars and practitioners, the polymath Dr François Duvalier in this way:
Vodou, elaborated on the soil of Africa whose anguished mystery it reflects, also expresses overwhelmingly the conscience of a race as it confronts the enigmas of this world.In addition, the memory of freedom was fresh and a passion for it remained kindled in the slave population. The island had been the site of the first recorded slave rebellion in the Americas, begun in 1519 and lasting until the Spanish quashed it in 1530. Nearly 300 years later, in 1791, inspired by the Revolution in France, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (also spelled L'Ouverture), a dark-skinned self-educated former slave who had been freed in 1776 and who had gained military experience by siding with the Spanish in conflicts against the French, became the leader of a revolt in Saint Domingue, the object of which was first and foremost the abolition of slavery on the island. The first stirrings of the revolution were within the population of Freedmen and mulattoes, then numbering somewhat more than 25,000 to the 40,000 whites in the colony. With a successful uprising of slaves in the North that grew out of a vodou ceremony, the battle was joined. Through mostly guerrilla tactics that would be emulated usually without credit in future revolutions across the globe, the tide turned inexorably in favor of the slaves and their champions.
Gaining an upper hand in the conflict, Toussaint Louverture sought to convince Napoleon Bonaparte of his desire for the colony to remain French but free; but Napoleon, shocked at the uncompromising nature of Toussaint Louverture's proposed constitution which envisioned enlightenment styled freedom for all men, ignored his entreaties and instead sent 20,000 troops to quell the rebellion once and for all. Toussaint Louverture and his army held them off for months until he was able to negotiate a treaty for a cease fire and retire from his rank to his farm, after a career in which his army of slaves and ex-slaves had defeated Spain, France and England in battle. He did not live to see the end of the revolution in Haiti however. Arrested in 1802 ostensibly for allowing a break in the cease fire-- possibly betrayed by his lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines-- he was taken in chains to France where he was tried for treason, convicted and sent to prison in the Alps where he soon died of maltreatment in the frigid conditions.
Meanwhile, in Saint Domingue, things took an uglier turn. In 1803, Toussaint Louverture's lieutenant, Dessalines who had switched sides in a show of complicity in his former superior's arrest, switched sides once again. In response, Napoleon sent additional troops and placed in charge the white supremacist and genocidal General Donatien de Rochambeau. Dessalines was done with Europeans. He responded in kind with increasing cruelty of his own. In retaliation for the capturing and hanging of 500 blacks, Dessalines had his troops capture and kill 500 whites and mount their heads on pikes around Port-au-Prince. The fighting intensified to the point that both sides were reported by observers as having been driven "a little mad." Sensing defeat, demoralized at his army's inability to conquer what he considered an inferior foe, Rochambeau lost interest in the battle, and fell into debauchery. Dessalines took Port-au-Prince to the cheers of sympathetic whites, whom Dessalines thanked in a ceremony and then promptly had seized and hanged in revenge for French cruelty.
On January 1, 1804, with France in retreat, Dessalines declared the colony independent, re-naming it for the Taino name for the Island, Ayiti, or in the French spelling: Haïti. There followed a massacre of many of the remaining French and destruction of their plantations. As many as 5000 were estimated to have been killed that year. In 1805, Alexandre Pétion, a mulatto, a revolutionary hero and the first president (as well as the first to illegally declare himself President for Life), banned foreign ownership of land or enterprise in the new republic.
Nervous about the reverberations of black freedom with American slaves, the only recently independent US itself refused to recognize Haiti's independence until 1862. Instead, Congress banned trade with Haiti in 1806, turning now to Cuba, still a white Spanish colony benefitting from the labor of black slaves, for its dependence on sugar. Although Thomas Jefferson had entertained the thought of US annexation of Cuba and John Adams had gone as far as expressing the US's interest in it to Spain, the official American position came to be more explicitly opposition to interference with respect to independence movements in the Americas as expressed in what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which the president elaborated in a State of the Union address in 1823. In the speech, Monroe announced that further colonial efforts against any independent states in the Americas by any European power would be regarded as "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." A test of the doctrine came in 1826 when France undertook to threaten a renewal of hostilities with Haiti, sending ships to Port-au-Prince harbor to demonstrate their intent unless Haiti promised to pay reparations of 150 million francs for France's loss of property (meaning slaves) in the revolution 20 years before. The US ignored Haiti's protests, and Haiti, already busy with its occupation of its briefly independent island neighbor Spanish Hispaniola, and with its economy in ruins from the loss of the US market, was forced to borrow the 30 million of its first payment to France from French banks. (With the price of reparations set at 10 times Haiti's annual revenue and interest at 20%, the reparations and loans were not repaid until 1947.)
Elsewhere in Latin America, Simon Bolivar and others, with often unacknowledged support from Haiti, were bringing revolution and independence to former colonies of Spain and Portugal across the region: Chile, Colombia and Mexico (1810); Paraguay and Venezuela (1811); Argentina (1816); Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru (1821); Brazil (1822); Bolivia and Uruguay (1825).
"Meanwhile on Hispaniola," according to author Alex Von Tunzelmann:
... the complicated tensions between French speakers and Spanish speakers, rich and poor, former freeman and former slave, had only intensified. Strict race lines had crept back into society, and were defined by the precise proportions of black and white in seven generations of a person’s ancestry. Foreigners could rarely detect the all-important differences between a noir, a sacatra, a griffe, a marabou, a mulâtre, a quarteron, a métis, a mamelouc, a quarteronné, and a sang-mêlé. Partly, this was because they were not always detectable by sight: as the black leader Jean-Jacques Acaau observed, “Nèg riche se mulat, mulat pauvre se nèg”—a rich black was a mulatto, and a poor mulatto was a blackThe Dominican Republic succeeded in gaining independence from Haiti in 1844 after 22 years of unification on Hispaniola. To quell Haiti's continued incursions, it welcomed the protection of its former colonizer, Spain.
Although the US continued to express interest in annexing Cuba, ninety miles away at its closest shore, neither Spain nor Cubans were receptive. Spurning offers of American military assistance out of suspicion of US designs on the island, Cuba briefly liberated itself from Spain in 1868, uniting whites and blacks in the cause and abolishing slavery in the process; but after 10 years, Spain won it back. Slavery was restored. It would take two more attempts and American intervention in the Spanish-American War before independence was won in 1902. A likely accidental explosion of the American ship USS Maine in Havana's harbor in 1898 was the official excuse for the US's insinuation into the war-- a convenient "injustice" that could be blamed on Spain, and a more sellable rationale to the American public than the protection of American tycoon's business interests in Cuba. In negotiations with Spain to conclude the war, the US promptly began a military occupation of the fledgling country, and gained Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the process. Americans amended the Cuban constitution with the Platt Amendment, basically giving the US the right to intervene in Cuban affairs at its own discretion, and would not relinquish control until it was adopted, giving the US the opening to establish permanent military installations at Guantánamo Bay and Bahia Honda. American troops would return repeatedly to Cuba proper in any event. In 1906, following a disputed election, American Charles Magoon, recently governor of Panama was installed as governor of Cuba.
Throughout this period of de-colonization, American banks speculated on the cause of liberation from European powers in the hemisphere, increasing debt in the region, enriching American concerns and advantaging generally lighter skinned and right wing minorities in the process. Theodore Roosevelt who won the US presidency packaged as Spanish-American war hero made US intentions in the Americas explicit with his "Big Stick" policy. In 1903, the US backed independence of Panama from the South American state of Colombia as a means of gaining control over the economically strategic isthmus, and assumed and completed the largely abandoned French project of building the Panama Canal (1903) monopolizing the only temperate shipping route between Atlantic and Pacific.
In 1912, Roosevelt's successor William Howard Taft had painted a vivid picture of American designs on the Hemisphere: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole.” Not often was it put in such stark terms, let alone expressed out loud.
In 1915, the American controlled Bank of Haiti cut off loans to the Haitian government, and in the ensuing crisis-- and in contradiction of President Woodrow Wilson's declaration that US meddling in the hemisphere was at an end-- the US intervened installing General Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam as president. Supporters of Sam's rival Rosalvo Bobo staged an insurrection, at which Sam ordered a massacre as he'd promised to do at the first shot from the resistance. Over 120 were executed, including a 14 year old insurgent with a particular viciousness. When Bobo's insurgents stormed the prison to rescue their comrades, they found blood and body parts strewn for their edification. Revenge came quickly. The insurgents surprised Sam in the presidential palace, violently forced him to the courtyard and thew him over the gates where he was hacked to death by machetes and torn apart by a waiting mob. This was all Wilson needed to order a full occupation by the Marines. The tension between a historically free black populace and American soldiers mostly from the Jim Crow south ostensibly at the service of their Haitian hosts exacerbated the misery. Having looted the National Bank, the reputation of the Americans preceded them wherever they went in Haiti. The public displays of drunkenness and debauchery on the part of the Americans were an unwelcome site in the generally conservative culture.
To further crystallize American intentions in foreign policy around the world, Bolsheviks finally toppled imperialist Russia in 1917 and installed Lenin as head of the Soviet Union. The response in capitalist America was panic. The nightmare of American capitalists investing abroad was an international movement of workers. Was the turmoil that the US had helped to instill in the regions of the hemisphere to the South contributing to a cauldron of conditions ripe for the spread of communism to the Americas? To see that this didn't happen, American meddling in Latin American affairs was ramped up to a fever pitch. If anyone is looking for evidence that the objectives of American military and intelligence services are the interests of American capitalists and not the cause of freedom and security for the American citizens whose taxes raise their revenue, let alone of the peoples whose lands they interfere in, one need only look at the formerly secret history of US involvement in Latin America.
In Haiti, American activity frequently had an effect opposite what was intended. When guerilla attacks were made against the Americans in 1919, the Marines quashed it, killing its already legendary leader, Charlemagne Péralte. Hoping to use Péralte as an example to his followers and other would be insurgents, they let his body be stripped down to what resembled a loin cloth to show his wounds and had him photographed on a board that was carried in the streets. Believing the local religion vodou to be a catalyst for rebellion Marines began a campaign against it, raiding ceremonies, destroying altars and reliquary and stomping the ceremonial cornstarch ritual designs called vévé used to summon the loas or gods. Those found to be practicing the religion were harassed, dispersed and sometimes imprisoned in an effort to destroy the religion. It only drove it underground. And the image of the martyred Charlemagne Péralte in death, his arms outstretched, Christlike, by rigor mortis, only became an iconic symbol for the resistance.
So the occupation went. There may have been order but Haiti slid deeper into poverty and despair. By the end of the next decade, Hoover questioned the wisdom of the American occupation of Haiti, but it took Franklin Roosevelt to end it, which he did in 1934 in the spirit of a Good Neighbor policy of rapprochement with Latin American governments. The Americans officially backed off, but not before the intellectual elite of Haiti had been radicalized. Inspired by Harlem Renaissance and by renewed interest in the Africa of their ancestors, Haitian intellectuals became scholars and practitioners of vodou, and otherwise a cultural and political force in the country. One such movement, Les Griots, named after a West African caste of bards, was started by an unassuming bespectacled medical student from Port-au-Prince named François Duvalier.
In the Dominican Republic meanwhile, Rafael Trujillo became president in 1930, backed by the US as a necessary evil to keep communism at bay. He started his career as a petty criminal, and put his skills of intimidation to use in the national guard where he impressed his US Marine trainers with his aptitude for torture. He quickly rose through the ranks becoming chief of police in Santo Domingo when the force was nationalized, and ultimately General of the Army. But he always considered himself a Marine. When the presidency opened up, it seemed a logical move. Trujillo's henchmen saw to it that anti-Trujillo participation in the election was kept to a minimum; he sailed to victory. The job suited him.
The Massacre River between Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the town of Dajabón had been a popular illegal entry point for Haitians seeking seasonal employment in the sugar fields, but their presence in the labor force as vital as it was to the industry roused the xenophobia of many Dominicans. Trujillo's response was in character. As Alex Von Tunzelmann relates:
In September 1937, Trujillo’s soldiers began an unusual operation around Dajabón. Dressed as peasants and armed with handfuls of parsley, they would approach black people and ask, “What’s this?” The Spanish word perejil, meaning “parsley,” is difficult for Creole-speaking Haitians to pronounce. If a person answered in a Creole accent, “pelegil,” the soldier would whip out a machete or bayonet, and hack the presumed Haitian to death.Along with those who at Trujillo's instruction were beaten or tortured to death or thrown bound into the Massacre River to drown, more than 17,000 (and perhaps as many as 35,000) Haitians were killed over the next four months in what came to be known as the Parsley Massacre. Even in the US the optics of the operation had been bad. At Haiti's urging, the Americans got Trujillo who waged a PR battle in American newspapers to proclaim his innocence to agree to reparations of the modest sum of $750,000. Only $250,000 was ever paid and only in bribes to Haitian politicians. Nevertheless, Trujillo's public relations were such that within 2 years, the American Congressman Hamilton Fish who had led the protests against Trujillo for the Massacre was lavishly celebrated in Santo Domingo, for which he was inspired to toast his host by declaring, “General, you have created a golden age for your country.” Before long, Santo Domingo was renamed Ciudad Trujillo.
Forty miles away from Hispaniola, Fulgencio Batista was rising through the ranks of the Cuban military, participating in a presidential coup in 1933 known as the Revolt of the Sergeants. He promptly appointed himself head of all of the military and as such, Army Chief of Staff, a position from which he was able to control a series of puppet presidents. He himself won the presidential election of 1940 on a populist campaign. His strong-arm tactics and indifference to the poverty of the majority of Cubans did not endear him to the masses, but he was not Communist and welcomed international capital and that suited the US. It also suited the mob. In 1946, Meyer Lansky began building the Riviera Hotel in Havana as a means of laundering money from his operations in Miami. It would be the first of many casinos that soon made Cuba an international playground for the rich, famous and powerful -- Frank Sinatra and up and coming politician and scion Jack Kennedy were among its patrons-- throughout the 40s and 50s. The glamour and excesses of Havana nightlife which was making Americans and other foreigners rich stood in stark contrast to the squalor of life outside the tourist centers.
The success of the mob in Cuba inspired them to look elsewhere. In Haiti, at least, the election of noiriste Dumarsais Estimé as president in 1946 meant that conditions were not amenable to foreign investment. A principled politician, Estimé represented the fulfillment of noirist aspirations. He nationalized the banana industry, supported rural co-operatives, advocated for a minimum wage for Haiti's work force, and promoted the cause of education for all. Perhaps most earth shattering of all he sought to end the long-standing common cultural practice of families having what Haitians referred to as 'Ti Mounes (Little ones), or child servants. His socialist policies made creditors nervous. The US called for repayment of loans. In turn, Estimé had Americans ejected from the Bank of Haiti's board and called upon Haitians to sacrifice in order to repay Haiti's debt. The nationalized banana industry suffered a series of setbacks with outdated equipment and more decisively a drought that did it in. Estimé's support began to fade. With Trujillo aggressively backing those in the Haitian military seeking a coup, Estimé abandoned hope of extending his presidency for a second term. He resigned in 1950 and exiled himself to Paris. He was succeeded by Paul Magloire, one of three leaders of the coup Estimé had defeated in 1946 and the same group that had ousted him in 1950.
Magloire put an end to Estimé's initiatives in Haiti, but the spirit of Estimé's reformations was reborn elsewhere in the hemisphere with the election of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1951. A colonel in the military, he was the second democratically elected president in Guatemala's history. Like Estimé, Árbenz had won on the promise of agrarian reform and land redistribution by buying parcels back from international landholders at government established prices. He also expanded voting rights, and supported the creation of political parties, free speech and the rights of workers to organize. For this he aroused the attentions of the recently established CIA (at the prompting of the Guatemala based United Fruit Company and of right wing factions in Guatemala), who began to back a group led by Castillo Armas to actively overthrow the president. That Guatemala turned to Soviet-sphered Czechoslovakia for arms to defend itself in 1953 as much as confirmed Árbenz's ideology to CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration shockingly ordered a blockade against Guatemala. CIA propaganda spread disinformation within the country that Armas's victory was immanent. In this atmosphere, Árbenz lost control of the government and fled, eventually to Mexico. In Guatemala, the departure set in motion a series of events that culminated in the civil war of the 1960's in which over 200,000 died. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, news of the CIA's role in the toppling of Guatemala's democratically elected government radicalized a new generation of revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
In this atmosphere, the CIA was eager to cultivate its assets in the Caribbean. Batista in Cuba and Trujillo in Santo Domingo were safe for the time being. In Haiti, Paul Magloire, enjoying an echo from good economic times in the US, presided over a period of relative quiet in which some of the charm of Cuba's glamour seemed to have rubbed off. Port-au-Prince became increasingly a destination for jet setters, culminating in the 150th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution in the town of Independence in 1954. But Magloire was a low grade kleptocrat who alienated the black majority of the country by favoring the Mulatto minority, and at stirrings of calls for his ouster, he responded in autocratic fashion by arresting opponents, silencing journalists and making life difficult for political rivals. Finally, when Hurricane Hazel devastated Haiti in the fall of 1954 and relief funds were discovered to be missing, it spelled the end of Magloire's era. Within 2 years, he was exiled from the country. An election was held. Among the contestants was an unassuming physician, vodou scholar and practitioner who had served as Minister of Public Health and Labor under Dumarsais Estimé. His name was François Duvalier.
*****
Umbrella Man:
Part 1: Ayiti
Part 2: Bèl Gason
Part 3: The Émigré
Part 4: The Opening
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