Vassar Haiti Project

On January 17, Sir Hilary Beckles published an excellent article in the Barbados Sunday Sun. Haiti is often depicted by the foreign media as a failed state. “Poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” is the favorite refrain. In The “Hate and the Quake,” Beckles tells another story, of a people who successfully rose above their slave-masters to become free and independent, only to be devastatingly punished by the very nations that prided themselves on freedom in equality. It is the oft-forgotten story of the crippling dept imposed on Haiti by the French after their successful revolution. The enormous dept, paid to the former masters, burdened the young country until 1922, and is in large part responsible for the deplorable economic and political situation in which Haiti finds itself today.

And Beckles is not just recounting history for history’s sake. He calls for France to repay the unjust debt they demanded from the Haitian people: “The value of this amount was estimated by financial actuaries as US$21 billion. This sum of capital could rebuild Haiti and place it in a position to re-engage the modern world. It was illegally extracted from the Haitian people and should be repaid…Such an act at the outset of this century would open the door for a sophisticated interface of past and present, and set the Haitian nation free at last.”

Sir Hilary Beckles is an historian and pro-vice-chancellor and Principal of the Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies. You can read the article here.