Behind the Bastards - Part One: Pappa Doc and Baby Doc: Dictators of Haiti

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Robert is joined by Propaganda to discuss Pappa Doc and Baby Doc.FOOTNOTES:https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/23/archives/papa-doc-a-ruthless-dictator-kept-the-haitians-in-illiteracy-and.htmlhttp://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,870257,00.htmlhttps://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/duvalier-francois-papa-doc-1907-1971/https://archive.org/details/dominicanrepubli00metz/page/462/mode/2up?view=theaterhttps://books.google.com/books?id=wFrAOqfhuGYC&pg=PA391#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttps://archive.org/details/haitiduvaliersth00abbo/page/8/mode/2upCharles River Editors. Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier: The Lives and Legacies of Haiti’s Most Notorious Rulers (pp. 15-16). Charles River Editors. Kindle Edition.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/jean-claude-duvalier-ex-haitian-leader-known-as-baby-doc-dies-at-63/2014/10/04/ecdaa2bc-4be3-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jean-claude-duvalier-former-president-haiti-who-brutalised-his-opponents-and-was-prevented-returning-back-country-9776019.htmlhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/terror-repression-and-diaspora-baby-doc-legacy-haiti/https://origins.osu.edu/article/pact-devil-united-states-and-fate-modern-haiti/page/0/1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's a dead man, Donald Rumsfeld? Dead man, Donald Rumsfeld. Find the bastards, the podcast where Donald Rumsfeld is a corpse. It's so tight. He died surrounded by his family, as opposed to surrounded by the families of his victims, beating him with sticks, but whatever, he's dead. That's as good as you get, I guess.

There's an amazing, amazing AP article out about him that, like, describes him as a cunning leader who was undermined by the Iraq War. Which is amazing. You know how you're just going through life and the Iraq War comes and blindsides you. After you spend years working to make it happen by relying to the international community in the United States. It's fucking rules. It's so good.

Just having the best time here, Prop. Prop's here, guys. Prop is here. Jason Petty, host of the Hood Politics Podcast, now on the iHeart Radio network because we are slowly consuming all media and folding it into our overmind of content. Overmind. And just bringing you the best of the best.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, real, recognized, real. You feel me? It's magnetic. I wish listeners could have seen when Prop and I met in person the first time. And we were just like, hi! Yeah, it was so crazy. That was right before the motherfucking playing kickoff. We were like twins? Same soul? Yeah, I was like, you're a real one.

I think she's a real one. I'm pretty sure she's a real one. And I was like, yeah, yeah, she's a real one. This is crazy. Prop, you know what else is a real one? Rumsfeld. Well, yeah, he actually, I mean, yes, actually. He was pretty easy to trigger. He pulled triggers.

Let's not deny that man's gangster. Do not deny that man gangster. But another thing that's real is the island nation of Haiti. Oh, no. Jason, you're gonna hate this. Y'all, this is a real reaction. We finna talk about Haiti. We're fixing to talk about Haiti, yes.

I wanted to do an episode because it's been required. There's two famous dictators of Haiti, the two longest serving modern leaders of the country, Papa Doc and Baby Doc. If you're going to talk about Haitian dictators, you have to start with the actual bastard of Haiti, which is the entirety of Western civilization. It sounds like...

Oh, no. The only effective slavery uprising. But for us to get to that moment, there had to be a number of horrible things. A lot of fuckery after it. So it's one of those things you can't... And these are some pretty colorful dictators, but it would be, I think, grossly irresponsible

to not talk about the various nations by which I mean the United States, France and most of Europe that were heavily responsible for allowing a situation in which these guys could be in power because it required... It takes a whole village to make a situation as fucked up as the present political situation in Haiti. Which is the poorest nation in this hemisphere.

And it was engineered to be that way. Yes, which, interestingly enough, was part of Trump's shithole country statements. Because he was like, well, look at Haiti, it's ran by black people. Why are you okay? Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit, Donnie. Let's ask about that. You're okay. You're just throwing shit out.

Okay, let's think about it. Yeah. So the island that both Haiti and the Dominican Republic share is called Hispaniola. And it's the largest island in the Antilles chain next to Cuba. Cuba is bigger, but Hispaniola's kind of right. Number two.

Hispaniola first entered the annals of European history in 1492 when some asshole with the same name as the director of Home Alone sailed three boats from Spain and landed on their southern shore. He named the island Hispaniola in honor of the Spanish crown. So he was like, this is Spain's, basically. That's what Hispaniola means. This is Spain's island.

Mine! It's Spain's, yeah. Because he was, as all bad people are, Italian. Now, we just recorded with someone else an episode on Ethiopia and Italy's history, and we really got to throw out some anti-Italian hate. It was good for the soul. Shout out the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia.

Let's go. So yeah, he names the island Hispaniola. He leaves the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria on Hispaniola when he goes back to Europe, and Columbus's men form a settlement called La Navidad, which became patient zero for the European infestation of the New World. The indigenous people of the island were the Arawak and the Taino. They were pretty much immediately enslaved

and forced to work themselves to near extinction, mining for gold. They were all but wiped out within a century. Meanwhile, European settlement on the island expanded rapidly. The occupation quickly turned into a plantation economy, and Spanish domination was replaced by French domination once the gold mines were exhausted. Coffee, cotton, indigo, and other cash crops made Hispaniola a hub of the burgeoning global economy.

Now, of course, if you know anything about, in that period of time, farming cotton, coffee, indigo, and other cash crops, it was a fucking nightmare. Super deadly, super unpleasant, grueling, backbreaking work, and white people were not about to do that themselves. Not at all. In a tropical paradise, too. Yeah, nah, you're not finna do that. No, no, no.

By the 1500, slaves were being imported onto the island in huge numbers. Over several hundred years, African slaves grew to be the majority population of Haiti. By the late 17th century, only about 5,000 African slaves had been brought to the island, but by 1789, a century or so later, the island had half a million slaves. 32,000 Europeans and about 24,000 of what were called affranches, which were free mulattos or people of mixed African and European heritage.

And that's really key here, because since it's French dominated, it's a different spin on racism than you got in the U.S. south. Yeah. So you actually have, I mean, you have some free blacks, but you have a lot of free mixed race people. And they form kind of a buffer, like chunk of society between white people and enslaved black people. Yeah.

It's like a thing in Haiti, and you have to really talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting how every place that imported African slaves had to deal with their categories of race and how they decided to like work it out, you know, with us, with like America having like Plessy versus Ferguson and like that. Yeah. The one drop.

You know, the one drop. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Whereas like that don't exist, nowhere else, you know, and like everyone else going, well, what do you mean? You know, and how colorism sort of like ruled in Central and in South and Latin America. But and then places like this that figured out like,

well, they're something else. Yeah. It's something else. You know what I mean? There's a lot of racism against totally these people, but it is and they have a lot more rights. And like, yeah, we'll talk. We're about to talk about that.

Yeah. So the French transported more enslaved people to Saint-Domingue, their colony, than to any other part of the French Caribbean. Now, again, as we were talking about, in slave owning regions of the U.S., the racial caste system was very simple. You've got the one drop rule for a big chunk of that time. You're either white or you're black.

And in many slave states, even if a black person was freed, it was illegal for them to continue to live in that state. I think that was the case in Virginia, a number of other places. French Haiti was different. While the right status of black people changed over time, from an early point, free mulattoes were able to accrue significant wealth and power. And we don't use the term mulatto here anymore,

but it is, you can't really talk about Haiti without using it because it's a huge chunk of the history and the culture there. So at the top of the hierarchy, you would have the big whites, which are your standard rich white plantation owners. And that is the same kind of dudes who we've got all throughout the U.S. South, right? The guys who make a Confederacy happen.

Then you have the little whites, which we'd call like working class white people. They don't own plantations. At most, maybe they have a small farm. They probably don't own slaves. If they do, it's a small number. And they kind of vied with the mixed race people for second billing in the power hierarchy,

which is obviously great for the big whites, right? Because if you're the big whites, you're worried about the little whites because they want your shit. And you've also got this other group of people who have accrued power. So if you can have those two groups who are kind of both broadly speaking,

we wouldn't call it middle class in the modern sense, but kind of within that are kind of like the middle. In the middle caste, at least. Yeah, middle caste. If you've got them at each other's throats, you, the big whites, don't think you have to worry about as much. Now, that doesn't work out in the long run for the big whites because spoilers, they all get murdered.

Which is rad. It's one of the fun parts of the story. There's so many. There's so much about Haitian history where you're just like, yeah, yeah, that happened. But that is the idea, right? You've got these two groups

to keep at each other's throats. And I'm simplifying all this significantly. Totally. There's a great podcast series called Revolutions by Mike Duncan, and he gives like a 30 episodes history of the Haitian Revolutions because there's a bunch. He goes into tremendous detail

and does a much better job. Obviously, we are like criminally simplifying things here, but like that's the broads. I think that's pretty accurate to the broad strokes of it. So the gist of how this story goes is that over the decades, the fact that the majority of the island's population were enslaved under brutal conditions

led to a series of revolutions. The enslaved blacks killed an awful lot of the big whites and the little whites, but they also went after mulatto property owners too because they rightly saw these people as oppressors too. And there's other, like the kind of mixed race community has their own sort of movements and their own militia. Like there's this, it's a whole process

and it occurs over a long period of time. It started the kind of series of revolutions started when small numbers of slaves began escaping into the mountainous island interior where they became known as maroons, like the term maroon, you know? I think that's where it comes from. Also as a side note, I don't know if you got it,

if this came up or it's gonna come up later, but the concept of a zombie is from Haitian slaves. Yeah. We weren't gonna get into that a lot, but like, yeah, we do have to talk about voodoo a bit because it's a really significant chunk of, yeah, we're about to get into that. Yeah.

Now the maroons, these escaped slaves in the mountainous interior developed their own self-sufficient society and they waged a slow guerrilla war against colonial militias. There's a couple of big kind of outbursts of this. From 1751 to 1757, Francois McAndal, who was the most famous maroon leader, led a six-year long insurgent war to try to overthrow the white slavers.

Alongside maroon guerrillas, the most prominent form of black resistance in Haiti became voodoo, which was a slave religion whose practice was forbidden by law. And there was a bunch of different, like suicide, infanticide, arson, poison. These are all aspects of the faith, and I think in some cases like denying your body to being exploded by slavers,

and they also become elements of resistance to the regime. Yeah. And again, there's a lot of history there that we're not going to be giving a proper do, but it is fascinating. But voodoo has this, it's rooted in resistance to this inhuman regime. Yeah.

And a throwback to your African history in animus of like, I'm just, yeah, the act of resistance I think is super interesting and it's funny how even among sort of the black diaspora, like your American slave descendant versus your Caribbean, whether they're Jamaican or Haitian or Belizean, like even this like, you know,

I'm doing this injustice too, but like, they feel as though like in a lot of ways, they're tied to that, to their animus faith, and their not willingness to, and their ability to overthrow their oppressors in some ways, like, you know, and the lowest debased versions of us made that community feel as though they were stronger than like American black people, you know what I'm saying?

Cause they threw their oppressors off and they didn't lose hold of their animus traditions. Like they rebelled, we didn't, you know what I'm saying? And in reverse, it's like black people from America, American descendants looked at them as like, well, y'all are something else. Like y'all, well, yeah, y'all are something else. You're, you're, we're not the same rather than being like,

nah, you just got off the boat earlier than us. That's fascinating. You know what I'm saying? It's really interesting as someone that was like sort of like in-house sort of issues that like, hey, we got to be better and really understand the diaspora much better to be like, they just as black as we are. They just, like I said, you just got off the boat earlier,

you know what I'm saying? And it's, it's, it's, you know, another area where this becomes, where specifically voodoo becomes kind of an issue is these dictators we're about to talk about today really use, there's kind of, I think, debate over how actually into the practice of it they are, but they use it. And it becomes kind of this, it's used as fuel in like the media covering them as like,

oh, look at these, these dangerous third world lunatics and their, and their, and their creepy, you know, witchcraft and stuff. And the reality is that these dictators are co-opting voodoo because it has this powerful tradition as a, as a resistance religion. Like you have to, you have to, it's, it's not wildly different from like, well, I mean, there are aspects of it

that are similar from like politicians in the US South kind of co-opting aspects of like revolutionary history. Totally. And trying to turn it towards their own political ends and getting a lot of it wrong, but it's because it has this powerful hold on people's consciousness. So voodoo is a huge aspect of religion or of resistance as well. And yeah, at the same time, this is all going on.

You've got, again, you've got this mixed race community who actually has some political power and who has some wealth and they're not, they are these, the black slaves are not really connected to the rest of the French empire because they're stuck on this island, they have no rights. But these mixed race people are a part of the larger empire and they get to go back to France. They get to do a number of things that are,

they are participating in this broader empire, several hundred of them joined the Royal French Army in 1779, Haitian mixed race people, traveled to North America and fight in the American Revolutionary War. They take part in the siege of Savannah, Georgia. And these guys, a lot of them are very inspired by the American Revolution and these ideas of what democracy could be. At the same time as they're inspired by some of like

the promise of the American Revolution, they're deeply frustrated by the racism they experience in the new United States and from their white French officers. And this kind of leads to after the French Revolution because right, the French help us out with our revolution then they have their own revolution. Suddenly they've got these people's assemblies and a democracy, the guillotine stuff, yada, yada, yada.

After this point, after that point, mixed race people from Haiti start increasingly coming over to France and agitating for equal rights within the Parisian Citizens Assembly because this part of the revolution was this idea that all men have equal rights. And so these people who are not white from French possession start coming to Paris and being like, well, all right. Yo, that's pretty cool, right?

That's pretty cool what you guys said. You remember you guys said that? And the history of this is complex because a number of these mulatto guys also were like, well, but obviously these black slaves don't get rights because I own some of them. In some cases, some of them are very much for complete... Again, this is like, there's a lot of really complex history here.

I'm going to quote from a write-up by the University of Texas. The impact of the revolution reached Saint-Domingue, escalating tensions between grounds-blancs, big whites, the elites, plantation owners and the like, petite-blancs, the little whites, and the free people of color. Big whites wanted local autonomy from France. Mulatto saw their chance for citizenship and equality, and little whites were eager to protect their position

in the color-based class system. All of these groups were against freeing the slaves. Amid all this infighting the slaves, who outnumbered the free population more than 10 to 1, began to organize. Why was liberty and equality not meant for them as well? In August 1791, the rebellion began with a voodoo priest predicting that a revolt would free the slaves of Saint-Domingue.

The slaves set about burning plantations and killing all of the whites they encountered. Saint-Domingue was an inferno for months. The revolution had begun. During the following two years, the attacks continued, and literally France sent agents to try to quell the uprising. In 1793, the remarkable Toussaint Louverture, a former slave, rose to power.

Louverture battled French, Spanish, and British forces, and by 1801 had control of Santo Domingue, the current-day Dominican Republic where he eradicated slavery. Man, could you imagine? I mean, thank God the phrase, big whites didn't make it into America. Oh, man. Could you imagine if that was in our lexicon? Just how...

Just think about the last 20... Just think about the last year in your time, in Portland, fighting these... You know, when I hear the phrase, big whites associated with the United States, one guy's picture pops into my fucking head, and it's Mark McCloskey, the guy with the AR-15, and his mansion in St. Louis.

That's the immediate, like, oh, yeah, that's exactly that fucking, that guy. A version of that guy got burnt to death by Haitian revolutionaries. Did you see that dude's... Did y'all see that dude's rally? Yeah. When 10 people showed up,

he waving his gun on the funniest thing I ever seen. He's waving his gun which, by the way, didn't have sights. So, like, if you don't put... Modern ARs usually don't come with sights on them. Because you can install a variety of optics, and sights might get in the way of some more advanced optics. You don't necessarily have iron sights, but you need some sort of sights.

Otherwise, you can't aim the gun, which means he essentially had, like, a blunderbust. Like, he had a weapon he could not have aimed. That's a damn toy you flairin' around to your throngs of fans. Yeah, you couldn't shoot someone attacking you, but you could fire bullets in their broad direction and hit a variety of other things.

Oh, wow. Big whites, that dude. Big whites. That guy, yeah. So, the Haitian Revolution, some of the inspiration was the ideas of liberty and equality proposed by revolutionaries in North America and France. But a lot of these same revolutionaries, these white revolutionaries, are horrified by what happened in Haiti

because they're all galloping racists, right? The Haitian Revolutionaries massacred a ton of white people, particularly plantation owners and their families, which... good for them. This bloodshed was often horrifying, but obviously, if you're enslaving people and making them heritable property, you can't be surprised if they murder you and your kids

when they get the chance. I mean, Thomas Jefferson expressed that. He was like, uh... If they ever get guns... Yeah, they are not gonna treat us kindly. They're not gonna treat us kindly. It's the same attitude, like you have about the morality, the execution of the czars and their family

in Revolutionary Resser, where it's like, on one hand, no, of course, children are always innocent and can't be held accountable for the crimes of their parents even if their parent is the regent. At the same time, if you grew up property of this family, and you can say that in a way, like all of the citizens of the czars were, I can't blame you for being like,

well, we just gotta get rid of all this shit. Just gotta wipe them all out. It's not a good thing to do, but it's an understandable choice to make given the situation these people were put in, which is impot... The situation they were put in made a reasonable response of any kind of possible.

They had to do what they had to do. Now, the reason why Toussaint fought basically every major European power, and this guy... We may talk about him for fucking a Christmas Eve. He's an amazing man. Yeah, I was gonna say, like, his solutions... This motherfucker is illiterate.

Like, he's aborted, right? He doesn't know how to read, and he creates an army from nothing out of people who also had no formal education in many cases, and who are basically just stealing weapons that they find and learning on the go how to be an army.

Wow. And he beats all of the major world powers. Now, he is helped by the fact that it is really hard for white armies to function in Haiti, because they don't have immunity to like malaria and shit. Obviously, that helps. He's an impressive dude.

Yeah. And the reason why all of these European powers get involved, because kind of everybody winds up rolling into Haiti during this period, is because, in part because they see the Haitian Revolution as a threat to white domination. Costinary tale, man. Yeah.

And it's very complicated, because, like, the British are actually fighting France at the same time, and they get involved in Haiti with the independence desires of the big whites, because the big whites are like, I don't like this whole idea about the declaration of the rights of man, that seems like it could lead

to an end to slavery at some point, which is why I have money. So the British, who will not much after this end slavery in their own empire, officially, are like, well, we'll support you guys, because it'll hurt the French government, and we'll let you keep your racial dominance

over Haiti if we win this war. So England basically sends an army of losing their North American colonies by giving them access to the products that are being made in Haiti. And of course, Toussaint massacres English soldiers as he had French and Spanish soldiers. In 1798, the English commander-in-chief

signed a treaty with General Toussaint and evacuated his soldiers in disgrace. Four years later, Napoleon played it negotiating with Toussaint and the new Haitian government. He kidnapped the revolutionary leader and sent him to a prison in this French Alps where Toussaint died.

In the eve of his death, he was said to have stated, in overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again from the roots for they are many and they are deep. And he was not wrong about that. They do not retake Haiti. And I'm going to quote now for a book titled

Haiti, the Devaliers and Their Legacy by Elizabeth Abbott. Toussaint's faith in the Haitian people's determination was justified when Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to fight a war of extermination his words against the Haitians. Follow your instructions exactly,

Napoleon wrote, and rid yourself of Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines and the principal brigands. Napoleon instructed, rid us of these gilded Africans and we have nothing more to wish. They're gilded because they're putting themselves up as equal to white.

That's what he means by gilded. Against Toussaint's generals, including Dessalines and Christophe, Leclerc fought a hopeless campaign which lasted until November 18th, 1803, and cost the French 50,000 soldiers' lives with countless more wounded. We have concluded Leclerc glumly,

a false idea of the Negro. Hmm. We grossly underestimated him. We didn't think these people were as smart as us. Turns out they are. Turns out they're just humans. Who knew?

They might be better at war than us. Yes. At least war in this place, they know very well. The French are like, I think we discovered something that will later be called home court advantage. Don't worry.

Napoleon's government would never again make the mistake of evading someone else on their home turf and getting wrecked. This is the last time that happens to Napoleon. Napoleon learned his, oh, wait a minute. I'm just checking the record here. Maybe we're wrong.

Nobody. You know who else never invades people's home countries? That's quite a, you don't know that. You definitely do not know that.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. I'm fairly certain none of our sponsors have invaded Russia. Yes. Yeah, that seems fair. Because we are not currently sponsored by any of these, right? This is true.

Because if Mercedes throws in ads, then yes, they have absolutely invaded Russia. Not that I'm aware of, but... Yeah. Well, we'll put a pin in that. Saab too, I think? I don't know, whatever. BMW for sure.

Probably can't get any Hugo Boss ads either, if we're really probably not, if we're going for hasn't invaded Russia anyway, we'll figure it out. Okay. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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Okay, so January 1st, 1804, MANG proclaims its independence from France. They adopt as the name of their new country an ancient indigenous Arawak name, Haiti, which is where Haiti comes from.

So there's some acknowledgement there that this belonged to some other people before. But at the same time, they're not colonizers. They got forced there, right? It wasn't their choice to be in fucking Haiti. Yeah, so they adopt this and they adopt as their flag the revolutionary tricolor.

It's not a flag that France had had, but they take the white out of the French flag, basically, because it represents to them the white man, right? They don't get that in their fucking flag. So a guy who had been one of Toussaint's generals and who had helped beat Leclerc, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines

had himself declared emperor just as Napoleon had in the history of Haiti, which was the world's first black republic starts at this point as like a government. So up to this point, let's start with the slavery and the genocide. But in the end, the better guys beat the worst guys.

They liberate themselves. And it's one of the great stories in global revolutionary history. This is the only time in modern history where a slave population successfully rebels against their masters. Are we going to get into some of the economic developments, too?

How they figured out how to... Okay, cool. How they figured out how to subsidize income and all this good stuff. We're going to talk about how the French fuck... No, I don't know much about the actual... I mean, I know that there's a lot of people will argue

that kind of the destruction of the plantations costs some economic issues. There's a lot of complications here, but we're mostly going to talk about... Okay, yeah. So there was some moves. I'm getting some of the names and dates wrong because I'd have to brush up on it. But some of the moves that they made was like,

okay, first of all, we already showed you out, but we do now, since we burnt all our cash crops, we need to figure out if y'all going to stay, how we're going to subsidize our income here. So there was a couple of economic incentives

that after they overthrow them, after they overthrew their owners, they were like, okay, so, but we still need income and jobs. So here's y'all's role, okay? Here's our role. You just don't get to own us.

So yeah, like I said, I'm getting some of the information wrong, but there was a few shrewd moves that this emperor does to stabilize their income or stabilize their economy for a while and then it goes to shit. We're going to talk about kind of what goes

awry there, but yeah, it's a promising start, right? Some good moves, some good luck, but obviously, today things are not great in Haiti. One of the poorest nations on the planet, the infrastructure is pretty much in a constant state of freefall. There are numerous endemic diseases

and almost unimaginable corruption. And it didn't just get that way by the natural... This was not the natural course of events. It was heavily manipulated. So let's start by talking about the USA's role and how we got here. So as a republic built on slavery,

our founding fathers were very frightened of Haiti, particularly the massacres of big whites in 1801 and 1802. Now, at this point in time in the United States, the idea that a black slave might want to be free was seen as a mental illness. There was even a diagnosis for it, drapetomania.

And they treated Haitian independence thusly. They consider a desire for freedom from an enslaved person to be a mental illness. They consider Haitian independence to be a kind of viral infection. So they want to stop any contage, any... They want to stop any possibility of it spreading, right?

That's what they see. Oh, hey, another people has overthrown the chains of their colonial owners and become a republic. They see, oh, this is a threat. So when one Haitian veteran who had fought to liberate the United States from Great Britain

at the Battle of Savannah, attempted to return to the country, he had helped fought to find and tried to land in Charleston, he was denied the right to set foot on the soil he fought for. That's just one kind of example of how... Yeah. No, you're dangerous. Yes. And of course he was, obviously. This is a danger

because it's a country built on the human bondage. Yes. Thomas Jefferson, the great philosopher of liberty slash rapist, child rapist, proposed that slaves convicted of crimes, and remember wanting to be free was a crime, should be exiled to Haiti.

And again, his goal here is he wants to quarantine the black desire for liberty. That's kind of how Jefferson sees this. Yeah. The most positive moment in U.S. Haitian relations came after Haiti's independence, but before Toussaint's capture, when Toussaint found his new government locked

in a civil war with a mulatto general named Regaud. And Regaud was a mulatto supremacist who wanted to massacre all the white people on the island and also re-enslave the black population. That's at least how Toussaint framed the problem this guy posed in a letter he

sent to U.S. President Adams requesting military aid. He wrote quote, Regaud has assassinated many whites, and this is but the beginning of his heinous crimes. His criminal and atrocious misdoings have left no alternative to the government agent, but to brand him as a lawless rebel and to muster an army to punish his outrages.

Now, the massacre of white people justified the first U.S. military intervention on the island. We sent over some ships ammunition in 2000 muskets. The aid played a meaningful role in allowing Toussaint's government to smash Regaud's rebellion. This would be the only broadly

positive move the U.S. made towards Haiti. After 800 when the U.S. and France reconciled because we're having a bit of a tiff when we send those rifles over, the official government policy towards Haiti grows more hostile. And after the massacres of 1801 1802, the United States

refuses to recognize the Haitian government as independent. This was justified by the United States and by everyone else because this is broadly speaking how most of the West handles Haitian independence. And it's justified by them because the French had refused to acknowledge Haitian independence.

Now, France was like one of the big world powers right then. And they're like the military power. So, acknowledging Haiti as its own thing is a dicey thing diplomatically, right? You see versions of the same thing today with the fucking Taiwan and stuff. There's constant like

do we recognize this country? Yeah, you can't acknowledge a L. Like, hey man you know, you took a L. It's like, no we didn't. No. That was different. That one don't count. Yeah. The U.S. refuses to acknowledge like China, the Chinese government, for years

as the legit like after the Civil War. Like we do this all the time is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. I love the like, yeah, like even just America being like we've never lost a war like what about Vietnam? That was different. That wasn't our war.

That wasn't a war because you have to declare it. You know, you got to go declare it. It's only a war if it comes from the from the war region of France. Otherwise it's just a sparkling conflict. Yeah. That's different. Yeah. Yeah. So it'll be like, nah, I don't

know. I don't think I don't think Haiti's a country. Like, yeah. Yes, they are. Okay. Yeah. So the U.S. fights another war against Great Britain in 1812 and we rely heavily on trade and aid from the French. So obviously there's a there's a lot of vested interest

in not recognizing Haiti because yeah, we don't want to piss off France. No. As a result, from independence, from its independence up to about 1825, Haiti is a pariah state. This enables the first emperor of Haiti, Dessalines, to justify an increasingly repressive regime. Haiti had

nothing but enemies and the entire effort of the state was devoted towards maintaining a huge army and a massive system of protective fortresses. And Dessalines becomes basically a military dictator and this is, again, he's got a point, right? Like, they want to fuck us up. They want to take

our liberty back. They want to take this island back. Like, we have to always be ready to fight. Yeah. The problem is that when you base your whole society around that, it's not the healthiest way of underpinning of a society. Yeah, you can't. You can't. That's not, it's not sustainable. Yeah.

Now, Dessalines, again, like all of these kind of founding fathers was illiterate and was a, like, yeah, like he comes from, you know, a background where that was not education of much any formal kind was not really an option. And as a result of his influence, the military becomes

dominated by black officers who were like him, generally illiterate former slaves. Meanwhile, the civil administration of the Haitian government becomes dominated by mulados, most of whom had benefited from a better education. And this contributes to the you've already got this really bloody racial

divide and this long history of fighting and it just, after independence, that divide doesn't get erased. And Dessalines leans into this divide. He'd massacred tens of thousands of French civilians after independence. And at the

same time, he had massacred a lot of mulados saying he couldn't tell the difference between them. In 1804, he declared, I will go to my grave happy. We have avenged our brothers. Haiti has become a blood red spot on the face of the globe. Now, of course, it was born in blood, right? Haiti starts as

an act of labor genocide and is repopulated by violent force. Dessalines is not starting a process here. It's just the natural continuation of that kind of violence. Now that said, later on in his reign, Dessalines takes an extra step

towards, I think he saw it as kind of an attempt to destroy these racial barriers. He declared a policy of bronzification, which was his goal was to destroy all distinctions of color on the island by forced intermarriage of blacks and mulados. Now, to start

this process, he ordered a mulado general, Alexandre Pétion to marry his daughter, Salamine, who was unbeknownst to him already pregnant. When he found out, he murdered her lover and Pétion declined the marriage and shortly thereafter, Dessalines is assassinated by

an unknown group of assailants. It's still why he was killed, who exactly killed him is a mystery in Haiti today. There's theories that he was murdered by unpaid soldiers, that it was General Pétion. What matters more than the specifics of like who did the

did the deed is that from the beginning Haiti is burdened by an history of authoritarian leaders, which again starts with the white rulership of the colony and is burned by a history of violent changes of power, right? It's born in blood and that they don't break the cycle.

Power would swing wildly over the next years between mulado and black generals generally representing different geographic and racial chunks of the island. The term it's so funny, it's like, well not funny, but the word bronzification, just if you

just said you're like, actually sounds kind of rad, like, you know what I'm saying? Like if you just, just the idea of like, let's just get this like, that beautiful brown on people, you know what I'm saying? Like it's kind of dope, you know, but then it's still like, you're still addressing

this like scourge of a racialized society that for multiple millennia we didn't have, you know, and like in terms of a social construct, where it's like we just, you dated

regionally, you dated tribally because this was like who was around, you know what I'm saying? But once you started putting these like rules around you know, the phrenology and the, you know, the eugenics of the shit that like, created

this like racial colorized cast that like has just become a scourge, you just see how many attempts we've had to try to undo this curse across the cultures and this was just one, his thought was, well

well if your kids is all brown, well look we'll find you somebody that's hot that's fine, you know and make a baby with them, like you can't be mad at this little brown, could the baby look good? You know, so you just

it's like you're following the logic and it's just, but it's like being able to step back and examine like damn, like just the racialization of our world, like fuck man, we're still trying to solve this issue you know, yeah.

Yeah and I did, like it's super messy, and it's one of those things you'd be, you can talk about how what happened and like what the actual impact was, but it is kind of this like as much as many fucked up things as like different players in this period carry out

as guys like Dessalines do, it's like also well I don't know what would have worked better Right, yeah, like you're coming in in a messy ass situation, right? Yeah it's hella messy, so you're like I gotta start somewhere I can't, like I can say that doesn't seem like it worked out great but I can't be like, well here's what would have worked better

Right, right, right? Yeah, like people trying to do the hardest thing ever, right? Yeah, I got some suggestions in the year 2020 Yeah, I think I know what it worked for you guys Shut the fuck up, you know what I'm saying? Like yeah you guys got ideas, oh three, three centuries later

you still haven't figured it out, yeah stop looking back at me, yeah 1800s Haiti, air conditioning probably would have solved some problems, why don't you why don't you guys have air conditioning, come on You could have some air conditioning Also antibiotics, just throwing it out there I'm just saying, how about

automation, you have all these people, there's a machine Hello, we eventually invented the Ford truck and that made a lot of money, could you guys have tried that in 1825? Hey why don't you try not slavery? Yeah

Could you try not being taken from your homeland and forced onto an island to farm cotton, maybe give that one a shot, like yeah, and then they were like you know what, here's the idea, we're gonna try not being dark I mean yeah, he does eventually kind of, yeah

But yeah, there's no good, there's no good options for any of these people in this period, which is not to like, also not to whitewash the fucked up stuff that all of these different Haitian leaders do, but like what are you gonna do? Again, so Haiti is

also, and the thing that really makes this difficult, right, because every new nation that's been born has different kinds of divisions and hurdles to overcome Haiti is additionally hobbled by something that makes it kind of impossible for them to thrive economically, which is the fact that they are completely locked

out of the global market, which contributes to rampant poverty and misery. In 1826, in order to gain diplomatic recognition and entrance into the world market, to be able to trade with people, right? To be able to actually like make things and sell them and import goods which you need to do

in order to be a part of the modern world, right? Yeah. That's just the way it works. They're not allowed to. So, they start negotiating with France in order to gain diplomatic recognition and entrance into the world market. Now, by this point, the French had accepted that they were not going

to regain military control of the island. So, they agreed to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation if it paid reparations. God. Oh, my God. Well, you stole yourselves from us, so you owe us. So, you kind of, oh, my God.

Real, real, real asshole move from France there. I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Origins Project at Oklahoma State University. The French government sent a team of accountants into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands and physical assets, including the 500,000 citizens

who were formerly enslaved, and declared the value at 150 million gold francs, in which in contemporary terms would equate to well over 20 billion dollars. Payments began immediately, and although Haiti was able to officially buy its economic freedom and diplomatic recognition,

the debt of 150 million francs was a massive burden from which Haitians have never been able to fully recover. Although the official debt was later reduced, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee for its national sovereignty for nearly 100 years, from 1825

to 1922. Good. Lord. For almost a century then, Haiti endured French imposed pinnury. By 1915, and we'll talk about what happens in 1915, Haiti still owed France 121 million francs. So

for nearly a century they pay off their 120 million debt, and in 1915 they owe 121 million. Oh my god. Oh my god. France is a nation of fucking payday loan.

Yes. Just such a bit of fuckery right there. Oh man. So much of their resources as a nation went to paying off this debt. For instance, 51% of Haiti's revenues from coffee went to service the exterior debt.

47% went to pay internal debts associated with building the nation's infrastructure, with only 2% available for all other expenses. Why doesn't Haiti have a functional state? Because they are forbidden by law from building one, otherwise they won't be able to pay off the debt

that guarantees their freedom. Yeah. Think about that for a second. Yeah. Yeah. You're just, it's on purpose. Yeah. This suffocating debt, more than any other single factor, is why and how Haiti becomes the poorest country in the western hemisphere. That's it, right? We can talk

about fucked up things different leaders did. We can talk about mistakes made by, and there's plenty of mistakes Haiti. Of course. Because all leaders make mistakes. Of course. Haiti is not allowed to build a public sector. Yeah. They're not allowed to. They've got it. That money is why France is so nice. Part of it, right?

France steals from a lot of people. Yeah. If you want to know why Haiti is so fucked up, walk down the streets of Paris and look at the nice monuments and be like, oh, some of this was paid for by the reason Haiti doesn't have functioning sewers. Yeah. Damn. That's why it's fucked up. Damn. Now, of course

the fact that Haiti agreed to bribe France for access to the world did not mean that the world accepted Haiti. The United States continued to have a profoundly toxic opinion of the Ailing Republic, and most European powers were equally unwilling to do business with a nation who's founding with such a threat to their domestic

and international order. Again, all these powers are based on slavery or based on colonialism that verges on slavery. So even if the Haitians themselves mostly just want hope and opportunity, right? They're not saying like our goal as Haiti is to overthrow the global colonial system. They just want to

have food and shit, right? Most people they're very existence though is dangerous to the myth of white supremacy that the European world order is based on. Think about every time we talk about this in the Ethiopia episode, but think about like, you know, you and I talked about this

and we talked about Spain in Algeria, right? They get beaten by this by this African army and then they go in with France with chemical weapons to massacre these people because they can't stand the thought that they were defeated by a colonized people. That's

very much all of the West's attitude towards Haiti. These people beat every Western army put against them. That can't be allowed. It unravels all of your origin stories, your creation myths, your formation of identity. It unravels.

You're looking at evidence that you're full of crap. You can't let that, that can't exist in your world. It's kind of crazy. This is going to feel like a jump, but like, I mean it. Like when I think of like that same

sort of fear of of the unraveling of your reality, I think a lot of ways it's that same sort of like germ that's in this like aversion towards like trans rights

and like LGBTQ stuff because it's like you have this universe that is ordered a certain way. And these, the existence of these people means you've ordered the universe incompletely.

You know what I'm saying? It has its genesis. There's an element of like that idea of FOMO, right? You hear about your friends going to a party that you're not going to and it makes you feel like you're missing out. It's this idea that like if things elsewhere or if things for

other people are fundamentally different than they are for me, then maybe I'm not doing things the best way possible. Maybe the way I live isn't the absolute best way someone could live. And that makes me so angry that I will commit a genocide. Totally. Because it's not like, because it's not

about, it's so true, because it's not about when you start listening to like people's arguments about rights, it's like, oh, you not talking about rights, you think they shouldn't exist. Yeah, you're angry with other people they're different. Yes. The reality

of their existence is an affront to your universe. So if I can take their rights, maybe they'll stop existing? Is that your is that your logic? Cause that's what it sounds like your logic is. So when I think about like you said, like, well

we won't trade with Haiti. Well, we won't, it's like, cause you don't want them to exist. You don't think this should have happened, but it did. And rather than saying maybe I should rethink what I consider reality I'd rather just say,

nah, we just we'll just make them pay forever. Yeah, we'll just, we'll just go out of our way to sabotage them forever. Yes. You know who else will go out of their way to sabotage Haiti

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That's the sound that you find in your place in the script, huh? It is. So, Haitian politics doesn't grow more functional over the course of the 1800s for reasons we've discussed. There's a bunch of revolts, right, when people can't build any kind

of functional civil society or when it's a lot harder and all of their money is going to other countries. It's difficult to, you know, have a happy civil... Anyway, so the Republican kicked off with an emperor, then reverted to a Republican government with presidents and stuff. But in the 1840s,

they go back to having emperors. The 1840s and the 1844s is when the Dominican Republic fights a war with Haiti and they separate. So there's two different countries on the same island. The Dominican Republic is definitely, it seems to be in a better position than Haiti has been lately.

But they have constant, they're like always kind of at each other's throats. There's a bunch of issues going on between them. Anyway, that all happens. And then in 1859, there's a military coup in Haiti. And that brings back a Republican government and presidents again. So we go from emperor to president

to emperor to president, right? In 1861, the outbreak of the Civil War gives the people who didn't totally suck in U.S. politics an opportunity to recognize the Haitian government. After a long congressional debate, President Lincoln enacts a law recognizing Haiti and

appointing the first U.S. Haitian commissioner. So that is, we recognize Haiti kind of as like a fuck you to the Confederacy. That's when you really don't like somebody like, you know what? Matter of fact, and matter of fact, Haiti I rock with y'all.

I'll take it. Cool. So the political situation though does not grow more stable in the late 1800s. In 1896, President Hippolyte died of a stroke on his way to crush a rebellion in the southwest.

He was replaced by president Theresia Sam, who was nicknamed the incompetent for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, right? Not because he was so popular. Under his ages, the Haitian government grew more corrupt and less functional than ever. The most egregious example

of this was the finance minister, the president's cousin, Gilliam. Gilliam Sam developed an extensive grift system, whereby he would have the government order and pay for non-existent goods and then pocket the payment himself. President Sam allowed dozens of his relatives in positions of power.

Together, they robbed the nation blind. Well, blinder. This compounded the economic misery created by the crushing debt to France. Under Sam's reign, civil service salaries were cut by 20%. Public works projects almost ceased entirely.

When Sam came to power, a tramway station had been under construction in Port-au-Prince, and the beginnings of a national railway station had been laid. All of this died on the vine as the Sam family sucked Haiti dry. In 1902, dogged by economic disaster and riotous discontent among the citizenry,

Sam resigned. He barely escaped with his loot ahead of a mob bent on murdering him and his family. Foreign diplomats escorted him to the docks and he eventually wound up in Europe with his fortune. Again, the reason part of, like, he's not he's not just stealing money. He's greasing

palms in Europe because, again, they're always all of these grifter dictators are very tied to the West and generally backed by them and often funded by them. In the wake of his disastrous regime came political chaos.

He was eventually succeeded by a very old man named Nord Alexis who was overthrown himself a couple of years later by a revolt. In the middle of all of this chaos, these just constant revolts, right, no peaceful transfers of power. And in the middle of all this chaos on April 14th, 1907,

Francois Duvalier is born into Duval and Eurythia Duvalier. Now, this is, by the way, the subject of our episode. Francois Duvalier is the guy better known as Papa Doc. Yes. Yeah. It would be an understatement to say that

he did not grow up in a functional state, right? So again, this guy doesn't fuck Haiti up. This guy is born into fucked and adopts it. Yes. Yeah. Ah, that's a great phrase. Oh, you call me on guard with that one. Okay, that's good.

So when Papa Doc was a toddler, President Alexis is succeeded by Antoine Simone, who ruled for three years before another revolt forced him to flee to Jamaica. The next president, Le Cant, came to power when Francois was about five. He survived only a

single year in office. He was murdered by, again, unknown assassins. His body was hidden to cover up their crime. The conspirators blew up the presidential palace on August 8th, 1912, leaving Haiti without a capital building or ahead of state. Now, despite the,

shall we say, tumultuous times, Francois's parents managed to make a decent living. They were lower middle class, but upwardly mobile. His father, Duvall, was a school teacher and his mother, Eurydia, worked for a bakery. Duvall was politically active and aware.

He wanted a better life for his children and he worked like a demon in order to scrape together the funds necessary to send his son to private schools. In 19, which is something very few Haitians do, that never happens. The education system is not in good shape, so he grows up very well educated.

Hold that thought, because I would be doing you and the listeners a horrible disservice and if I didn't stop and acknowledge the name Papa Doc. Papa Doc? Yes, in the, here's a pop culture reference, so he was a character

in Eight Mile, the M&M movie. Oh, really? Yeah, I know what Eight Mile is. Yeah, I was like, I don't know how far down this rabble I need to go. Papa Doc was one of the main characters and it seems like a strange name

to choose as a rapper, unless you know who Papa Doc is. Yeah. Haiti, so there you go. Connect your dots, guys. That is interesting. Yeah, I was unaware of that part, because all I know about the Eight Mile movie is that it's about M&M. Yeah, Mom's Spaghetti.

Exactly, Mom's Spaghetti. Spaghetti. So, in 1915, when Francois was eight, Haitian President Joseph David Martheodore was ousted in yet another coup, this one of the military variety. He was replaced by General Jean

Vilbrune Guillem Sam. Now, the president of the United States in this period is a fellow named Woodrow Wilson, who is one of the most racist people who's ever been president of the United States, which is a high bar. Yeah, I was like, which is a high bar. So, you are saying there's listeners

of two people that y'all know on this pod, me and Robert are bona fide history nerds. We know what the hell we talking about. When we tell you that Woodrow Wilson holds the crown. He's up there. Yes. He's competing

with guys in like 18, 20 for races. Yeah, he competing with like Andrew Jackson, where I'm like, who you could like, like they named the trail of tears after this man. Y'all saying, like... He's a shit. Yes. So, like, let's pause for a second and appreciate really how racist Woodrow Wilson is.

He is a repeatedly praised the Ku Klux Klan and screened a movie about their founding in the White House like a racist. And Woodrow Wilson is particularly concerned. He's concerned for a number of reasons. Number one, he sees a black republic as a weak is a weak link in the political

structure of the Caribbean, which is really close to the United States. So, you know, he's also further concerned by, you know, in this period, World War One has just kicked off, right? And Germany prior to World War One had developed strong economic interests on the island

of Haiti. German investor on the island of Hispaniol in the Haitian nation. German investors had started to directly impact Haitian politics. In 1892, Germany had been instrumental in defeating a reform movement within the Haiti that would have hurt

their economic design. So, this is a weak government. It's a country that's in chaos. Colonizers see the opportunity in this. Germany doesn't colonize Haiti, but they come in and they help defeat a political movement that would have been bad for the interests of German corporations, right? So, in the months leading to the coup that brought General

Sam to power, Wilson had been considering sending in U.S. troops to Haiti to replace the government with one that would be more friendly to U.S. interests and less friendly to German ones. And again, the Germans are against positive reform in the Haitian government. The U.S. doesn't support positive reform

in the Haitian government. We just want a government that's more friendly to our companies than to German ones, right? Totally. So, the coup gave him the excuse that he needed, right? And in short order, he sends the United States Marines, including frequent bastard's podside character, Smedley Butler,

into occupied Haiti. Yeah, Smedley doesn't want to counter insurgency work there. That's my dog, Smedley. He's still a heel at this point in the story. He has a heel turn. He has a real good heel turn, which we've talked about, but he's still a heel

at this period. So, from 19... Yeah, Smedley's in play. Yes. So, from 1915 to 1934, which is basically all of Francois de Valier's childhood and early adulthood, the United States rules Haiti with an iron fist.

Protests that break out against the occupation are put down with machine gun fire. In one protest alone, US soldiers gunned down 2,000 Haitian protesters. So, 2,000. Yeah, we're not talking like Kent State here. We're talking

opera tsar, you know? Yeah. Yeah. From a write up by the Origins project, quote, for 19 years, the United States controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions, all of which benefited the United States. In 1922, for example,

the United States extended Haiti a debt consolidation loan that was designed to pay off its remaining debt to France. But in many ways, Haiti simply exchanged one master for another. Although Haiti was finally free of its debt to France, it now had a new creditor, the US government and the US banks

who made a small fortune off the loan arrangement. Always. So, US is like, I can help you out with this France problem, because like France, France right in 1915 desperately needs US help because they have gone broke fighting this stupid, stupid

fucking war. We can't really afford to do anything but barely hold off the Germans. The US is like, well, we got a proposition for you. We'll work this out. We'll give you guys some money up front. You cut down the loan, but also Haiti's going to owe us

forever now. Yo, this is why you never open your junk mail that says consolidate your debt. Yeah, I'm like, this is what you're looking at right now. They're going to have some junk mail. Yeah, you're about to get Haiti. Yeah. So, although the US finally withdrew troops

from Haiti in 1934, the US government still maintained fiscal control over the country until 1947. Again, the US has never had colonies. We just maintained military control of Haiti for 19 years and then controlled their finance system until 1947,

when they finally paid off their loan to us. In order to pay off this loan, Haiti was forced to expend its entire gold reserves pretty much, which left the company bereft of any kind of hard currency. Perhaps more importantly, the removal of the US military didn't mean the end of US military

influence in Haiti. In 1916, we're going to talk about some shit that happened while the US was in charge here. In 1916, the all-white wives of US Marine Corps officers joined their husbands on the island, right? They were immediately, in the words of one source I found, squeamish about meeting or socializing

with native Haitians. You have to remember, these women are white women coming from the segregated United States, where many of them had probably never met a black person who wasn't a servant. And going to it, then they went to an island where the black people were ostensibly in charge. Obviously, the US is in charge, but we like

the fiction that we're letting them govern themselves, right? They were disgusted by this. They refused polite invitations to dance and snubbed even the Haitian elite. As a result, US occupiers formed essentially their own micro-society in Haiti. This really pissed off the Haitian elite.

Of course. Who, again, they're the elite. They also suck, right? Yeah. But they're also justly pissed off by how racist these white Americans who come over are. My money ain't good enough for y'all? Okay. Yeah. And they're increasingly disgusted not only by the racism of these occupiers, but

by how fucking drunk they get. So at this point, Haitian culture was very conservative in regards to alcohol consumption. Crowds of drunk. Yeah, these guys are fucking, these guys are white people in 1916. They're drunk. Which is,

we still have not eclipsed those levels of drunk white Americans. And let's say, I don't know if I drink like white people, boy. So to imagine an ancient white boy. Oh, yeah. No, that's not a game. Yeah. Yeah. Their nightcaps are just pints of liquor. They are.

So how drunk these Americans get when they get time off, when it's like the weekend or whatever, this horrifies them. And they're also shocked by the sheer frequency with which U.S. soldiers engaged in whoring. Again, I mean, nobody whores like soldiers.

I'm not going to say the U.S. is particularly high in that. No, that's just soldiers. That's just soldiers. Maybe smash it down. But it's at a level that they were not used to see. In a few years, there are 147 new dance halls and saloons,

most of which are barely disguised brothels. Since Americans were, again, super racist, they had to import girls to work in these places. Generally lighter-skinned women from the Dominican Republic, right? So again, you never get over this racial caste system. Even when it's like some drunk 19-year-old

Texan boy, like it's still the fucking, you know, the divide between mixed race and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, keeps going. U.S. domination brought Jim Crow hotels, segregated Catholic masses, and segregated white neighborhoods.

The U.S. remade Haiti in its own image, which meant instituting something that looked like democracy, ift you squinted, but was really just a way to make sure no one wound up president who wasn't good for U.S. business interests. Not all that different from our present system. Yeah, I was like, good God. In fairness, we do the same thing to ourselves

in this regard. This is important because the elections that take place during this period are the first ones that François Duvalier would have been really cognizant of, right? There's, again, there's a lot of chaos in his childhood, but by the time he's 8, 9, 10 years old,

old enough to, like, know shit and actually, like, think about what's happening, this is the kind of elections that are happening. And this excerpt from the book Haiti, the Duvaliers, and their legacy makes it clear that this was not a good thing. Quote, though the Americans insisted on the semblance of democracy,

they refused even the slightest democratic substance. Nowhere was this more obvious than in American-sponsored Haitian presidential elections. The State Department approved the first occupation president, Philippe Soudre, not even going to try to pronounce that last name, sorry, after he agreed to surrender financial control and receivership of the customs,

Haiti's sole source of revenue, asking in return only for marine protection against assassins. He was the sole candidate. His rival, Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, had earlier disqualified himself with fits of peak and a riskability. Allow election of president to take place

ordered Secretary of State Daniels. The US prefers the election of the guy that was the only real candidate. Yes. And again, he's saying, I will give you all of our money if you make me the boss and give me Marines to stop me from being murdered. Right? That's the deal.

I want your jackboots to protect me. I will give you all of my people's money in response. Yeah. As a result, Francois' early political understanding was heavily informed and influenced by completely understandable hatred of the United States. As a young man, he wrote articles for the

Nationalist Anti-Occupation Newsletter Action Nationale. He used a pseudonym, Abdurrahman, to avoid being arrested or murdered by US occupiers. In 1929, Francois and a black lawyer in Mystic named Lorimer Denise, founded the Haitian Negritude movement.

Now, the Negritude. Yeah. Have you heard of this? No, it's a great word. It is a great word. And it's in brief. It's a black nationalist movement that advocates black Haitians overthrowing or otherwise taking power both from the Americans

who were, you know, well, who were dominating colonizers, whatever you want to call it, their nation, and from the mixed-race political elite who collaborated with European colonizers in the US in this period, but who throughout, like, yeah. Now, if you'll remember from earlier in the episode,

Voodoo had a long history as part of the Black Liberation struggle in Haiti, of the Negritude movement, right? Because it's authentically ours, right? You know, it's not something... You've got this kind of mixed-race dominated political and economic elite who's working with the Americans

who are trying to become more Western, right? Who are adopting Western clothing, Western customs and stuff, because that's where the money is in part and because it's just fashionable. And Francois and others like him are like, no, what we need to do is actually... This is authentically ours. Voodoo's ours.

Yeah. Yeah. Very understandable motivations. Yeah, I get it. The Negritude movement continued to grow as Francois went to medical school in the early 1930s. He graduated in 1934, which is the same year that the US Marines finally left his country.

He started his medical career working in hospitals and clinics around Port-au-Prince. In the late 1930s, he and Lorimer Denise founded a pro-Voodoo African-focused political organization called Ligrio, which means the Bards. Ligrio included an academic journal

where Francois published articles laying out his thoughts on the Negritude movement. He also wrote a book in which he urged Black Haitians to take power from the mixed-race elite. Despite his hatred of the US government, he traveled to the mountainous interior of Haiti to work as part of a US-supported effort to wipe out malaria and yaws,

which is a horrible disease. I don't know much about yaws. It's a bad disease. This happens in the early 40s. And when you find write-ups about this guy, a lot of them portrayed as like baffling or inconsistent, well, this guy hates the US. Why is he doing this? Well, it's because he's a doctor and they're helping fight a disease.

Like, it doesn't mean they didn't do a bunch of other fucked-up shit. It means he's like, okay, I'll take your money to vaccinate people. I don't think it's in any way inconsistent. Yeah. Francois seems to have been good at this work and eventually he becomes the head of a clinic. In August of 1944,

he briefly travels to the United States to attend Michigan State University to study public health. He's not in there long, but if you went to Michigan State, what if you're in? Whoa. Papadoc. Papadoc went to Michigan State, man.

Famed Michigan State grad? Well, maybe graduates, but yeah, he goes. So he never finishes the program and he rather quickly goes back to Haiti to continue his work trying to eliminate yaws. At the same time, he helps another doctor named Price Mars form the Bureau of Ethnology, an organization

dedicated to studying and propagating indigenous Haitian customs, including Voodoo. Now, at this point, Francois de Valier is pretty rad. Unfortunately, in the mid-1940s, he makes the call to get into politics, which is not a thing that ever tends to go well for people.

And I'm going to quote now from a book published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress in 1999. Francois de Valier's first overly political act was to become General Secretary of Daniel Fignoles' Party of Young Professionals, the MOP. In 1946, he became a pro...

What? I'm sorry, there's so many throw-outs that are happening. The MOP, as far as the rap group from New York, which I never thought about. And he up, you know what I'm saying? And then when you said the griot, I always thought that was

a reference to the griots. You know, we're like the African storytellers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. G-R-I-O-T-S. Yeah, the griots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, cool. I was just pronouncing it probably wrong. Okay, I thought it was something else. I was like, no, the griots.

No, it means bards. So, yeah, it's like African storytellers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Oh, man, okay. Well, then, yeah, there it is. So there's all these ties that I knew the Papa Doc one, but I didn't think about the MOP one. You know what I'm saying? That's dope. Okay, anyway.

I hope MOP is referring to that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I honestly don't know. But yeah, it's fucking, yeah, it's fascinating. So, he becomes a the protege in 1946 of a guy named Dumarsai Estime. And then

Estime becomes like the MOP candidate. Estime gets elected president and Duvalier enters his cabinet as the minister of labor. Okay. But Estime gets ousted in a coup in 1950, right? And Duvalier loses his job. So

when Estime, the guy who had made Duvalier a minister of labor, gets, you know, forced out of power, a new guy, General Magliore, takes power, right? So again, one of these things that keeps happening in Haitian history. And Duvalier, because he was a member of the old government, finds himself

a wanted man and he winds up hiding from the government. He befriends a school teacher named Clement Barbeau, who becomes his trusted friend and helps him move from one hiding place to the next, often dressed as a woman. For years, Duvalier hid and built a base of supporters in the mountains, biding his time

until the int came from Magliore, which it did in 1956. So he spends years kind of as like a guerrilla leader, right, doing the Castro thing, right? Hiding in the mountains, building my support. He's got support in the mountains already because he's this famous doctor who helped people with these horrible diseases. So he's very well liked there

and he starts building, yeah, he builds up a movement. So 1956, General Magliore gets kicked out in 10 months of chaos follows, in which six different governments attempt and fail to hold on to power. While this was going on, Duvalier succeeded in

appointing his followers to several public offices. So while all these different dudes are like trying to take power and failing, he's kind of quietly like making deals with whoever he has to to shotgun guys loyal to him into different political positions in order to, and he uses these guys as beach heads to build support for

a regime headed by him among civil servants, right? The kind of equivalent of the deep state. That's what he's trying to do. He's trying to set his guys up in positions that don't get overthrown because nobody wants to overthrow the guy keeping the sewers going or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if that guy's loyal to you and then the guy doing this,

the guy doing that, the guy keeping power going right, that you gradually build up a base of support, makes it easy for you to take over. He's very smart about this is what I'm saying. Very methodical about it. He doesn't just take the easy first grab to get power because those motherfuckers are going to get kicked out by the other people. Let's them fight among themselves a while.

In 1957, after again, six different governments try and fail to hold on to power, Haiti has another election and de Valier runs on a campaign of what one writer called undiluted Africanism and one of the things he advocates is the removal from public life of all mulatto's.

Well, I say that, but despite this rather hard line, a number of mulatto business owners, a lot of these rich mixed race elite support his run for president because he assures them in private that he didn't really mean what he was saying. Oh, okay.

No, I'm just we all make campaign promises. I can so picture it like we remove all the light skin. We're not really going to remove all the light skin. No, no. All the light skin. Got to go. Drake out of here.

It was his closing Guantanamo. Yeah. Drake under the bus. I was about to say, what Drake do to you, prop? He just light skin. Doing him life. Shaving a heart into his head.

Just put just irrationally salty. You know, we still beef with the mulatto's. We need to really work this out. We still we need to really work this out with them. I got no comment there. No, don't. There's in house debate here, guys.

Matter of fact, one of the shows we did on the my mama told me with Langston that was my episode about like life scare people are sensitive. And if this is the case, I'm like, well, we did try to run y'all out of Haiti. So maybe you got it.

Honestly, this is obviously obviously this is ridiculous. I don't really think about this about life scare people, but it was a very funny thing to point out. Yeah. So from a write up by the New York Times here about how Duvalier kind of comes

to power because it's not, you know, the election is a very flawed election. And it's more a matter of who he's able to get in his corner before the quote unquote vote happens. Yeah. Duvalier had the all important support of the army whose generals considered him a feckless puppet. Even his campaign workers openly

boasted that they could easily manipulate him and some rewrote his campaign speeches without even consulting him. She Haitian intellectuals who were later exiled have speculated that Duvalier, far from being a stupid pawn, cunningly stepped into a deceptive role as puppet and figurehead, playing various power blocks and interests against one

another to divide and conquer. And conquer he did with an overwhelming majority in the election of September 22nd, 1957. He was inaugurated on October 22nd. The two dates were felicitous ones from his point of view as Papa Doc had always considered 22 his lucky number. He was to continue to hold

it in superstitious reverence. Francois came to power with the support of the army who are again in a very dis rite situation in 1957. They were very unpopular, disorganized, not very well equipped or trained and Francois saw this as an opportunity. He was a smart guy. He lived through a lot

of military coups and he was not going to let that shit happen to him. So one of his first acts when he becomes president like two years after he takes office in 1959 is he starts building a civilian militia. Which will be the Tonton Mccut are kind of

described alternatingly as a secret police and a militia and an imperial guard. They're not really any of those and they're kind of all of them. It's an interesting organization. How he makes this is he starts drawing in poor young men

from capital city slums. And he arms them with antique guns that he found in the basement of the presidential palace and he puts them under the command of his old friend Clement Barbeau who had helped him hide out during the bad years. This militia he calls officially volunteers for national security

or VSN and they become better known as the Tonton Mccut whose name was taken from a myth about a Haitian uncle who kidnaps and punishes bad kids by trapping them in a gunny sack and then eating them for breakfast. Yeah, like they're not, they're called that because they're scary. They're called that because

people are terrified of them. From the New York Times quote, within weeks hundreds of Devaliers political enemies were thrown into jail. Others simply disappeared and within a year according to the later claim of Mr. Barbeau more than 300 persons had been killed by the Tonton's on Devaliers personal orders.

And as we'll discuss in part two, Jason. Things only get worse from there. So that's part one some Haitian history, some Papa Doc Good stuff. Good stuff. Man, Papa Doc man go back to just battle rapping man.

When you were just spitting bars to be rabbit, you know it was better then. Yeah, you got any plugs for us prop man her politics were prop coming at you where we're cranking in the her politics pod

Instagram and in Twitter is cranking we're doing silly takes on that you know things that can't you know become a full episode so we doing takes on that prop hip hop.com for the book and

for the music and for the Instagram and the Twitter is it's all prop hip hop. Right. Well, check out check out hood politics and check out I got a book you can find it at at our book.com

you can find the podcast after the revolution check that shit out too. I'm a man I'm I'm caught up on it with with Skullfucker on his party. Fucker Mike everybody loves school every time I hear the names on this I'm like I could totally

picture Robert just giggling as he's making these names. You should hear the outtakes. No, you shouldn't. I will never write a British person into a story again. Would you try to do the British accent? Terrible mistake on my part.

So unbelievably fun for me. Oh my god. I hate it. Yeah, I hate it. Well, I enjoy it. I enjoy you attempting to do the British accent. I love Robert. Hey, by the way, he thought he's British not Australian.

So he might want to redo that. Hey, man. Well, I am on record is saying British and Australian people are the same thing. One could argue. Yeah. All right. Well, if you think British and Australian

people are different hit me up on Twitter and argue with me, but I will not respond to you. Hey, everybody, initially I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book After the Revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com.

But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem. Activists everywhere have been kind of

gathering to try and mitigate set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.

So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem that's Venmo at Free Fridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks, they could really use it. Local government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations out.

We're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this. So please Venmo at Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do. So one more time, the Venmo is

at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking

mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences

and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him

he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.