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clude support for Aristide. This raises the question: How can Americans
such as George Bush talk to the Haitian people about democracy and all
the while say that they don't get to have the president who wins the
election? The Clinton administration's argument is also flawed: putting
Aristide back in power will not produce a democracy. The Duvaliers
were fond of claiming that Haiti was not ready for democracy. Of
course, they did everything they could to make sure Haiti stayed that
way.
Haiti has a very wealthy and very unproductive elite that lives there
by stealing its resources.
The New York Times
recently ran a bizarre article
comparing Haiti to South Africa, never mentioning the fact that the
comparison was between the richest nation in Africa and the poorest na–
tion in the Americas. In South Africa a boycott meant something, be–
cause there was something to boycott. A wide range of South African
products had to be forced off the Western markets, and the Western na–
tions had to be persuaded to deny themselves profitable trade. A large,
successful modern entrepreneurial class was made to suffer. In Haiti one
of the few export products is mangoes, which are gathered from single–
tree farmers. Mangoes were originally exempted from the embargo for
fear that the farmers, lacking the income from mangoes, would chop
down the trees and sell them for charcoal, thus contributing
to
Haiti's
already devastating deforestation. My lesson about the elite was taught
to me by a Haitian whom I had known since 1985, whose home I had
frequently visited. His extremely wealthy family was rarely outspoken, but
its members had denounced Jean-Claude Duvalier in his last months.
Their conservative but reasoned position was that they were interested in
making money. Military rule, violence, and corruption were all bad for
business. They wanted to thrive in a Western-style democracy.
After Aristide was overthrown, a fashionable subject both in Haiti
and the U.S. was the question of which elite families had "financed the
coup." No one seemed to know how much money it would have taken
to finance a Haitian coup against a president already hated by the mili–
tary, but almost everybody had their own list of the families who al–
legedly had put up money. My friend's name was on most of these lists.
This made no sense. He and his family had always been against such
things as coups, and this coup d'etat was particularly bad for business.
But when I asked him about the accusation, he said, "Now I have
learned that the people are sometimes wrong." I asked a well-respected
businessman how he felt about the coup, and he answered, "After twenty
years of struggling for democracy I find that I am not the democrat I
thought I was."
