When in 2018 Donald Trump allegedly referred to Haiti as one of the world’s “shithole countries” from which immigration is per se undesirable, the deranged slogan “Haiti Is Great Already” promptly went viral on social media, turning up with clockwork predictability on T-shirts worn by various contrarian celebrity goons. While it might be conceded from the outset that “shithole” is not and should not be encompassed within the vocabulary of international diplomacy — Metternich, for example, is not known to have used the term — we would at the same time be loath to concede that the general sentiment properly expressed, that Haiti is the most failed of all failed states, is entirely without merit. It is, in fact, possible to assert an axiom in global affairs: No good news comes out of Haiti. To contemplate even in outline the history of this unhappiest of lands is to feel the dead weight of 20 decades of catastrophe, as if the god of mischief had chosen Haiti as a 28,000-square-kilometer proving ground for a grotesque experiment in just how much suffering one country can endure in the space of 200 years. In the aboriginal Taíno language, Haiti’s name means “land of high mountains.” But Haitians call their country by another name, “Ayiti-Cheri,” or “Haiti, my darling,” intoned more in pity than in pride, the way one might console a luckless friend, a feverish child, a grieving beloved.
Haiti, my darling. There is no word for your sorrows.
Then again, a nation parked squarely over a tectonic rift, caressed by hurricanes, subject to sequential spasms of drought and flood, earthquakes and epidemics, and that commenced its political life with a bloodcurdling occult ritual was never likely to chart a temperate course through the centuries. One stormy August night in 1791, the sky wreathed in tropical lightning and the mountains crowned by thunderheads, an African-born slave insurrectionary and Vodou priest called Dutty Boukman gathered his followers in the spectral gloom of the Bois Caïman forest, held his knife to the throat of a pig, and swore a solemn oath on behalf of all noirs to “throw away the image of the god of the blancs who thirst for our tears,” the same white god that had deracinated his people, turned their backs to the colonial lash of the French, and grown fat on their forced labor. The oath was sealed with a communion of the still-warm pig’s blood.
There followed the Haitian Revolution against the French, mutually pitiless (Napoleon lost more men trying, and failing, to reclaim Haiti than he lost at Waterloo), then several firsts: In 1804, newly independent Haiti became the first free country of the Caribbean, the world’s first majority-black republic, the first country ever established by a slave revolt, and, accordingly, the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery. It was also one of the richest places on the planet, its exports exceeding in value those of the new United States. But the superlatives henceforth count only on the debit side of the ledger: As of 2024, Haiti is the poorest and least developed country in the Western Hemisphere, with levels of crime, violence, poverty, child mortality, and political and societal ataxia sufficient to make a professional writer of dystopian fiction think twice before stretching his readers’ suspension of disbelief beyond all reasonable tension. Haiti offers a rare example of anthropological regression, a historical rewind. By the time the rule of the scowling, sorcerous François “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to an end in 1971, Haiti’s exports were less than they had been in 1791. (Papa Doc’s oafish and adipose son and successor Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, meanwhile, proved to be his father’s superior solely in terms of the scale of his kleptomania.)
The Duvaliers were preceded — and, indeed, succeeded — by a venal carousel of village despots, ensuring that Haiti’s history from birth to date describes only a cataract of calamities. Between 1843 and 1915 alone, Haiti reverberated to the tumult of over 100 revolts, coups, countercoups, and civil wars. The United States, which arrived in 1915 and left in 1934, attempted to impose a rough draft of order, by methods alternately brutal and benign, most practically by building 1,200 miles of well-maintained roads. Today, in 2024, less than 630 poorly maintained miles of this network remain. To describe Haiti as a failed state seems in these circumstances somehow inadequate. More accurately, the birthplace of the zombie is now itself a zombie state, resoundingly dead as a civic and national endeavor, yet still animate, still screaming, still hungry. Ogun, the Vodou god of war and destruction, unleashed into the storm by Boukman in 1791, remains predatory and at large, a looming shadow cast from 200 hundred years before. And into Haiti’s cauldron of man-made disasters and mismanagements, nature, not to be outdone, periodically throws a few mega-disasters of her own: The 2010 earthquake killed 300,000 people. To consider Haitian history is a bit like speed-reading the messier parts of the Old Testament, right down to the genocidal prophets. This is a country where would-be presidents such as rebel leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier actively encourage rumors about their predilection for burning people alive, a USP to which Western politicians are yet to catch on. Fittingly, the machete, not the machine gun, remains emblematical of Haitian politics, a cipher for the pre-industrial psychology that bedevils Haitian society and resists, almost at the level of the neuron, any and all attempts at progress.
The response of the international community to Haiti’s latest round of ruination is the usual shopworn litany of misplaced pieties: promises of aid (to be immediately misappropriated and mismanaged); promises of money in return for reforms that will never happen; allegations and counter-allegations of historical responsibility (the West has simultaneously intervened too much and too little); and, inevitably, shrill demands for the already super-pervious borders of the United States to become still more pervious to the tidal waves of refugees. In the final analysis, there is no logical reason to conclude that the plan to send in a contingent of Kenyan police officers (famous for their discipline and incorruptibility) to restore Haitian civilization will prove any more or less meritorious than the results wrought by the U.N. peacekeeping force in 2017 that left Haiti with a cholera epidemic (brought by peacekeepers from Nepal) and widespread allegations of mass sexual abuse. Is there such a thing as a nation, a people, beyond our aid, foredoomed to disaster? Haiti is as close to the mark as makes us shudder.
Haiti began in sorrow and sacrifice, with the knife of a slave glittering in the tropical lightning. There is a literal fearful symmetry here: It’s said that just before fleeing the National Palace on Feb. 7, 1986, for luxurious French exile, Baby Doc Duvalier ordered the sacrifice of two newborn male infants in a Vodou ceremony intended to curse his successors and guarantee what we have already said and surmised — that no good news would ever come out of Haiti. The country’s history is bookended by superstition and sealed at both ends in blood.
Haiti, my darling. You are better left alone.
READ MORE on Haiti:
Haiti: A Tourist’s Nightmare
Can We Now Admit Trump Was Right About Haiti?
