Haiti biggest enemy has been themselves and their corrupt leaders. We are not the solution for their problems. By Gentoku Santana

Haiti biggest enemy has been themselves and their corrupt leaders. We are not the solution for their problems.

From the following article👇

Haitians were very keen to conquer and keep the Dominican half of the island, and twice attempted to invade it. While one might sympathize with the Haitian leaders’ decision to put so much of their discretionary state income into the military, it was, in hindsight, a poor long-term investment for the young nation. It is a cruel irony that, after 1825, conflict with the European powers and the US was consistently resolved with diplomacy and capitulation. As a result, the Haitian military budget was never really used in the defense of the nation against foreign powers.

My thoughts👇

It was used to attempt to subjugate the dominican people. So the idea that haiti kept invading the dominican republic to stop european aggression is a bold face lie. Haiti has always had expansionist ideas the first amd second empire of haiti is proof of this.

Another major state expense was internal debt. While most of the time Haiti’s debt crisis is discussed in terms of their external debt to the French, and later the US, Haiti had long been borrowing money from its own citizens. In fact, in 1890 the internal debt of Haiti was as large as the external debt. Sadly, attempts to refinance the internal debt were also consistently marred by corrupt Haitian officials with short-term interests.12

Where Are the Haitians?

With this information in mind, we can begin to assess Harriot’s historical hypothesis responsibly. The first thing to address is that factors in economic history that are relevant to modern outcomes are never dichotomies. France’s reparations would count as a ‘relevant’ factor, irrespective of whether they explain 90 percent or 0.9 percent of Haiti’s modern poverty. But, obviously, these two figures would indicate very different things. While arriving at a meaningful numerical estimate of the role of French reparations on the modern state of Haiti is well beyond the scope of this article, we can still safely conclude that, on their own, the damage they caused is nowhere near sufficient to explain the Haitian economy over a century later.

Those who accept Harriot’s claim may counter that the reparation payments were what sent Haiti into a “self reproducing cycle of poverty.” But this too is specious. To get set on such a cycle things need to be pretty bad, and at each ‘turn’ of the cycle things need to still be pretty bad, but not necessarily for the same reasons. In the face of real ongoing explanatory factors like ecological devastation and a corrupt, violent, and unstable political system, it is exceedingly implausible that the French reparations payments have consistently played a fundamental role in perpetuating Haitian poverty for centuries.

On the other hand, the impact of foreign debts was ongoing. Due to the severity of environmental damage, we can have at least moderate confidence that even these debts are no more than a secondary cause of Haitian poverty. But even if foreign debt were the foremost cause, it would still not be reasonable to claim that ‘white people’ or France caused Haitian poverty. The French did not create corrupt Haitian debt out of thin air—in each case they had to go through corrupt Haitians willing to enrich themselves at the expense of their own people.