The Daily - The Cost of Haiti’s Freedom

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible. They ousted their French masters and created the first free Black nation in the Americas.But France made Haitians pay for that freedom.A team of reporters from The New York Times looked at the extent and effect of the ensuing payments.Guest: Catherine Porter, the Toronto bureau chief for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their freedom. A Times investigation explores Haiti’s reparations to France.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is a daily. In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible, ousting their French masters and founding a nation. ousting their French masters and founding a nation. But France made generations of Haitians pay for that freedom in cash. Just how much has remained a mystery until now. Today, my colleague Catherine Porter on what a team of Times reporters has found.

It's Friday, June 3rd. Katherine, just to begin, how and why did this project come to be? Well, I started going to Haiti in 2010 after the earthquake as a journalist for a different paper at that time. And was very upset by what I saw because of the death and destruction. And I kept going back to report on the rebuilding of Haiti. And over time, I came to see that that destruction, that state of damage was a constant there. It wasn't getting better. And at one point, I was doing a story about maternal health and I was in a hospital in Hensh in central Haiti and there was a 16-year-old girl on a hospital bed giving birth and her baby was lodged sideways. And the doctor said to me, like, she's going to die. We can't get her out because we have no electricity. get her out because we have no electricity. And last time I tried to do an operation,

I passed out in the OR because there's no AC. So we can't do it. You know, this is a type of reporting you do when you're in Haiti. So you're not only struck by the poverty and the pain, but also the lack of infrastructure is just quite haunting while you're there. And, you know, Haiti shares an island, the other half of the island is Dominican Republic, where they have like subsidized health care and education and a functioning subway system. And meanwhile, on the other side of the island, they don't have electricity or running water. And it's a resounding question. I think any foreign correspondent spending time in Haiti has to ask themselves, like, why? Why? Why is the country like this? And the answer you normally get when you ask people about this deeper why is corruption. And we've seen lots of stories of corruption.

is corruption. And we've seen lots of stories of corruption. Corruption does play a huge role. But the more I read about Haiti, I started to learn about this thing called the independence debt, which was a series of payments. Former slaves of Haiti paid to their French colonists for their freedom, for generations, for their independence, unlike anything I'd ever heard of before or any country had done. And I wanted to learn more and to learn everything I could about it to see what effect it had on the country's trajectory.

So trying to get to the bottom of how much they paid, who they paid, what was this thing the independents did. The more we dug into it, the more we came to understand that the context of these payments is really critical in understanding the bigger story about why Haiti is as impoverished and underdeveloped as it is today. and underdeveloped as it is today. And so, Catherine, what is the story behind these payments, this independence debt, as it's called? What is that history?

So, to understand the story of the payments, you need to understand the story of colonial Saint-Domingue. So before Haiti was Haiti, it was the most important colony of France. It was a small little nub of an island in the middle of the Caribbean that produced the bulk of sugar and coffee being consumed in all of Europe and made huge amount fortunes for people in France, but it was also considered one of the most brutal places for enslaved people. 90% of the population were kidnapped Africans that did not survive very long once they were there. They didn't reproduce. They were just simply replaced. A couple of years after the French Revolution, there was this revolution started by slaves in Haiti in which they overthrew their white masters. They set fire to the plantations

where they had been subjugated. And the former slaves win. It's incredible. In 1804, they form the country they call Haiti. And it was the first modern slave rebellion that created the first black republic of the Americas. Wow. So it's just an amazing story.

So, you know, what happened though after is instead of being celebrated, Haiti became a pariah. So Haiti is free, but totally on its own, very much isolated. Totally on its own, very much isolated and completely freaked out, worried that France is going to come back and reconquer. In fact, you know, in 1825, that finally happened. A battalion of warships show up with an emissary of a new king in France. And the emissary is a guy named Baron de Macau. And he says, look, I'm not a negotiator.

You have two choices. Either you pay us reparations for what we've lost, or we declare war. Can you explain that, Catherine? Reparations for what we've lost? You know, what they had lost was the land and their slaves. So they're talking about both human and physical property. And normally when we talk about reparations in today's context, it's the opposite. It's reparations for slavery. In this case, it was reparations for lost property. And how much is France demanding from Haiti? France is demanding 150 million francs to be paid over five years, which is just impossible, would be impossible for Haiti to pay. Its budget was just like a small fraction of that. And yet, like after just three days of

talks, the president of Haiti agreed. There's still a huge debate among historians as to why, but for whatever reason, president at the time agreed that this would be better than going to war. Hmm. So how does Haiti begin to tackle this enormous debt that they have disagreed to? Well, you know, they couldn't. They couldn't even make the first payment. Hmm. France knew that Haiti wouldn't be able to pay.

And so, you know, the French king, the second order he gave to his emissary was not just to get them to sign this deal, but also to make sure that they took out a loan from a group of young French Parisian banks. I mean, that's what happened. They took out a really bad loan from a consortium of French banks to cover the bulk of just the first payment. And that is what became known as the double debt. And why is it called the double debt? Well, there's the money that Haiti's paying France and the former French colonists for its independence. And then there's the money it pays back to the banks and the bondholders of that loan. Right. And late fees and payments, you know. So essentially, there's two debts here.

That's why it's called the double debt. Got it. A debt to France and now a debt to French banks. So what does Haiti do? Literally empties its treasury to try and finish that first payment and afterwards it defaults. And then the Haitian government basically tries everything. They pass laws for individuals to pay, a kind of personal income tax. It didn't last very long. They have taxes on stamps. They try property tax. They try a whole bunch of different taxes. But in the end, they end up relying really on one thing, and that is coffee. Coffee became the number one export in Haiti for more than a century. They tax coffee exports from coffee farmers that are generally small subsistence farmers growing coffee trees on small plots of land up in the mountains. And that is what pays year after year for the double debt.

year after year for the double debt. So the way Haiti ultimately decides to tackle this debt is to take its most profitable and important product, coffee, tax the heck out of it, and ship the bulk of those taxes straight over to France. Right. You have to remember that the thing that's most egregious about the double debt is that Haiti got nothing in return. It's not like this was an investment. Like when we think about debt, you know, international debt today that developing countries take on in order to invest in something like schools or, for that matter, agriculture, which would have been brilliant at the time. This money was just simply like a giant drain sucking onto the side of Haiti and going across the ocean to France for nothing in return.

But Haiti does make good on these payments. Yeah. When we were going through the archives, we found that it eventually paid the last part of the double debt in 1888. But, Michael, in order to make those payments, the Haitian government in the 1870s took out two more disastrous loans. And so it's kind of like, yeah, they paid their hospital bill, but with their credit card, like the debt was formally finished, but it continued in another form. And it continued for decades. And it essentially set Haiti on a course of indebtedness to foreign banks that didn't end

until really the late 1950s. Catherine, at the beginning of this conversation, you said that so much of Haiti's modern woes are tied to these payments. So by the time this double debt is finally paid off, just how much has it cost Haiti? So what we found by going through archives and collecting actual payments and tabulating them was that Haiti had paid in total $560 million. Wow. Then working with economists, we figured that if that money had just stayed in Haiti, instead of flowing across the ocean to France and just been tucked into people's pockets, it would amount to $21 billion today. A huge sum of money. That's the modest end. That's the bottom of the range, because it's unlikely that that money would have just stayed in people's pockets, right? They would have used it to send their kids to school, and the government might have used some

of it to build roads and bridges, and it would have grown the economy. So in the other scenario, we worked with economists and figured that if the Haitian economy had grown at the same rate as neighboring countries in Latin America, that money would add up to $115 billion today. Wow. So a transformative level of money for a country like Haiti. Yeah. I mean, one to eight times the size of the entire economy today. this much, much bigger number in the billions, which is really, from what you're saying,

the economy that Haiti would have had if all that money had stayed in the country. Right. You know, like, it's really just that opportunity cost that when Haiti was this young country trying to grow and make something of itself, It was hamstrung and did not have the opportunity to do so. We had to look at this as, you know, almost like magical thinking what Haiti might have been had it not been saddled with this huge burden from basically its birth. with this huge burden from basically its birth,

would Haiti look more like the Dominican Republic now? Would there be electricity? Would there be more public schools? Would I have gone to that hospital where that girl was facing death over a difficult pregnancy and found a doctor who had no problem doing an operation on her because the hospital had water and had electricity and had every medication that doctor needed to do it. We don't know what Haiti would look like now.

Of course, this is magical thinking, but to me, that is the cost that Haiti was forced to pay for this debt that really it should have never have had to pay in the first place. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So, Catherine, we have been focused on the staggering cost of this double debt, this independence debt to Haiti. But, of course, on the other side of this debt was France. So where did that money go within France, and what impact did it have there? Well, the bulk of that money went to the

descendants of former French colonists and slaveholders in France, you know, some of whom were still fabulously rich families, you know, merchant families, aristocracy that had invested in Haiti. We did some genealogy to look at who they are. In fact, you know, we found the records from a commission that was set up in France to decide how much money each property owner was due. And it was amazing to look through the handwritten notes because most of the worth of Saint-Domingue, of the old colony, was in its slave labor. That land was only producing anything because of the slaves, and they literally calculated the worth of the land

based per head of slaves. So this is making very clear that these payments are 100% tied to enslaved people in Haiti and what France regards as their value to the ex-slaveholders. Right. And we found some evidence that there were complaints at the time that this money didn't amount to much because generation after generation,

it was divvied up between grandchildren and great-grandchildren, more and more and more of them. But many of these families, you know, already had made so much money on the slave trade. These were just almost like small dividends long after entering their bank accounts. So this money that, of course, would have meant so much to the people of Haiti, felt like kind of crumbs to these wealthy French families who were getting them generation after generation. Right. It was just like sort of something extra that came in the mail, as opposed to something you wait for. The other winners on the French side were the French banks. You know, this international loan became a model and Paris became known around the world for international banking.

Right. But I think like what this double debt did was exactly what the Baron of Macau, that French emissary of the king, hoped it would do. When he left the colony and he wrote his report to the king, he said, under this regime, Haiti would undoubtedly become a highly profitable and costless province of France. It was basically a continuing colonization without having to have people on the ground. But you could still reap the profits long after the colony had become independent. Right. So the irony is that this arrangement is draining Haiti's economy, to use your word, and simultaneously kind of seeding the future of the French economy in the form of international banking. And what it so clearly demonstrates is how powerful money on this scale can be in creating institutions, right, and wealth over time. But in this case, not in Haiti, but in France. Right. That's really well put, Michael. Have there been any meaningful efforts since the establishment of the double dead to get France to pay some or all of this money back to Haiti?

Yeah, in 2003, around Haiti's 200th anniversary, a president at the time was a former priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He launched this campaign for reparations. Demanding for $21 billion in reparations. And it was this remarkable speech in which he just sort of surprised everyone in the audience, including the French ambassador. And that was the beginning. It became this huge campaign with television ads and street banners, you know, rah-rah bans. Even a legal team, international legal team, was putting together

elements of a lawsuit. But a year later, before any of this could come to fruition... Rebel forces rolled into Haiti's capital today, a day after President Aristide fled the country. At the same time, several hundred U.S. Marines, along with French troops, began securing key areas and Port-au-Prince. Aristide was removed from the country by the French and Americans. By the French and the Americans? Yeah. And there's lots of reasons for that. At the time, the country was roiling with problems. There was huge opposition to Aristide.

He was facing allegations of human rights abuses, of drug trafficking. There was a group of rebels, armed rebels, that were literally bearing down on the capital. So on the record, both the French and the Americans said that they were removing him to avoid bloodshed and it was at his request or he left willingly. Yet, years later, speaking to former French ambassadors, they say that the demands for reparation, this drumbeat and campaign that Aracide had launched, had a part to play too that had really rankled the French. They saw it as a trap that risked opening floodgates of demands from all former colonies, and they just wanted to shut it down. So France acknowledges that Aristide's demands that France right this historic wrong of the independence debt, it is some factor in the decision to remove it from power.

Right. Like, almost 20 years later, former French ambassador at the time said, yes, this was not the full reason, but it was part of the reason too. Wow. And that was the end of the demand for reparations. It went with him.

So this very much highlights how much France wants this to be a forgotten chapter of its past. Right. You know, the story of the Haitian Revolution is taught very rarely. Only 10% of French schools teach anything about the Haitian Revolution. And the story about the double debt, like that is not on the French curriculum at any level. Interesting. double debt? Like, that is not on the French curriculum at any level. This is history that France has worked to ignore, to smother, to silence, because it's expensive and it's painful.

But of course, Catherine, because of this project that you and our colleagues undertook, this subject is being discussed very widely at this very moment. So when the Times published everything that you and our colleagues found about this double debt, what was the response inside France? Well, this has stirred a lot of media coverage in France. There are columnists writing about it, radio shows talking about it. One of the French banks we highlighted that was very involved in later years, it now goes by the name Credit Mutuel, it put out a statement that it was horrified and that it was hiring a team of scholars, including Haitian researchers, to bring the full history to light. But from the French government, there's been nothing but silence. Total silence.

We have not had a reaction whatsoever from them. So it does not seem like the possibility of France paying reparations has really changed here. That possibility still seems very small. Yeah, I see no indication that that has changed. And what about the reaction in Haiti? The reaction has been huge. Haiti politics, colonization files. The revelations made by the New York Times.

The Haitian media has really been running with the story. It's been filling the airwaves of the radio, on TV. Talk show hosts have been talking about it. The newspaper has been printing parts of the story. But the most amazing reaction to me has been the emotional reaction among both Haitians in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, particularly in the United States. and the Haitian diaspora, particularly in the United States. You know, one Haitian American told me that she felt like she was a person who had suffered abuse for years and that the series kind of was an acknowledgement of the abuse

and that up until now, it was almost like this history had been so silenced that you'd feel like you're stupid or insane to think it and that it had really been Haitians themselves had been blamed for their own lack of development. And this was kind of like a vindication that the story that they knew to be true and they had told themselves was recognized by outsiders. I'm curious, Catherine,

how you think about the value of this project? I mean, if it's not going to result in France repaying this vast sum of money to Haiti, if it's not going to allow Haiti to reclaim this $115 billion in economic activity that it was deprived of. What is the value of having determined the cost of this to Haiti? Now, I interviewed this really interesting PhD history student who's studying Saint-Domingue,

the colony of Haiti before it was Haiti. And he told me he thought about the double debt every week. And I asked him like, why? Because he was studying colonial Haiti, like Saint-Domingue before it became independent. And you know, his response has really stuck with me. He said he thought it was just so unfair that France has this motto and it's known around the world for it of being the country of liberty, of fraternity, of equality. Like that's its theme. But Haiti is known for corruption, for poverty, for despair. You know, and this year we spent looking deeply at this really calls both of those things into question. Like, when it comes to Haiti, I do not think France's tagline has been liberty, fraternity, or equality.

Quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. You know, and when you look at the history of Haiti, among the taglines we should be including is that this was the first place in the Americas that threw off slavery and declared black people free. And it was made to pay for that for generations. to pay for that for generations. Well, Catherine, thank you very much. We appreciate it. And thanks for having me on, Michael. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Las Vegas, after Parkland, nothing has been done. In a speech on Thursday, President Biden said that a series of deadly mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma required Congress to end years of inaction by passing new federal gun safety laws. This time that can't be true. This time we must actually do something. The president called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, the expansion of background checks for gun buyers, and the adoption of red flag laws. But few, if any, of those proposals are likely to overcome opposition from congressional

Republicans, a reality that Biden angrily acknowledged. But my God, the fact that the majority of the Senate Republicans don't want any of these proposals even to be debated or come up for a vote, I find unconscionable. We can't fail the American people again. Today's episode was produced by Mujzadi, Rob Zipko, Will Reed, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Patricia Willans, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Rowan Nimisto, and was engineered by Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfer of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Constant Mea, Matt Apuzzo, Salam Gabrekidon, and Harold Isaac. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.