Is there any hope at all for Haiti?

[BrainGlutton]

@gonzomax

The Heritage Foundation wrote this;
In addition to immediate humanitarian aid, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti ,offers opportunities to reshape Haiti’s long dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.
I guess no disaster should be passed up if money can be made. Then, it is an opportunity to steer the government into something that would benefit us. Like in Naomi Klein’s "Disaster Capitalism’, we can take advantage of a bad circumstance and make a boatload of money.

I don’t get it. How could the U.S. make money off this disaster? Individual American businesses could – the relief organizations have to buy food and medicines from somebody and they might as well buy American; certainly the Defense Department will – and that will create jobs in the U.S.; but it won’t last very long.

[Sarabellum]

[quote=“Silverstreak_Wonder, post:2, topic:525073”]

Sure it could be fixed if someone would take it over that could invest and make it a tourist and cruise stop, say Disney. QUOTE]
Well, now… interestingly enough… there IS such a place in Haiti.

Royal Caribbean cruiselines has a peninsula on the northern coast that they call Labadee. They rather euphemistically refer to it as their “private island” off the northern coast of Hispaniola (Seriously, this is how they refer to it! God forbid the passengers realize that they are in god-forsaken Haiti!) Anyway, they built this little area up for the exclusive use of their cruise line, which requires predictably low-to-nonexistent port fees, and LOTS of their Caribbean cruises go there.

It’s quite a lovely place, actually. White sand beaches, very unspoiled and far-removed from anything ugly. A very few local Haitians are permitted to come inside the fenced & guarded beach area to sell trinkets and souvenirs, like… less than 20 local vendors per ship visit, with anywhere from 1500-2500 tourists milling around. The other uniformed RCCL employees, preparing the buffet lunches and delivering cold drinks with little umbrellas, are from the ship.

[Mr.Excellent]

Personally, I very much doubt there’s much hope for Haiti in the foreseeable future.

The problem is that there are far, far too many spoilers in Haiti. The government is very, very weak (effectively defunct right now), and widely viewed as corrupt. This combination makes it vulnerable at the best of times to anyone who wants to mount a challenge to it/spark large-scale rioting/etc. Further, even at the very best of times, Haiti’s infrastructure (supported by international aid) is barely capable of keeping actual starvation at bay for most people, most of the time. Give a hard shove to the national infrastructure - with riots, or storms, or an earthquake - and the whole ediface collapses.

Haiti seems to live on razor-thin margins - even modest deteriorations of any aspect of national life quickly reach catastrophic levels. It’s extremely hard to build up a country under those circumstances - you might make some progress, but you’ll still building in such an unstable environment that the next crisis slams everything back down into rubble.

Such an environment makes it very difficult to establish a stable democracy. Democracy, after all, is predicated upon the notion that it is okay for your preferred party or candidate to lose an election. I’m sure many Republicans were very unhappy when the Democrats took the American Presidency and Congress in 2008 - but they didn’t take to the streets to topple the government. They knew that their electoral defeat did not mean that they would starve, or lose their homes. In fact, they knew that even a Democratic government would take its duty to protect them very, very seriously. (And of course, the Democrats knew the same thing in 2000).

That isn’t the case in Haiti. Haitians know, from bitter experience, that a malign or indifferent government can make the difference between survival or death. When government becomes that sort of zero-sum game, losing an election is decidely not okay. For the same reason, even stable, relatively benign authoritarianism in the Putin vein is unlikely. (I’m no fan of Putin, but I think it’s fair to say that he doesn’t wish most Russians any actual harm - which makes him infinitely prefereable to, say, Papa Doc.)

A tempting solution would be to impose order by force of arms - send in enough UN or American troops to seize control of the country as a whole (rather than just the airport) and bring development by fiat. The problem is, of course, that such a move would be unlikely to be supported by the local population - we’d end up fighting the people we’re trying to help, and the whole thing would collapse once we (inevitably) left.

[yojimbo]

@Sarabellum1976

Well, now… interestingly enough… there IS such a place in Haiti.

Royal Caribbean cruiselines has a peninsula on the northern coast that they call Labadee. They rather euphemistically refer to it as their “private island” off the northern coast of Hispaniola (Seriously, this is how they refer to it! God forbid the passengers realize that they are in god-forsaken Haiti!) Anyway, they built this little area up for the exclusive use of their cruise line, which requires predictably low-to-nonexistent port fees, and LOTS of their Caribbean cruises go there.

Yep. Only found this out when I was in my parents and Haiti came on the news. My Ma said, “and to think we were there not too long ago”. I said that nope they weren’t there exactly but in the DR instead. They both insisted they were in a part of Haiti. Turns out they were right. I was surprised. My Da said that almost everyone he spoke to was insistent on one thing, it was the one place they stopped in where they would buy lots of crap off the locals as as my Da said “Those poor feckers need it more than most”.

[Chen019]

Is it possible that it can one day become a stable, somewhat prosperous place

Only through outside intervention to impose order and build/maintain key infrastructure.

[BrainGlutton]

@Chen019

Only through outside intervention to impose order and build/maintain key infrastructure.

But watch very carefully for profiteering.

[figure9]

orcenio. I read your essay. It was well written and really opened my eyes. Thank you.

[Magiver]

@gonzomax

The Heritage Foundation wrote this;
In addition to immediate humanitarian aid, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti ,offers opportunities to reshape Haiti’s long dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.
I guess no disaster should be passed up if money can be made. Then, it is an opportunity to steer the government into something that would benefit us. Like in Naomi Klein’s "Disaster Capitalism’, we can take advantage of a bad circumstance and make a boatload of money.

**
You never let a serious crisis go to waste**, Rahm Emanuel.

[code_grey]

here is a more optimistic take - most of those “wars”, “despots” and “occupations” really happened in and around the big cities. The bulk of the population live in the countryside, do subsistence agriculture, remain relatively unaccessible to people from other areas due to bad roads and generally don’t give a damn. Except maybe for things like Duvalier’s “Tonton Macoutes” who might actually show up at your village and mistreat you.

So, if only they had a decent level of population given the agricultural productivity of the land, they would have been perfectly fine. Not great, obviously, lacking in all sorts of creature comforts, but hey - zero unemployment, the weather is usually nice and life is generally livable. All the more so if purely organizational problems like unsecure land tenure were ironed out.

Too bad, however, that they have apparently managed to far outstrip the Malthusian limit of the country, destroy their forests and end up with a big minority living in urban areas relying on foreign food aid.

Well, so if they can get their population growth under control, maybe they will work things out. At least the rural people - I am not so sure about the city-dwellers whose economic basis of existence seems to have been precarious even without the earthquake.

In a sense, I think we Westerners do wrong by denigrating the farmers because they lack education and running water. Plenty of farmers in Europe in past centuries didn’t have much of either and nevertheless they lived interesting and useful lives. Just because the life of Haitian peasants is very different from ours doesn’t automatically make it “hell on earth”. Indeed, the farmers in nearby Dominican Republic that doesn’t suffer nearly as much from either land hunger or deforestation reputedly do just fine - a good example for Haitians to follow.

[Susanann]

@joebuck20

Is there any hope at all for Haiti?

Are you asking about the “west” side of Haiti? (because there is nothing wrong with the east side of Haiti Island)

Yes , of course!!! Absolutely!!

No problem!!

There is absolutely no reason at all why the west side of the island cannot be as nice as the east side of the same island (Dominican Republic). Actually, the east side of the island is rather quite nice.

Same island.
(Why is this even a question? )

[Chen019]

Paul Shirley has some advice:

I do not know if what I’m about to write makes me a monster. I do know that it makes me a part of a miniscule minority, if Internet trends and news stories of the past weeks are any guide.

“It”, is this:

I haven’t donated a cent to the Haitian relief effort. And I probably will not.

I haven’t donated to the Haitian relief effort for the same reason that I don’t give money to homeless men on the street. Based on past experiences, I don’t think the guy with the sign that reads “Need You’re Help” is going to do anything constructive with the dollar I might give him. If I use history as my guide, I don’t think the people of Haiti will do much with my money either.

In this belief I am, evidently, alone. It seems that everyone has jumped on the “Save Haiti” bandwagon. To question the impulse to donate, then, will probably be viewed as analogous with rooting for Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, or the Spice Girls.

My wariness has much to do with the fact that the sympathy deployed to Haiti has been done so unconditionally. Very few have said, written, or even intimated the slightest admonishment of Haiti, the country, for putting itself into a position where so many would be killed by an earthquake.

I can’t help but wonder why questions have not been raised in the face of this outpouring of support. Questions like this one:

Shouldn’t much of the responsibility for the disaster lie with the victims of that disaster?

Before the reader reaches for his or her blood pressure medication, he should allow me to explain. I don’t mean in any way that the Haitians deserved their collective fate. And I understand that it is difficult to plan for the aftermath of an earthquake. However, it is not outside the realm of imagination to think that the citizens of a country might be able to: A) avoid putting themselves into a situation that might result in such catastrophic loss of life. And B) provide for their own aid, in the event of such a catastrophe.

Imagine that I’m a caveman. Imagine that I’ve chosen to build my house out of balsa wood, and that I’m building it next to a roaring river because I’ve decided it will make harvesting fish that much easier. Then, imagine that my hut is destroyed by a flood.

Imagining what would happen next is easier than imagining me carrying a caveman’s club. If I were lucky enough to survive the roaring waters that took my hut, my tribesmen would say, “Building next to the river was pretty dumb, wasn’t it?.” Or, if I weren’t so lucky, they’d say, “At least we don’t have to worry about that moron anymore.”

Sure, you think, but those are cavemen. We’re more civilized now – we help each other, even when we make mistakes.

True enough. But what about when people repeat their mistakes? And what about when they do things that obviously act against their own self-interests?

In the case of mistakes and warnings as applied to Haiti, I don’t mean to indict those who ignored actual warnings against earthquakes, of which there were many before the recent one. Although it would have been prudent to pay heed to those, I suppose.

Instead, I’m referring to the circumstances in which people lived. While the earthquake was, obviously, unavoidable, the way in which many of the people of Haiti lived was not. Regrettably, some Haitians would have died regardless of the conditions in that country. But the fact that so many people lived in such abject poverty exacerbated the extent of the crisis.

How could humans do this to themselves? And what’s being done to stop it from happening again?

After the tsunami of 2004, the citizens of the world wailed and donated and volunteered for cleanup, rarely asking the important – and, I think, obvious – question: What were all those people doing there in the first place? Just as important: If they move back to a place near the ocean that had just been destroyed by a giant wave, shouldn’t our instinct be to say, “Go ahead if you want, but you’re on your own now.”?

We did the same after Hurricane Katrina. We were quick to vilify humans who were too slow to respond to the needs of victims, forgetting that the victims had built and maintained a major city below sea level in a known target zone for hurricanes. Our response: Make the same mistake again. Rebuild a doomed city, putting aside logic as we did.

And now, faced with a similar situation, it seems likely that we will do the same.

Shouldn’t there be some discourse on how the millions of dollars that are being poured into Haiti will be spent? And at least a slight reprimand for the conditions prior to the earthquake? Some kind of inquisition? Something like this?:

Dear Haitians –

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World

…
Additionally, some responsibility for the individual lies with that individual…

When I was young, the great humanitarian crisis facing our world – as portrayed by the media, anyway – was the starving masses in Africa. The solution found, of course, was to send bag after bag of food to those people, forgetting the long-understood maxim that giving more food to poor people allows them to create more poor people. (Admittedly, it’s a harsh truth.) At the time, my classmates and I, young and naïve as we were, thought we had come up with a better solution. “They should just go somewhere else,” we said. Our teacher grimaced, saying, “It’s not that simple.”…

But children are brought into the world by their parents. Those parents have a responsibility – to themselves and to their kids – to provide. They have a responsibility to look around – before an earthquake happens – and say, “I need to improve this situation, because if a catastrophe were to happen, we’d be in bad shape.”

The people of whom I write are adults. Functional, human adults with functional, human adult brains. It is not too much to ask that they behave as such. That they stand up and say, “Yes, we screwed this up the first time. We are forever indebted to you. Now show us how we can do it right. So that, next time, we won’t need your help.”

http://www.flipcollective.com/2010/01/26/if-you-rebuild-it-they-will-come-by-paul-shirley/

[dropzone]

Some people I heard on NPR see the earthquake as the reboot it needs. Look at it like this: Aid has been piling into it. People here who a few weeks ago might’ve dismissed it as a bananaless republic might see it as a source of cheap labor who will APPRECIATE the opportunity (for a few years) AND a PR goldmine. When most of the buildings are collapsed destruction of old crap is as easy as hauling away the rubble and one can hardly help but build better.

It’s a win-win. If I were one of my customers I’d be looking for a way to both cash in and build up.

[BrainGlutton]

Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti’

[BrainGlutton]

@Chen019

Paul Shirley has some advice:

Home - Flip Collective

Bad idea to give free school lunches to poor children, too. They’ll just breed.