Haiti's Nightmare and the Lessons of History
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
"The Haitian mind, you know, is just differ- ent," says Robert McCandless, a Washing- "ton lobbyist described as "the most vocif- erous advocate" of the civilians and military leaders behind the...
...It is inherently predatory: it has always operated against the nation it claims to represent.10 It is a closed world over which civil society has no hold...
...Yet neither his ruthlessness nor U.S...
...3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the World," Cimarr6n...
...Congress argued vehemently that recognition of Haitian independence would encourage blacks elsewhere to revolt...
...76-77 (1991), pp...
...In sheer Mussolinian fashion, the Duvalierist state aimed to become "total...
...Duvalier learned the lesson: he gradually discharged most senior officers, but he relied heavily on their successors to build the most centralized power Haiti had ever seen...
...Duties and charges multiplied, varying in form from additional stamps on official papers, transcripts or documents, to booths set up for no other purpose than the enrichment of a local strongman...
...who collected their market taxes and the chkfseksyon (section chief) who acted as the sole representative of the three branches of government in the deep countryside...
...The Duvalierists also declared open season on the Treasury...
...Successive Haitian governments also heavily taxed food and other necessities such as flour, oil, candles, kerosene and matches...
...None of these facts should, however, mask the fact that Duvalierism has its roots in the very socioeconomic organization set up by the Haitian elites and in the centralization of the state and army brought about by the Marines...
...The occupation failed to strengthen civil society, but it did strengthen the arm of the state...
...Right-wing allegations to the contrary, Aristide's presidency showed the lowest level of human rights violations by the state in recent Haitian history...
...Under the successive leadership of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they defeated Napoleon's army after 12 years of struggle...
...But Duvalier could achieve his aim only because of the role played by the state in Haitian history since independence...
...The rapid spread of light-assembly industries, subcontracted to U.S...
...The temptation to use this "lumpen" for political leverage is almost irresistible.1 4 But as the Duvalierists demonstrated-staging a made-for-T.V...
...More important than the elites' uneven competence in NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 48REPORT ON HAITI French are the number of times that privileged Haitians make a point of using French, and the fact that the use of French in the school and court systems denies majority participation...
...The first leg of that strategy was economic...
...Their first-and only unquestionable-gesture as a people was in 1791-1804, when they stood en masse against slavery and French colonialism...
...See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "La lumpenisation d'une crise," Les cahiers du vendredi...
...Haiti's Nightmare and the Lessons of History 1. James Ridgeway, "Family Business...
...Taxes collected in the urban markets and at the customhouses-and ultimately paid by the peasants-provided the bulk of government revenues...
...policymakers find Haiti hard to explain, mainly for two related reasons...
...Second, class remains the capital taboo of U.S...
...Few have bothered to ask how or why rural people can be "mounn andewb" in a country that is 70% rural...
...3-12...
...1837...
...Like the U.S...
...It also killed them at a much faster pace through mistreatment and harsh labor...
...The colony imported many more enslaved Africans than most plantation societies of the Americas, including the United States...
...Relations between the state and civil society have deteriorated to the point that any government, regardless of its popularity, can maintain itself only by force of arms, at least until the state gains some legitimacy...
...13 VoL XXVII, No 4 JAN/FEB 199449 I m VoL XXVII, No 4 JANIFEB 1994 49REPORT ON HAITI Thus, the cadets of the Military School set up by the Marines took part in the removal of President Elie Lescot (1941-1946), and in the nomination and removal of his successor, Dumarsais Estim6 (19461950), before ultimately placing one of their own, Paul Magloire (1950-1956), in the presidency...
...New Perspectives on the Caribbean, Vol...
...Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, p. 103...
...At the center of the system stood an all-powerful and personalized executive branch that dominated all the activities of the state, from military training to the writing of national school exams...
...president to back down-this lumpen can cut many ways...
...Only a tiny minority within the elites can be said to be truly bilingual in both French and Haitian Creole...
...As traders, politicians and state employees, they lived off the peasants' labor...
...But it did not and could not mean the end of Haiti's nightmare...
...Rich people, they believed, made profit only by buying and selling, usually with the connivance of the state...
...It is in the class structure of the country, in the military organization of a society at war with itself, in a fiscal system that discourages production and investment, and finally, in sociocultural elitism...
...The conversion to a non-Duvalierist regime is only one of the transitions that Haiti now faces...
...Indeed, Duvalierism invented very few formulas of power...
...advice to bypass the peasantry, Jean-Claude Duvalier's regime tried to take advantage of this urban labor force to spark an "economic revolution...
...he first outcome was largely unintentional, the second deliberate...
...If Duvalierism impedes the advent of the rule of law, the weakness of democratic institutions, in turn, keeps Duvalierism alive...
...More important than bilingualism per se are the number of times an elite child is told not to speak Creole...
...By the time Magloire left, the army had become the final arbiter of Haitian politics and its dominant factions imposed the presidency of Franqois "Papa Doc" Duvalier...
...ian folk religion-referred to as "vodoun" mainly by non-practitioners-can easily be found among the elites, in spite of their formal adherence to Christianity...
...The economic returns were meager...
...First, for most of them, as for many other Americans, history is rarely a serious explanation-especially history that runs deep...
...In the midst of that popular agitation, Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced into exile in February, 1986, leaving behind a much more depleted country and much more desperate elites...
...Whereas the first Haitian army, because it was born of the war against the French, could claim a patriotic mission, the Haitian Garde was created specifically to fight Haitians...
...The direct and hidden taxes imposed on that peasant crop accounted for from 60 to 90% of government revenues from the late 1800s to the first half of this century...
...Haitian leaders vainly tried to restore the plantation economy immediately after independence...
...Yet in 1870, less than a thousand Port-auPrince residents had the right to vote...
...In 1891, import and export duties accounted for 98.2% of state income...
...Meanwhile, luxuries consumed by the elites entered the country free of charge...
...Haiti remains, of course, a "weak state" in academic parlance...
...9. See World Bank, World Tables (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins & World Bank, 1992) and L'Etat du monde (Paris: La Dbcouverte, 1993...
...6. Michael Hooper, Duvalierism without Duvalier (New York: National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Americas Watch, 1986), p. 10...
...Congress by Haiti specialists or policymakers-especially supporters of the authoritarian status quo-is that just policies may not be "realistic...
...The intense economic polarization and the unmediated distance between the regime and the swollen urban masses contributed to urban uproars in the mid-1980s...
...In this way, the first independent state of the Americas-where "Freedom" meant freedom for everyone-was born...
...To be sure, in 1971 U.S...
...1992...
...Zenglen," had terrorized Haitians a century before the Duvaliers...
...See U.S...
...They encountered the state mainly through two dubious characters: the presept...
...army doctors reportedly revived a comatose Papa Doc, lengthening by decades the agony of average Haitians...
...Death and ruin were foretold in these choices...
...Then, he closed the Military School...
...Urbanites, in turn, often refer to rural dwellers as "mounn andewb" (outsiders...
...the urban classes reproduced themselves by sucking up the state and the peasantry...
...Analyses that go back a decade, let alone a 46 N4CIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS >tJ >z a u NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46REPORT ON HAITI The most dangerous and resilient explanation is the idea that the Haitian political quagmire is due to some congenital disease of the Haitian mind...
...Simply put, the Haitian elites made a choice early on that the maintenance of their lifestyle was more important than the survival of the majority...
...The 1915-1934 U.S...
...Nicaragua Aujourd'hui, Vol...
...2. National Public Radio, November 1, 1993...
...rational explanation and therefore to solutions that could be both just and practical...
...3 The most dangerous and resilient is the idea that the Haitian political quagmire is due to some congenital disease of the Haitian mind...
...It did so by "pacifying" the countryside-by "modernizing" the so-called rural police (the infamous chkf seksyon), and by creating a new Haitian army, the very one now at the center of the crisis...
...House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Situation in Haiti and U.S...
...Seen from that perspective, the Haitian state has never represented governance for the people, let alone by the people...
...Jonathan Brown, The History and Present Condition of St...
...political analysis, a divide not to be mentioned-except as a measure of income...
...revolution, it was a victory against colonialism...
...8. Historians regard the legislative elections of 1870 in Port-auPrince as one of the few legitimate electoral victories of nineteenth-century Haiti...
...But it was ill-timed precisely for these reasons...
...A second transition is the passage to the rule of law...
...The word leta in Creole means both "the state" and "a bully...
...For a century and half, successive governments have prolonged the agony...
...Policy, Hearing before the subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations...
...Even sympathetic U.S...
...At the Voi XXVII, No 4 JAN/FEB 199447 Vot XXVII, No 4 JAN/FEB 1994 47REPORT ON HAITI turn of the century, for example, import duties on a pair of opera glasses were equal to those on five gallons of kerosene...
...However crude the system of checks and balances, it limited the ambitions of the generals...
...The Haitian victory exemplified the best of the age of revolutions...
...Regardless of the deals that led to Jean-Claude Duvalier's departure, the end of that dictatorship was an obvious victory for the Haitian people...
...protest against the landing of the USS Harlan County that forced a U.S...
...It foreshadowed the independence of Latin America and the demise of African-American slavery...
...They reflect the tendency to resort to exceptionalism...
...Military centralization afforded full protection to the rulers of the day and removed the tenuous right of the majority to revolt...
...Rather, it systematically codified old-fashioned practices of the Haitian state...
...Up to now, indeed, this force has never fought anyone but Haitians...
...The minor improvements did not lessen the elites' historical aversion to production...
...If in retrospect the Haitian revolution appears to have been a failure, it is in part because Western powers-notably France, England, the United States and the Vatican-wanted it to fail...
...In systematizing both the extractive and repressive power of the state, Duvalierism gravely worsened the Haitian situation...
...The urban elites countered with a dual strategy, set up during the presidencies of Alexandre P6tion (1807-1818) and Jean-Pierre Boyer (18181843...
...So did its fiscal dependence on custom revenues...
...If prompted and willing, they may add, however, that they are also "servants of the gods...
...To wit, as befits occupied territories, the infamous chbfseksyon is a member of the army...
...In 1791, European powers held Caribbean colonies and accepted African slavery as a matter of fact...
...The fundamental cultural divide is not based on huge differences in cultural repertoire but on the use of those differences that exist to create a social wall that few can cross...
...In August, 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue revolted...
...The political cost was heavy: peasants, at times bound in ropes, provided forced labor for these projects...
...That choice, in turn, meant using the state both to suck up the economic output of the majority and to stop the majority from crying out too loudly...
...Civilities that had bonded otherwise divided citizens tumbled under the weight of a totalitarian apparatus which made political polarization a fact of daily life...
...Up until recently, the various charges on coffee amounted to a 40% tax on peasant income in a country where, after almost 200 years of independence, the government has yet to collect income tax from most merchants, civil servants, or middle-class employees...
...In 1842, more than 90% of government revenues were collected at the customhouses...
...I mean they don't understand why we react to things that they don't, and why we don't react to things that they do...
...Yet class structure, rather than mere income, and history, rather than the immediate past, are at the roots of the current Haitian crisis...
...That countryside was-and remains-a class colony of the urban elites...
...5 Coffee, Haiti's main agricultural export, was the favorite target of these elites and the centerpiece of Haiti's fiscal policy...
...7. U.S...
...support fully explains the longevity of Franqois Duvalier's dictatorship, the fact his son Jean-Claude lasted even longer, nor that Duvalierism is now going through a revival A cadet of a sort, seven years after JeanClaude Duvalier went into exile...
...Individuals who were not Duvalierists-some of whom had voted for Aristide-honestly believed that their lives were in danger...
...The Executive and its proxies also took control of the import and distribution of a number of basic commodities, such as oil, flour, matches and tobacco...
...Port-au-Prince and its immediate environs now counts anywhere between 1.2 and 1.8 million people split between two extremes: an increasingly nervous minority, desperate to hold on to its privileges, and an anonymous mass that has nothing left to lose and that occupies front stage by sheer virtue of its size...
...The United States provided most of Haiti's imports but bought little in return...
...The two somewhat overlap, while in other ways, they cancel each other out...
...Similarly, representatives of the southern states in the U.S...
...It became easier for would-be dictators to control the state...
...2, No...
...That systematic backing turned them into the most feared militia of Haitian history...
...6 Meanwhile, the number of luxury cars in the streets of Portau-Prince reached an all-time high...
...Their second national gesture was in 1990, when a 67% majority elected Father Aristide to the presidency in the country's first free elections...
...The elimination of known Duvalierists or officers is no guarantee whatsoever that Duvalierist-type behavior within the state apparatus will not immediately resurge...
...4. The most frequent warning to the U.S...
...First, the Marines reinforced the fiscal and economic power of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, notably by centralizing the customhouses...
...Ambassador Clinton Knox personally supervised the transition from one Duvalier to another...
...Such a conclusion makes Haiti's political dilemma immune to Michel-Rolph Trouillot is a professor of anthropology and the director of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power, and History at Johns Hopkins University...
...Marine occupiers professed a desire to create a U.S.-style middle class...
...firms, only reinforced polarization...
...Export duties in fact increased in relation to the value of merchandise, imposing an even greater burden on the average consumer...
...The economic response of the Haitian elites to the emergence of an independent peasantry refusing to labor on the plantations guaranteed that they would get their surplus willy nilly, even if that meant squeezing the nation to death...
...Haiti's Behind-the-Scene Warriors Come out in the Open," Village Voice, October 26, 1992...
...4 As soothing-and rewarding-as such analyses may be to their proponents in Port-au-Prince and Washington, if history reveals anything it is the very extent to which the stakes have long been different for various groups in Haiti...
...orig...
...market...
...The state reproduced itself by sucking up the peasantry...
...reporters: "we are not talking about rational people...
...25-27...
...Most often, they were kept at bay legally and illegally, through manipulation of election laws or through repression...
...It is, on the contrary, to acknowledge that Haitian democracy will happen in the deep hinterland or it will not exist at all...
...Two structural features emerge from this sociohistorical sketch: the total rejection of the majority by the very groups that exert political and economic control, and the role of the state as the key mechanism of both Rice farmers work the field in Haiti today...
...2 These statements rest on weak evidence...
...The elder Duvalier achieved the near destruction of Haitian civil society...
...An infamous operation suggests Duvalierism's extremes: while previous Haitian governments always fed-at least metaphorically-on Haitian sweat and blood, in the 1960s the Duvaliers and their cronies literally sold Haitian blood to the U.S...
...To be sure, in 1963 U.S...
...While Haiti was ostracized diplomatically, it also represented "the world's first experiment in neo-colonialism...
...They failed in that attempt-in part because the goal was set too late and too timidly, and in part because the occupation did little to change Haiti's economic structure...
...But old habits die hard...
...Less than 8% of the population is comfortable speaking French, a competence they acquire mainly through the school system...
...Attempts to get rid of Duvalierism by legal means have failed: the 1987 Constitution-which banished prominent Duvalierists from the political process-is a dead letter...
...Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "L'Etat prbdateur...
...At one point, Franqois Duvalier even outlawed the boy scouts...
...Culture works as a divider because of the value added to the rather small part of that repertoire that is not accessible to the majority...
...Occupation of Haiti (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1971), p. 235...
...Unfortunately, U.S...
...The majority of the former slaves, however, abhorred plantation labor and settled as small peasants on land bought or reconquered from the state or abandoned by large landowners...
...Robert E. Maguire, "Haiti's Emerging Peasant Movement," Cimarr6n...
...The Haitian Creole language registers the enormous distance between the elites and the peasantry...
...3 (1990), pp...
...Why would a few roads make them risk the hassles of manufacturing or petty-commodity production...
...To take only the example of language, all Haitians speak Haitian Creole, which evolved during the Haitian colonial period and matured in the nineteenth century...
...Hereafter, as Hans Schmidt notes, "political strongmen in Port-au-Prince were able to control the entire country more effectively than ever before...
...Impoverished peasants rushed in greater numbers to urban centers, especially the shantytowns of Port-au-Prince...
...It's doubtful that any elected official in Haiti ever received a thousand legitimate votes before the twentieth century...
...It only recognized Haitian independence almost 60 years after the fact, in 1862, when the Civil War created an unexpected need for cotton and silenced the South in Washington...
...physician Jonathan Brown who visited Haiti in the 1830s wrote: "the country is saved from utter want and political dissolution solely through the spontaneous productiveness of its soil...
...Duvalierism's legacy of extremes means that neither changes in the state apparatus nor institutional reform are enough to compel real change in Haiti...
...Aristide's own prime minister, Robert Malval, seems to agree, at least in part...
...The very aftermath of that election, however, suggests the depth of the divisions that had ripened between the two events...
...An import-export bourgeoisie, dominated by foreign nationals and unconcerned with local production, garnered profits from the labor of the peasantry...
...7 To limit the political turbulence that was an inevitable outcome of their economic designs, the Haitian elites added a second leg to their strategy...
...It was also the worst place in the world to be black...
...occupation of Haiti left the country with two poisoned gifts: a weaker civil society and a solidified state apparatus...
...They used the very isolation that the peasantry enjoyed on its small mountain plots to keep it away from the political scene...
...The elites turned the fiscal and marketing systems of the country into mechanisms that would allow them to siphon the wealth produced by the peasants...
...9 Haitian culture also registers the distance, although in complex ways...
...Haiti begot two Duvaliers...
...The negotiations concerning Aristide's return all but forgot the fact that Aristide himself was possible in part because of deep political changes in the countryside, rooted in the rural churches and the emerging peasant movement.' 5 To emphasize the peasantry as the most repressed actor on the Haitian political stage is not to fall into romanticism...
...To be sure, the first Duvalier regime exercised state repression with a swiftness hitherto unknown in Haiti...
...Second and more damaging, the occupation deliberately contributed to the centralization of political power in Port-auPrince...
...As imports rose in both quantity and value, so too did the already huge gap between the haves and the have-nots...
...Using the full power of the centralized state, the elder Duvalier formalized a system of absolute individual power...
...The methods of the dreaded Tontons Macoute-the secret police, whose members and function overlap with those of the militia-reflect the systematization of practices honed by the death squads of earlier years...
...Domingo, II (London: Frank Cass, 1971...
...the presidency of Aristide ended with a coup...
...Haitian exceptionalism takes many forms...
...he product of a revolution against slavery and colonialism, Haiti emerged in 1804 from the ashes of the French colony of SaintDomingue on the western part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola...
...1 2 The occupiers did train a few craftsmen, enlarging Haiti's small crew of urban independent producers...
...See Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation...
...More important, the Marines improved the material infrastructure of the country, most notably by overseeing the construction of roads...
...Like the French revolution, it was a revolution for social justice...
...Legitimacy of the state, in turn, requires a social contract-that is, the participation of Haiti's majority in deciding the fate of the country...
...Hans Schmidt, The U.S...
...The younger Duvalier's reckless wager on light industry added the weight of a huge, desperately poor urban underclass to this breakdown of social norms...
...Franqois Duvalier was a cunning and ruthless politician, who enjoyed the fruits of Washington's "realistic" policies at the very moment his regime seemed to run out of steam...
...That they are now in more immediate danger only exemplifies the paradoxical overlap of the two transitions...
...They considered making things a lower-class venture...
...This overlap stems from the transformations that Duvalierism imposed upon Haitian society...
...At the same time, the perception-never proven, though sincere-that President Aristide might not even try to control Port-au-Prince's masses if that human flood decided to take the law in its hands helped the coup leaders...
...Thus, while it would be wrong to suggest that elites and masses fully share the same culture, it is equally misleading to divide Haiti into two cultural spheres...
...However brutal they were, Haitian dictators of the nineteenth century knew that they might have to pay for power with their lives...
...3 (1990), p. 28...
...It could beget more or worse if the structures that bred Duvalierism remain unchanged...
...2, No...
...century, seem moot -at least until the latest exercise in myopia reveals a new disaster...
...The history of Haiti is one of sharply opposed interests, of competing visions of state and nation...
...rejection and control...
...House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights in Haiti, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights..., (1985...
...and Trouillot, "Etat et duvalierisme" in La Rbpublique haitienne...
...While the state turned inward to consolidate its control, the urban elites gravitating around that state pushed the rural majority toward the A pease margins of political society...
...More important, the government centralized the management of coffee exports and increased taxes in the process, creating new fortunes...
...lawmakers have too often failed to ask why and how less equitable solutions would prove more effective...
...Government-sponsored paramilitary groups, such as the promotion ceremony at a Haitian military school in 1939...
...Following U.S...
...They were used to "making money" as merchants or as state officials...
...Predatory policies accelerated the speed of environmental degradation...
...8 Before the Duvalier dictatorship, many peasants would not have been able to name the president...
...Not only did they-like their predecessors-misuse public 50 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 50REPORT ON HAITI funds, but they made their personal fortune the very raison d'dtre of state revenues...
...Eighty years later, as coffee exports fell during Jean-Claude Duvalier's regime, taxes on flour, sugar, petroleum, tobacco and matches provided as much as 25% of government revenues...
...More important than the elites' mixed adherence to Christianity are the number of times privileged Haitians publicly associate "vodoun" with evil, and the number of times successive governments persecuted the servants of the gods, often with zealous help from the Catholic Church...
...Thus France, England, the Netherlands and the United States traded with Haiti, but only on terms that they themselves imposed...
...House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Political Crisis in Haiti, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs..., (1988...
...Referring to McCandless' employers, he warned U.S...
...The U.S...
...The Haitian mind, you know, is just differ- ent," says Robert McCandless, a Washing- "ton lobbyist described as "the most vocif- erous advocate" of the civilians and military leaders behind the coup that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide...
...Haiti's trade dependence on coffee increased during the occupation...
...Once in a while, they joined one or another regional landowner to attack Port-auPrince, the ultimate site of power...
...But it is also because the new Haitian elites treated the rural masses pretty much the same way that the West had treated them...
...To be sure, current wavering in Washington has provided much needed fuel to the Duvalierist machine...
...its means became totalitarian...
...Similarly, practices and beliefs associated with Haitant family in front of its hut in early twentieth-century Haiti...
...5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, The Origins and Legacies of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990...
...By 1789, Saint-Domingue was arguably the most profitable colony of the Western world, with world production records for both sugar and coffee...
...Similarly, the Duvalierists systematized the extractive power of the state, multiplying the number of points at which the government could suck up money from the average citizen...
...The Haitian problem is not merely political...
...More disturbingly however, statements such as these lead us to search for the wrong kind of explanation...
...and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Etat et duvali6risme" in Gerard Barthblemy and Christian A. Girault, eds., La Rbpublique haftienne: 'tat des lieux et perspectives (Paris: Karthala, ADEC, 1993...
...Finally, by contrast to the first Haitian army whose allegiances were primarily regional, the army created by the Marines was heavily centralized...
...the 1987 elections resulted in a massacre...
...So was political instability...
...New Perspectives on the Caribbean, Vol...
...The difference in the Duvalier era was that the Volontaires de la S6curit6 Nationale (VSN) enjoyed total and official support from an all-powerful Executive...
...The Haitian high brass has been quite "rational" in pursuing its interests since 1985...
...The very peasants who subsidized the state had no say in the running of the state...
...At the same time, most peasants see themselves as Roman Catholic Christians, practice Roman Catholicism as much as possible (that is, to the extent that priests and churches are accessible), and follow the annual cycle of Roman Catholic events...
...That modified state apparatus, in turn, attacked or marginalized all the groupings and institutions of an already weak civil society: extended families, schools, neighborhoods, clergy, press, villages, trade unions, soccer teams and carnival bands...
...If "the Haitian mind" is a short-cut phrase to signify the political will of the majority, Haitians can be said to have been of one mind only twice in their history...
...Such a conclusion makes Haiti's political dilemma immune to rational explanation and therefore to solutions that could be both just and practical...
...It requires the recognition by the urban elites and their foreign partners that Haiti remains fundamentally a country of poor peasants...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 4
