Haiti in Crisis

When Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti in October, the massive storm brought torrential rains and 145-mile-per-hour winds that destroyed almost everything in its path.

In the town of Les Cayes, residents watched as a man was blown off a ledge into rushing water and then killed by a falling wall. In Port-Salut, wind ripped the roof off Destine Rosevald’s home. Before he could get two of his children to safety, the house crumpled on top of them.

By the time the hurricane subsided, the country was ravaged. In Lacadonie, so few structures were left standing that hundreds of people were living in caves. The smell of death lingered over everything.

“Our country has collapsed,” said one boy. “We cannot go to school, and it will be years before we can rebuild our homes to what they once were.”

All told, Haiti’s strongest storm in a decade killed more than 1,000 people and left 175,000 homeless. Some 1.4 million Haitians—about 13 percent of the population—required assistance with food, shelter, and medical care.

This is an all-too-familiar scene in Haiti, which never seems to recover from one disaster before it’s hit by another. In 2010, a devastating earthquake killed 316,000 Haitians and displaced 1.5 million. Six years later, Hurricane Matthew is yet another setback for one of the most long-suffering nations on Earth.

Why can’t Haiti catch a break? Part of the reason is geography. Haiti is situated on the western half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. (The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern half.) The island is regularly hit by tropical storms that tear through the Caribbean Sea. 

Other Caribbean countries are hit just as hard, but Haiti is particularly vulnerable because it’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. More than 40 percent of its people are unemployed. Almost 60 percent live on less than $2.42 a day. Widespread poverty means its people can’t build houses strong enough to survive each new storm, and the country’s infrastructure—its roads, bridges, and public buildings—are extremely fragile.

Environmental damage adds to the problem. Impoverished Haitians have cut down many of the country’s trees to burn for fuel. This has left mountain slopes bare, leading to devastating floods during intense storms.

“Haiti has an unnatural vulnerability to natural disasters,” says Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “It boils down to the government’s inability to provide basic services.” 

For decades, Haiti’s leaders have been unable to prepare people for disasters, get them to shelter, or help them rebuild afterward. The nation’s inadequate education system and underfunded police only exacerbate the problem, Concannon explains: Low literacy rates mean that some people can’t read notices telling them to evacuate; because of ineffective policing, many refuse to leave their homes for fear of looting.

Haiti’s ineffective leadership is due to the government’s notorious instability. For example, Haiti has been without an elected president since February. This is in part because the 2015 presidential elections were marred by corruption and violence—and the results had to be thrown out. New elections were originally scheduled for October 9, only to be postponed to November 20 because of the hurricane.

Many of the country’s problems stem from its turbulent past (see Key Dates, left). Most Haitians are descended from African slaves who were brought over by French colonizers. The slaves rebelled, and in 1804 Haiti declared its independence. But in exchange for France’s lost “property”—its plantations and slaves—Haiti was forced to pay an enormous “independence debt” worth about $23 billion in today’s money. 

Haiti didn’t finish paying off the debt until 1947, and that had crippling long-term consequences.

“The pressure of paying off the debt kept Haiti from investing in building up the country,” Concannon says. 

In contrast to the United States, which became independent in 1776—just 28 years before Haiti—Haiti spent its first century neglecting the creation of the basic building blocks of society, including sustainable food production. Amid the chaos, a long string of tyrants were able to seize power. 

“Dictators stole left and right from the country,” Concannon says. 

Two of the most notorious are François Duvalier, who was known as “Papa Doc,” and his son, Jean-Claude, who succeeded him and became known as “Baby Doc.” From 1957 to 1986, they jailed, tortured, and killed their opponents while skimming millions of dollars from Haiti’s treasury. 

“It’s not an accident of history that the government is so poor and weak,”  says journalist Jonathan Katz, who has long covered Haiti. “This is a process that’s been going on for 200 years.”

The other factor that has long destabilized Haiti is a history of international intervention. The U.S. has invaded the country several times, most recently in 1994, when American troops reinstalled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He had been elected in the nation’s first democratic election four years earlier and was then ousted in a military coup. 

Today, Haiti is in dire need of aid. The U.S. has pledged at least $14 million—far more than any other country but just a fraction of what Haiti needs to recover from the hurricane. 

But the help that has come to Haiti in the past hasn’t always been effective. After the 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars poured in from around the world. Almost all of it went toward temporary measures like tents and emergency food. None, say critics, was used to make lasting changes in the way the country builds structures and feeds its people. 

There have also been unintentional but deadly consequences of foreign aid. In 2010, in the aftermath of the earthquake, United Nations peacekeepers on assignment in Haiti accidentally started a cholera epidemic. An infectious and potentially fatal disease spread via contaminated drinking water, cholera had never before been present in Haiti. But U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal, where cholera is common, threw infected human waste into a river. The disease spread ferociously, and more than 10,000 Haitians have since died of cholera. 

Now, floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew have spread the cholera into new areas, threatening communities that lack fresh water and proper sanitation.

As of early November, residents of western Haiti were just beginning to pick up the pieces. International aid workers labored to reach places that became inaccessible because of flooding and collapsed bridges.

The damage to the country’s agriculture was severe, a serious concern in a country where most of the population depends on growing its own food. 

“We’re very worried about the country’s future in terms of food security,” says Hervil Cherubin of Heifer International, an aid group that works in Haiti. “Most of the crops are gone. Many of the farm fields are like landfills. They’re full of trash, seawater, gravel, and other debris.”

In the long run, Haiti needs to be able to sustain itself, so it doesn’t have to rely on foreign aid, says Katz. Haitians need to create the proper institutions to do things themselves. 

“Hospitals, schools, police, and fire departments—all the things that a country needs to function,” Katz explains, but there’s no way to do this without a functioning government.

Haitians hope the long-delayed elections will finally jump-start this process. Concannon says he is “cautiously optimistic.” He praises Haiti’s recognition that its original election earlier this year was flawed and that they needed to start over with a clean slate. 

“In the end,” he says, “what’s important is this is an opportunity for the Haitian government to do better than before and to set the stage for the future.”