On Thu Mar 5, 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I'd love to find someone who could talk about the history & political
> economy of Haiti on my radio show next week - e.g., how did it get to be
> so poor? Any ideas?
Recently someone posted a news update from the IPA that listed a half dozen experts ready to talk:
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR030104.htm
I couldn't help noticing that one of them is Adam Hochschild. According to this, he is currently writing a book on the Haiti revolution, about which he says
"You can't understand Haiti today without understanding the long, bloody struggle in which that country gained its independence 200 years ago this year. It was the most extraordinary and least heralded upheaval of the Age of Revolutions: rebel slaves defeated first the French, then the British, then a new attempt to re-enslave them by Napoleon. But in their ordeal lies some of the seeds of the country's problems today."
His book on the early history of the Congo, _King Leopold's Ghost_, is absolutely brilliant. It brings forgotten history vividly alive and makes it seem central to everything. So if you want to go that far back in history, he might be a perfect choice. People in the middle of books are usually dying to work out their ideas orally. And the press release gives his email: ahochschild at mcimail.com
On the opposite end of Haiti's history, this most recent period, and specially on the history of its relations with international aid and economics institutions manipulated by the US (which have largely determined its recent economic fate), Jeffrey Sachs' 2 recent pieces -- the one in the FT, and the other syndicated and posted by KJ from that Malaysian paper
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/page.arcview.php3?clid=11&id=94364&usrsess=1
-- were both very good. The latter recounted a World Bank Mission to Haiti (and then a corresponding advocacy mission to the US government) that Sachs took part in in recent years, and he seems to have all the human development details at his fingertips. I would also expect that he could probably reel off the cutting edge neo-classical economics view on where Haiti's poverty comes from, for what that would be worth to you. He's certainly not a normal Behind the News interview. But it's kind of a sign of These Our Times that people like him are writing articles so denunciatory, and that might give the interview an added interest.
Mark Danner wrote two books on Haiti, one entitled specifically _The Legacy of Duvalier_, back in the 1980s, and one on Aristide a year after he was first overthrown in the early 1990s. The latter was compiled from three very long articles he wrote in the New York Review of Each Other's Books. They struck me at the time as a very serious attempt to be both critical and sympathetic -- and knowedgeable, back when there wasn't that much readily accessible knowledge, because Aristide hadn't really ruled yet at all; he was all potential, for good or bad. He might well have kept up on the country in the years that followed. But even if not, he might be a perfect source for the middle period of Haitian history, between Hochschild's 19th century and recent times -- for the US occupation, the Duvalier years, and what Aristide inherited. Also I'd be interested to hear what he has to say about Aristide's famous character faults -- how much is real, how much is propaganda, and how much is the exigencies of a very different political culture.
Michael