A Dream Where Haiti is Born Again

I saw the very first trickle on Thursday and I said to myself that if the Haitians leave Port-au-Prince it will be very good for them and bad for the giant international corporations (otherwise known as giant leaches). If you look at history, migration is one of the most important things that change the future.

Haiti was historically an agricultural country with most people living in the country and in towns and in very small cities. As has already been reported in Common Dreams comments (thanks, folks) the population of Port-au-Prince was artificially ballooned in the last few decades as a result of the huge international corporations forcing (at gunpoint, basically) the Haitians to lower their import tariffs on sugar cane, coffee, and on other agricultural and other goods. After the tariffs were cut to shreds, the local farmers could no longer compete with the huge international agricultural conglomerates which dumped large quantities of food and other items onto the island, so many of those farmers then moved to Port-au-Prince, where a relatively small subset of them obtained employment in sweatshops and where the majority of them became unemployed and dirt poor.

The interesting thing about devastation is that it completely changes both the physical and the economic landscapes. The massive international corporations are now going to be even more reluctant than they already were to invest in the "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere," In fact, they aren't going to be willing to invest much of anything at all for several years.

At the same time, Haitians are going to be even more poor than they already were (yes, poverty can always get worse) and a much greater percentage of them than before will not be able to afford imported food. When you combine the fact that they are moving back to the country with the changed economic reality, you can deduce that the Haitians will reestablish small farms and then simply use them to feed themselves and their immediate neighbors, thus removing themselves from having to buy imported food.

It is in fact absurd for people in a lush tropical country to have to pay money for imported food, and of course it is absurd for anyone to work in a sweatshop, so a silver lining in this catastrophe is that Haitians who now live away from the corporate and Western-dominated Port-au-Prince will enjoy better lives than before.

Finally, it should be noted that both the Cuban Revolution and the original Haitian Revolution, objectively and obviously speaking two of the most successful revolutions in history, were successfully generated from the rural countryside as opposed to from the main towns which were under foreign control to one extent or another. Since history often does repeat itself, this means that there is a distinct possibility that in the coming years Haitians living outside of Port-au-Prince will form a real resistance to the control of Port-au-Prince by international corporations and by right wing foreigners.

It is interesting to note that shortly after the Revolution in the early 1800’s, Haiti was divided into two: north and south. The north was all country and very small towns. In south Haiti, even after the Revolution, there were political and even small military conflicts between those in control of the small city of Port-au-Prince and those living outside of that destined to be destroyed city.

The above was in response to this article.
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