One Day in Haiti
The United States speaks in the language of democracy—elections, sovereignty, self-determination. But what happens when those elections produce leaders Washington doesn’t want in power?
Image: Jean-Bertrand Aristide celebrates his inauguration as Haiti’s first democratically elected president in decades, Port-au-Prince, 1991. Photo: Associated Press.
In February 2004, the airport lights burned through the humid Caribbean night as the first American aircraft touched down. Marines moved quickly across the tarmac, boots striking the concrete in sharp echoes, armored vehicles rolling through the narrow streets toward the National Palace. The city was tense but quiet—the kind of quiet that settles over a place where everyone knows something is about to happen.
Inside the presidential residence, Jean-Bertrand Aristide waited.
He had come to power in a way almost unknown in Haiti’s modern history: not through the army, not through the narrow alliances of the political class, but through elections—overwhelming ones—carried on the voices of the poor who filled the hillsides above Port-au-Prince and the crowded neighborhoods along the harbor. A former priest, slight and intense, he had preached in the language of liberation theology and the language of Haiti’s streets. The people who voted for him called themselves Lavalas—the flood.
But Haiti had a long memory.
In 1915, nearly ninety years earlier, another crisis had brought American Marines to the same city. They marched through Port-au-Prince after the assassination of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, rifles fixed with bayonets, and stayed not for days or weeks but for nineteen years. During that occupation American officials rewrote Haiti’s constitution, took control of its customs houses and treasury, and built a new army—the Garde d’Haïti—trained and organized by U.S. officers. When the Marines finally sailed away in 1934, the institution they left behind would remain the central instrument of political power in the country.
For decades it decided who ruled.
In 1991 that army turned again. Only months after Aristide’s first election victory, soldiers forced him from office. Gunfire echoed through Port-au-Prince; bodies appeared in the streets; thousands fled the island on fragile boats. Three years later American troops returned—this time landing on the same runways to restore the president they had once watched fall.
Now, in 2004, the city faced another moment like those before it.
Armed men were advancing toward the capital from the north—fighters who had crossed the border from the Dominican Republic, many of them veterans of earlier coups and paramilitary campaigns. Their names were familiar in Haiti’s political history. Their weapons were not difficult to find.
In the palace that night, Aristide was told the situation had become too dangerous.
The rebels were coming. The capital could not be secured. For his own safety, he was advised, he should leave the country immediately.
Outside, the Marines had already taken their positions.
The engines of a waiting aircraft hummed on the runway.
Before sunrise the president of Haiti was escorted to the plane and flown out of the country he had been elected to lead—told that departure was necessary for his protection, though the men closing in on his government were themselves products of the same long cycle of coups, armies, and armed factions that foreign intervention had helped create.
By morning he was gone.
And in that ancient land of Haiti, as so many times before, power had shifted again in the shadow of American aircraft.
Intellectual Map
The Haitian Revolution
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso, 1988.
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Geggus, David Patrick. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Originally published 1938.
Popkin, Jeremy D. A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Haitian State Formation and Political History
Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012.
Girard, Philippe R. Haiti: The Tumultuous History—From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation. New York: Palgrave St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010.
Heinl, Robert Debs Jr., and Nancy Gordon Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti: State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
The United States Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934)
Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971.
Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Aristide, Lavalas, and Modern Haitian Politics
Dupuy, Alex. Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.
Dupuy, Alex. The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti. Nee York:Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
Farmer, Paul. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994.
Hallward, Peter. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso, 2010.
Fatton, Robert Jr. Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002.
Reports and Primary Documentation
United Nations Security Council. “Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti.” New York: United Nations, 2004
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/519750?v=pdf
Organization of American States. “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Haiti.” Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 2002.
https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/pdfs/2023/Informe_Haiti_EN.pdf
Journalistic and Contemporary Accounts
BBC News. “Profile: Jean-Bertrand Aristide.” BBC, March 2011.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-12633115
Pollen, Lydia and Weiner, Tim. “Haiti’s President Forced Out; Marines Sent to Keep Order.” The New York Times, February 29, 2004.
An example and consequence of securing authority by way of populism: Aristide intended to break up the private concerns and nationalize what little Haiti does produce. His administration began distributing land back to its people; subsidizing its rice in order to ease an economic burden on the hungry, which were the majority arguably; then, planned to increase the minimum wage by 100%, at the expense of the wealthy via taxation. His administration also negotiated deals with Venezuela to receive oil at a reduced cost, lastly.
All of these are major ‘no-gos,’ in the mind of the parasite—that is the West.