I have never been to Haiti. I know little about Haiti except for what I’ve read. The people of Haiti are, in the end, the primary source of a solution to that country’s problems. Those that pontificate from their comfortable, first-world confines about problems in other countries are nothing more than armchair colonialists. I am an armchair colonialist.

The closest I’ve ever been to Haiti is the Samana Peninsula and later Santo Domingo, both in The Dominican Republic, sharing the same island, Hispanola, but worlds apart from her neighbor to the west. You can fly over the island and notice the stark difference immediately. On the eastern half of the border, the land is lush, green and densely tropical. The western side of the border is brown, tree-less, a harsh but not firm landscape that is slowly eroding into the sea.

When I was a boy, my father would travel to the island to work on construction projects. My older brother learned some masonry techniques somewhere along the way and would tag along to work on a crew. On returning, my father would bring us bottles of home-made syrup, hand-woven baskets, sometimes carvings and paintings he would purchase at the markets in Cap-Haitian. The paintings systematically portrayed a pastoral setting, perhaps during a bountiful harvest, blue skies and green hills, flowering plants, palm trees, clean but sparse clapboard houses…what seemed to me a paradise. I had a hard time reconciling this image with the stories my brother would tell me about Baby-Doc Duvalier, his secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, the repressive nature of the regime, widespread poverty, disease and general unrest among the people. A voodoo parade scared him and another teenage companion of his to no end, good christian boys that they were. So my first Creole language lesson: Tontons Macoutes. What does it mean? The boogey-man. Oh, thanks big brother. Sweet grenadine dreams.

The Duvalier regime has long since fallen, the Tontons are spread throughout the Caribbean avoiding prosecution. We’ve almost gone to war as a nation to reinstall an elected leader of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide, who now presides over his own repressive regime, well not quite like regimes of old, but leaning undemocratic nonetheless. No, there’s no Tonton Macoute, but a boogeyman of another sort persists.

Aristide would tell you the boogeyman is France, who upon learning of the successful independence of their former colony demanded reparations, hundred of millions of francs worth. This sum was to repay for lost land, the market value of freed slaves, etc...that saddled the newly independent nation with debt for years to come. The debt was owed to French banks, who loaned the money to pay off the French government who threatened to marshal all of its resources to take back the island if the Haitian government did not pay up. The Haitians were free, physically, but bound by a new fiscal servitude.

Aristide is calling for the money to be refunded. To the tune of 22 Billion dollars, after all it was from the work of the slaves that France created much of its wealth, in Aristide’s opinion. The money would be used to redevelop the island.

The president could start by redirecting to the people the millions of dollars meant to be spent on lavish celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the revolution. Spend it on the Haitian people rather than partying all year with foreign dignitaries.

But I digress, should France pay up? Or should the people of Haiti move on..?

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