Haiti, extreme poverty and vulnerability for centuries (Photo: ANSA)
16:55, May 21•NEW YORK•ANSA Editorial Office
(ANSA) – NEW YORK, 21 MAG – There’s a reason Haiti is the destitute country that has been confined to a fate of underdevelopment and black misery for centuries.
The American newspaper The New York Times (NYT) today, after months of investigation, lifts the veil of the “big payment”, a perverse mechanism on the basis of which, since the end of the 17th century, Haiti has become the first and only country in the world where since Generations, the descendants of freed slaves must pay compensation to the descendants of their former masters.
In 1791 – reconstructs the research of the American newspaper, which also appeared in French and Creole – slaves from Haiti drove the French out and founded a nation in the first successful slave rebellion in the modern world.
“France instead made generations of Haitians pay for their freedom. How much was paid remains a mystery to this day,” the newspaper writes.
“Wealthy French settlers continued to push to retake the territory and had the Bourbon monarchy on their side. The payment read: Compensate the former owners or another war would follow the request”.
The size of the payment – 1825 francs 150 million in five installments – was much larger than Haiti’s capabilities – the first installment alone was six times the government’s revenue that year – but this was part of the plan.
“Thus becomes a double debt: the payment and the loan to pay it,” writes the Times, which has reviewed thousands of pages of original government documents, some old, centuries old, and many never or rarely used by historians in France’s archives were consulted. Haiti and the United States.
For the first time, it was calculated how much Haitians paid to the families of their employers, to the banks – including Crédit Industriel et Commercial, which financed the Eiffel Tower, and the National City Bank of New York, forerunner of Citigroup – and to them the investors who granted the loan, not only in terms of “double debt” payments, but also in terms of interest, year after year, for decades.
The sum of $560 million in today’s dollars over seven decades, according to the Times, does not represent the true magnitude of the loss: “If those funds had stayed in the Haitian economy, they would be in the hands of the coffee farmers, the laundresses, the masons, they won would have enabled the country’s real transition in two centuries, creating a fortune of at least $21-115 trillion, six times the size of the country’s economy in 2020” (ANSA).
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