HAROLD: My name is Harold Isaac and I’m an independent journalist here in Haiti. 00:49 It’s been a rough week. It’s been very, very bad.
Welcome to the World Unspun. I’m your host Maxine Betteridge-Moes.
I spoke to Harold on November 14th. Just three days earlier, Haiti’s international airport was temporarily shut down after gangs opened fire at a plane landing in Port-Au-Prince.
NEWS CLIP
HAROLD: Never, ever, ever have we been in a situation where international planes have been struck by, you know, rifle bullets. You know it’s, it’s, it’s unimaginable that such a thing would have happened. It should have never happened.
The latest violence came as the new prime minister, businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé was sworn in after the interim prime minister was fired. The US has since banned civilian flights into Haiti for at least 30 days. Harold won’t see his kids, who were supposed to come visit him for the holidays.
HAROLD: I was looking forward to seeing my kids that were supposed to be coming from Canada, and that’s another whole long story, but they hadn’t been here in the past two years, and they were supposed to come for Christmas, and this is not going to happen. You might as well wish everybody best wishes for the holidays or Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, because we will not, in the best case scenario, see a reconnection to the world before mid February of next year.
MUSIC FADE UP AND UNDER
Harold is a Haitian-Canadian based in Port-au-Prince. He regularly contributes to New Internationalist, and his most recent features for us include a Country Profile on Haiti and a fascinating feature on Haiti’s independence debt. As the country’s worsening gang violence once again makes global news headlines, I invited Harold onto our new podcast to help explain what’s really going on in the country and what historical factors have led to the crisis we’re seeing play out on our screens today.
We covered a lot of ground — from the country’s long history of colonization and slavery, to the crippling independence debt that succeeded its revolution, to multiple failed foreign interventions and the forces of capitalism that underpin all of this. You’ll hear that Haiti is a complicated place. No one knows this better than the Haitians themselves. But it was fascinating to speak to Harold, and I hope you’ll learn as much from him as I did. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the episode with us — more details on how to do so later in the show.
MUSIC FADE UP AND OUT
HAROLD: I’ve been going personally and professionally through a checkered reality, you know? … now I need to think about my commute. I need to think where I go, how I come back. Always assess the environment, the area, people, and see whether or not it makes sense to be where you are, how long you’re going to be there, you know. So you need to think about everything right now. What’s going on is the last kind of thoughts of innocence are being targeted.
Modern-day Haiti is a nation of huge contrasts. Despite its rich cultural heritage and the resilience of its people, economically the country remains one of the poorest in the western hemisphere. Gang violence has taken over 80 per cent of the capital. On November 20, Doctors without Borders announced that it was suspending its operations in Port au Prince due to attacks, death threats and rape threats against their staff.
The 2010 earthquake, which claimed around 220,000 lives was followed by another earthquake in 2021 that killed over 2,000 people. Both events exposed the fragility of infrastructure and governance in the country. Just a few months after the 2010 earthquake a devastating cholera outbreak began, introduced by UN peacekeepers and going on to kill 10,000 people. The assassination of president Jovenel Moïse in 2021 plunged the country into aggravated turmoil. Corruption and mismanagement are widespread, and the current transitional government struggles to restore order and provide basic services, let alone deliver long overdue elections.
HAROLD: When you’re here, it’s an ac t of resistance, because the deck are stacked against us. 11:23 Listen, I mean, Haiti is first and foremost to me about its history, or to say it, you know, in Creole and in French, her history. Because, listen, people, if they have a minimum of knowledge of Haiti, will know that we’ve, we’ve broke, you know, the chains of slavery in 1804 and established ourselves as an independent nation ever since. But if we want to go a little bit further right and a little bit deeper, we need to also understand that Haiti before 1804 is 299 years of enslavement.
Long before European colonization, the island of Hispaniola, now home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was mainly inhabited by the Taíno people, but also the Arawak and the Caribe nations. But their lives were drastically altered in the late 15th century when Christopher Columbus landed, marking the beginning of Spanish colonization. By the 17th century, France had gained control of the western third of the island, turning it into one of the world’s wealthiest colonies through the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans on sugar and coffee plantations.
HAROLD: This cannot be dismissed, because it also defined the struggle, defined us as a people. And I, I to visualize it really. I tell folks, okay, you take a kid that was born in 1650 that kid would have had 150 years of slavery behind him or her, and would have 150 years ahead of slavery you know? So that puts a lot in perspective to understand the level of violence waged on a people for nearly 300 years, right?
MUSIC FADE UNDER
Haiti’s revolution, led by Toussaint Louverture at the turn of the 19th century, was the only successful slave uprising in history. Louverture died in French custody, and his main lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines became the first Black ruler of Haiti – and of any postcolonial state – in 1804.
HAROLD: The Haitian Revolution, forced capitalism to an introspection, to an analysis. And I go as far as to say that Haiti was the birthplace of work as we know it today. because the message we sent to the world is unacceptable to the system. We forced it to do something it was not supposed to do. 18:48 We forced an introspection. We forced a questioning. We said we are people. We are people too. We matter and to this day, this is the same message.
But for Haitians, the price of independence was steep. The country was forced to pay a crippling indemnity to France. This so-called ‘independence debt’ took 122 years to pay off and created a cycle of impoverishment, stunting Haiti’s development and preventing the majority of the population from accessing basic services like health and education.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the budding nation struggled with political instability and foreign intervention, culminating in a US occupation from 1915 to 1934.
NEWS CLIP
This era laid the groundwork for decades of economic dependency and external interference that persist to this day
HAROLD: One of the things that Dessalines did that has ripple effects to this day, and I believe, has echoes up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk. 20:00 So the first decision that Dessalines as the first leader of Haiti took was to distribute land to the formerly enslaved people. Everybody could get a patch of land to grow their crops, to take care of their, you know, their cattle, to take care of their to grow, whatever they needed to do, and this is a problem to this day. I mean, okay, of course, it creates debates in the Haitian society about land dispute, land title and all that. But I think that there’s a deeper message, and I’ve been discussing it with friends. The deeper message is that to this day, any Haitian that travels outside of Haiti or goes anywhere they could go, even on Mars, for matters and purposes, they know that back home they have a little bit of patch of land. This doesn’t make sense in capitalism, you’re not supposed to have something that doesn’t lose value over time, and you don’t need to do anything for it. You know, capitalism asks you to constantly be working, to keep whatever you have. If you don’t keep working, you’re going to lose what you have. So this has defined the Haitian character, because the Haitian knows in the back of their minds that they always have this last entrance policy, which is their land, their patch of land. So what happens is, I think that, and because when the cats and dog things was being discussed, I kind of dug in and went and listened to what the far right pundits had to say. I know they’re despicable. To me, they’re despicable, but I needed to listen to see what they had to say.
NEWS BITE
HAROLD: And it turns out that what a key problem they have with Haitians has nothing to do with what’s going on today. Their key problem with Haitians is that there are enslaved people that liberated themselves. And I think that the problem that they have with Haitians today is that they’re liberated enslaved people that also own assets. And this is an unbearable thought.
So you have the Western civilization pushing a capitalist narrative onto Haiti, and it doesn’t stick. So of course, it’s the cartoonish. I’m not saying that everything is great. I’m not saying that. Au contraire. Everything is very challenging, but there is a cartoonish depiction of Haiti that is constantly made, that is missing out on the significance of this country and its people in the world history and in the world narrative. And you can shape it, or you can try and impose it, whichever way you want. At the end of the day, time prevails.
AD BREAK
I wanted to talk to Harold more about the Haitians that stay in the country and the Haitians that leave. I also wanted to know more about why he chose to move back to the country after living in Canada for several years.
More than half a million Haitians have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the turmoil — some of them remain internally displaced, and others have left the country to find safety and security elsewhere.
HAROLD: They went down south in Chile and Brazil, and eventually made their way through the Darian gap onto Mexico and eventually the US Canada. They are driven out, of course, by misery. They are driven out, you know, for humanitarian causes and whatnot. But while we telling the stories of those who leave in very dire conditions, there are still 11 million Haitians that remain here and that are resisting and this is where my idea of being in Haiti is an act of resistance. That’s where it comes from.
HAROLD: So, um, journalism, it wasn’t my first career choice, but it runs in the family. My late mom was a prominent journalist. She was a broadcaster for 50 years. She’s the first person, along with the late Konpè Filo her colleague, to have introduced Creole into newscast in Haiti, essentially making news, and especially international news, accessible to the poorest people in the country. And as such, she got into the crosshair of the dictatorship of Bébé Doc and got thrown in exile.
Harold is referring here to the former president Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed ‘Baby Doc’, who was personally involved in many of the crimes committed by his government, including arresting hundreds of journalists and opposition voices and torturing several of them.
Harold’s mother, Liliane Pierre Paule and Harold’s soon to be father were forced into exile in Venezuela before eventually moving to Montreal where Harold was born. Just weeks after Bebe Doc fled Haiti on February 7, 1986 after a mass popular uprising, Harold’s mom returned to Haiti and brought him along with her.
HAROLD: She was greeted like a superhero. You know, people were cheering her.
Harold spent the next 15 years in Haiti. He eventually went back to Montreal where he went to university, had kids and started a life, before returning to Haiti in 2015. He has since worked with international media outlets to focus on Haiti’s ongoing crisis, leveraging his deep understanding of the socio-political landscape to shed light on the complex issues facing the country today.
These issues are set to get even more complicated under the Trump administration. During his campaign, the US president-elect suggested he would revoke protected legal status of Haitians. This is a designation that protects people from countries like Haiti that are deemed too dangerous to return to from deportation, but does not allow permanent legal status in the US.
HAROLD: With a new Trump administration that is anti Haitian, you know, they understand that they’re not welcome anymore. The US has a problem today, which is they need bodies. They need people to do work because their system is crumbling into itself if they cannot support their economy without people, they need bodies to come and do the work. So this is an issue for them, and they need us more than we need them in that sense, and because of all the crazy politics going on in the US, you know, it goes back and forth, and now, you know, the like the far right is going to come after Haitians and ask for them to be deported or put them in marginal situation, where it will be very in precarious conditions, you know, in in there. So to me, it’s all tied, but there is one key thing that it doesn’t affect. It’s the Haitian character.
In 2003, Haiti’s then President Jean Bertrand Aristide began proceedings to pursue $22 billion in restitution from its former colonizer, based on the independence debt having been agreed under duress. But Aristide was forced out by a US, France and Canada-backed coup in 2004, and the new government abandoned the restitution claim within weeks. Critics say there has been a systematic erosion of democracy in Haiti ever since.
Here in the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently ruled out paying reparations for the country’s historical role in the slave trade. Instead, he says he wants to focus on today’s challenges. I asked Harold where he thinks Haiti fits within the wider discussions of reparations today — and whether that’s still something Haitians are pursuing. Here’s what he said.
HAROLD: Haiti is the poster child of the necessity for reparation. And why is that? It’s because it was the first, and just like Haiti had been the first in many, many things, but Haiti was the first experiment of neoliberalism or Neo colonialism, so like, how do you keep the formerly enslaved people enslaved? And by literally stroking our our pride and say, well, listen, you owe us money. You’re gonna pay us that money. You owe us money for lost property. But we were not property. And while France was boasting for over 150 years that they are the land of, you know, human rights, they got us to pay that shameful debt for 150 years, we were done paying it in the 50s.
In 2022, Harold took part in a New York Times investigation which estimated that the repayment of the debt had cost the Haitian economy $115 billion. That could have allowed the country to develop an economy comparable to the Dominican Republic today. His own grandmother personally participated in paying off the debt.
HAROLD: She was the last generation that paid it, but we are paying we are paying it today in terms of what it costs our economy over time. One thing that was very clear, because that was a connection made, is that Haitian coffee producers work to finance the Eiffel Tower, because the Eiffel Tower is perhaps the the biggest symbol of that imposter, the biggest symbol of that shameful Debt, because it was the fruit of the money paid by Haiti. So normally today, you know, I mean, France may not want to do this out of principle or because they may like say to themselves that it’s a remote thing, but in reality, if they wanted to have a gentleman agreement about it, they could have shared the proceeds of the Eiffel Tower with the Haitian people. There’s nothing that would have prevented them from that, if they were truthful to themselves about it, you know. And then again, France will come and say, oh, you know, you have a bunch of corrupt regimes. We don’t want to hand out the money just to anybody. But it’s not that. That’s not the problem, because when the Haitians were ripped away from Africa, especially from the Dalma, and that’s why it’s important to put things where they happened. The majority of Haitians they come from Benin. Even the president of Benin knows that, and he knows, not only he knows, but he’s a big, he’s a big, he’s a big defender of Haiti and he believes that Haiti’s and Benin’s history go hand in hand. We were ripped away from there in majority. We didn’t choose, you know, we didn’t choose to come to America. We were enslaved for 300 years, and we broke free and we became independent, but they made us paid that for 150 years, right? And today, yes, we’re the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, of course. But if you think about it for two seconds, you understand where that comes from. So therefore, you know we understand that this is not what defines us.
Earlier this year, Kenyan police officers arrived on the island as part of a US-backed multinational law enforcement mission. US President Joe Biden said it would ‘bring much-needed relief to Haitians’, but given the record of previous international missions, Haitians can be forgiven for feeling wary.
HAROLD: Foreign interventions are almost as old as sliced bread for us here … What is the key subdivision? It’s something you’re not going to necessarily see written places. But when you look at Haitian society, there are fundamental divisions, right? One of them is, what do we call Creole versus Maroon. So Creole are cosmopolitan folks like me. You know, they’re like, more international, they’re out there. And you have, then the majority, which is of Maroon descent, which were former runaway slaves that went into the mountains. Because, by the way, Haiti means mountain land, because 95% of the country is mountains.
So out of the 500,000 enslaved people back in 1804, that we had, a majority of them had actually ran away into mountains, into their today’s peasants. So there’s been kind of an agreement between these two fundamental subdivisions of the Haitian society in how they will interface with the world.
So, Boyer who was the first president to oversee the whole island back then, before the Dominican independence, they call this agreement between these two subdivisions the way consensus, which allowed for the coffee producers who actually paid for the Eiffel Tower right in majority, to have people, let’s say like me, that interface with the world to export their goods and get them the money. And then what happened with globalization and what happened with the mass production of goods is that to for certain people, there’s, been a reversal of that consensus. So folks like me dealing with descendants of maroons, today’s peasants, they were importing for them now, because Haiti, as went from one of the most lucrative colony in terms of production to one of the biggest importers in the area, in the region of goods and services, right? So, as such what that did is that once you understand, once you understand that you have this composition of the population, you understand also its interaction to the world. And what happens is that because of 300 years of enslavement, all right, Haitians never erase their culture. They never accepted to be defined by foreign culture. They accepted to integrate it to their roots, which includes voodoo, right, which includes a reading of the world and they understood also how much their own revolution carried to the world. So that defines them, right?
So interventions want to do what? They want, to impose a world order into a different reading of what the world is about, and it creates tension. So when you have people, whether it’s blue helmets, whether it’s the Americans, whether it’s Kenyans, they’re coming with a reading of what order should be, and then what they find is insurgency. Because the security crisis you’re seeing today it’s not just your run of the mill criminal. You know, you have a whole system that is standing against all the folks that are trying to do so, in a sense, if you live here, you understand all of these things. But if you take a Kenyan and you bring him in, first thing, and as it’s been reported by Reuters, they will want to convert you. They’ll be like, well, your first problem is voodoo. You need to fix this. So you’re like, but wait a minute. That wasn’t part of the UN mandate, that wasn’t part of the Security Council mandate. Oh well, we’re sending officers, and they need to do something, and then they couldn’t do it, and they’re like, but we don’t know who to shoot, or we don’t know what to do. And then you’re like, well, perhaps you need to learn the culture, and perhaps you need to understand what the matter is, and perhaps you need to also know how we need to be helped.
Over the years, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank have pushed for economic liberalization, often at the cost of local industries and social services in Haiti. I asked Harold whether this has translated into an emergence of more local grassroots movements that are responding to local needs. Here’s what he said.
HAROLD: So the word I’m gonna say I don’t like that word. And my late mom she hated that word, too, but for lack of a better one, Haitians are very resilient. And to understand it, we’ve explored it in the discussion already, you have to understand that for a peasant that lives in a remote town of Haiti, which are there are many of, not much has changed over the last 200 years. You know, if anything, as I initially stated, you went from a consensus where they were producing to the world to now where they’re importing from the world. And this is what the structural adjustments of the IMF did.
Structural adjustments are essentially a set of economic reforms that a country must adhere to in order to secure a loan from the IMF or the World Bank.
HAROLD: For instance, a key example. Key example, rice. Haitians did not use to eat rice every day, but thanks to structural adjustment, that said, Hey, why don’t you import rice from the US? You know, we have massive subsidies. So we have massive subsidies for our farmers. They have all this rice to dump somewhere. How about you buy it for the cheap? But we’re like, we all make, we already make rice. We have the Artibonite Valley. That’s why it does. It makes one of the best rices. They’re like, No, you don’t, you can’t compete with them. They have all this massive amount of rice we’re gonna give you for the cheap. And this is how Haitians started to eat, quote, unquote, the Miami rice. And they eat it every day. To this day, they eat it every day.
So when you have that, you realize that, of course, the majority are subjected to these structural adjustments. It also affected the resilience, the very resilience, of the Haitian state, in the sense that it led to the destructions of pretty much all the state institutions of Haiti. Because back in the days, I remember when I was a kid, you had everything, you know, you had the national flour mill. You had, you know, you made your own cement. There were so many industries. You made your own sugar, like you could produce and sustain yourself. This is what’s different today. All these industries, have been literally wiped out by globalization, right? They’ve been wiped out by the market, and we’re left now to fend for ourselves. Like the drama today, precisely when you lose an airport or you have attacks on the ports, is that it affects directly the breadbasket of the Haitians.
So during starvation, there’s hunger. Half of the population today is facing, is facing hunger. But perhaps it would not have been that situation 30 years ago, because before we did the structural adjustment imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, if we had not made these adjustments, perhaps we would be more solid, you know, as a population, we could provide for ourselves, but now we are a pure product of the world, right? We’re consuming, we’re consuming, we’re consuming, but there’s reaction to it. And yes, there are pockets of resistance throughout the country about, you know, how do we get back to our roots? How do we get back to eat healthier? How do we reinstate our national production right in a world that is also seeking itself and then, and then you see what’s going on in the fight between all the big powers, and you realize, okay, maybe we should not be relying so much on the supply chain, you know, maybe we should be making our own things, right? So this is a debate that is happening privately in Haiti, but it’s there … So again, you know, that’s where I kind of try and bring it back to the essential. Haitians are finding their ways. It’s not easy. It’s actually very, very hard, but they are.
Speaking to Harold, it became clear the level of hostility Haitians face and the violence that has and continues to be inflicted upon them from all angles. I wanted to know: do Haitians feel alone in this world?
HAROLD: That’s an excellent question. I think the world is going through its own set of revelations to itself, right? I mean, I’ve seen, you know, many people in the US, after the elections of the election of Trump, to claim that, you know, well, the US is assuming what it is and it’s a strange situation for Haiti to be at the centre of this. I mean, think about it for a second. You have two billionaires calling out Haiti names, you know, saying that we’re eating cats and dogs. But why this obsession? Or what is this? The obsession of the far right into Haiti and and, and we, we’ve discussed it in in the conversation, and then it’s about what we actually own and how it cannot be taken away from us, right? So Haitians are going through our own set of crises, and it’s not nice or looking good, you know, out on the world stage, but I think that we are living in a time where extremisms are being fanned.
It’s almost to the point that you feel there’s a cycle where, 100 years ago we were having, we would have had this pretty much the same conversation and and the Western Hemisphere being in crisis unto itself, because, listen, what’s going in the US is happening in Canada, it’s happening in France. It’s happening in the UK, you’ve had the Brexit like you have this quest where folks are trying to define themselves vis a vis all these changes that they’re called, they are struggling to embrace or to understand, right? So seeing from here, it looks a lot like there’s a lot of agitation, but at the same time it’s it looks also very remote, because while we’re dealing with our set of problems, we also have our core values that we we stand by, you know, firmly and and, no matter what’s going on in the US, I mean, again, they have a they need people right now. So whether they open their gates or not, people will find a way, because the economy is attracting people, because they need people to work, you know. So whether it’s Haitians, whether it’s Venezuelans, whether it’s Chinese, whether it’s, you know, Indians, whoever is going to go there, they’re going to go get in that funnel that will attract them in, hopefully good conditions, but likely in difficult conditions. So it’s going to happen, but at the same time, the very people who are attracting them are the one pushing them away, you know, and it’s about, you know, making things great, great again. You know, bringing them back to a past where they were not threatened in their existence, or feel that they’re threatened in their existence. And whether it’s Canada or France or the UK or Spain or wherever like you go, you see the same debates happening, but at the end of the day, you know, at the end of the day, the reality will eventually prevail. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to go through rocky years. I think we’re going to be going in through rocky years, you know, with whether it’s the Trump administration or where, wherever else, but the world has pretty much been like that indefinitely and and a tidbit from Haiti is that we’ve seen worse. We’ve seen worse before, and we’ve survived worse,
One of the things I enjoy the most in Haiti is the established wisdom. Because Haitians have a lot of Proverbs, and I’m just gonna give you one. Just gonna give you one. The late Paul Farmer used a lot, even called his book like that, Mountains beyond Mountains, deamoines, deamoines. So the reality for a peasant today standing there in his ground, maybe in a blackout, maybe without access to core services, to basic services, is looking and it’s like, it’s not simple, it’s complicated. That’s what it means, … there’s another one, ‘Haiti est une terre glisse’, which means Haiti is a slippery land.
So this is a secure knowledge that spans at least 500 years. Because don’t forget that kid in 1650, the only thing that that kid knew was enslavement, slavery. So it forces you into putting things in perspective, and that’s why I tell folks what’s going on in America can be worrisome, but at the same time it is a stress test for American institutions. And they either succeed it or fail it. Perhaps the whole the rest of the world is too dependent on US policies. But the reality is that for them, it’s just another regular day. So this is what I’m trying to say. It’s like in Haiti, you find at every turn, at every corner the wisdom and the resilience to persist and eventually prevail.
That was Harold Isaac. Since I spoke to him on November 14th, the situation in Haiti remains extremely volatile and dangerous. The UN and several foreign embassies have since evacuated their staff with most foreign embassies now effectively closed. Harold is safe and says he is hanging in there. He’s shared some reliable sources for up-to-date reporting, which you can find via the links in our show notes.
Thanks for listening to this episode. If you’re new here, New Internationalist is an independent media co-operative based in the UK. We’re proud to be co-owned by our readers and staff. We’ve been publishing award-winning, in-depth analysis on global progressive issues since 1973. We’re really excited to present this new podcast series to you.
If you liked the show and you want us to make more episodes like this, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts – it really helps other people to find us. And if you don’t already, please consider becoming a subscriber. You’ll gain access to our latest issue on Disinformation and our upcoming issues on the arms trade and on Indigenous Rights in Australia, along with access to our full 50 year digital archive.
Listeners to the show can also get 20% off their first year of a print or digital subscription to New Internationalist by using the promo code THEWORLDUNSPUN at checkout.
This episode was hosted and produced by Maxine Betteridge-Moes. I’m the digital editor at New Internationalist. Co-editors of the magazine are Amy Hall, Bethany Rielly, Conrad Landin and Nick Dowson. Our editorial assistant is Paula Lacey.
Our theme music has been produced by Samuel Rafanell-Williams and our logo design is by Mari Fouz. Audio editing is by Nazik Hamza. Special thank you to the folks at Impress, the UK’s independent media regulator for helping us get this podcast off the ground.
Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.