1 00:00:18,620 --> 00:00:21,760 Thank you very much for that, for that introduction, David. 2 00:00:22,370 --> 00:00:32,419 Before I begin my lecture, and I want to first apologise for those in the audience for the double image that you see on the screen. 3 00:00:32,420 --> 00:00:39,409 That wasn't intentional. Since this happened then, and I thank everyone who was trying to help me resolve it, but I've been since it happened, 4 00:00:39,410 --> 00:00:43,310 I was thinking of an appropriate David Nicholls comment to make about the double image. 5 00:00:43,610 --> 00:00:51,950 And for those of you who know from wrestling to Duvalier, no Nichols very famous comments in the preface of it, 6 00:00:51,950 --> 00:00:57,350 when he talks about a Haitian historian who he stayed with in Port-Au-Prince while he did his research, 7 00:00:57,740 --> 00:01:03,530 and the Haitian historian wrote to him and said, you forgot your unit clear when you went back to England, 8 00:01:03,530 --> 00:01:07,249 meaning that he had seen Haiti in these two different sides. 9 00:01:07,250 --> 00:01:14,360 So not a perfect segue into this, but it will work for the purposes of today. 10 00:01:15,260 --> 00:01:19,579 I'm very, very grateful to to be here and to be able to speak with you. 11 00:01:19,580 --> 00:01:26,180 It's a great honour for me to be presented the 21st David Nicholls Memorial Lecture, 12 00:01:26,180 --> 00:01:34,040 and so I thank David Howard and members of the David Nicholls Trust for extending to me this this honourable invitation. 13 00:01:35,300 --> 00:01:44,540 It's very special to me personally to be delivering this lecture because David Nicholls work meant a lot to me at a very early stage in my career. 14 00:01:44,720 --> 00:01:52,940 Way back in the end of the last century, in the 1990s, when I started to develop a scholarly interest in Haiti, 15 00:01:52,940 --> 00:01:56,600 it was the Nicholls work that I turn to very early on. 16 00:01:56,610 --> 00:01:57,620 So it was something very, 17 00:01:57,620 --> 00:02:07,669 very personal to me that that journey and more than any other work that Nicholls published and this is not just the books but the essays, 18 00:02:07,670 --> 00:02:19,159 the articles and all of the, the output that he, he, he, he really sort of shared with the world on, on Haiti its past and up to the 1990s. 19 00:02:19,160 --> 00:02:25,250 But more than all more than all of that it was from Destiny to Duvalier that had the most sort of profound impact on me. 20 00:02:25,700 --> 00:02:35,030 It was one of the required books for reading on Haiti for anyone serious with understanding Haitian history. 21 00:02:35,510 --> 00:02:37,640 And it was a starting point, I believe, 22 00:02:37,850 --> 00:02:46,309 for a sort of investigation of a generation of scholars that looked at Haitian history after its first appearance. 23 00:02:46,310 --> 00:02:52,910 And I will say this I don't think the book has had the sustained respect it deserves. 24 00:02:53,930 --> 00:02:59,180 I think now as as a scholar myself of Haiti, as a as a professor of Haitian history, 25 00:02:59,510 --> 00:03:07,249 I've lamented the fact that it doesn't appear as frequently as it should on reading less on Caribbean history and Haitian history. 26 00:03:07,250 --> 00:03:14,640 And in some ways, that's a tribute to the vast outputs of scholarship on Haiti since the 1990s. 27 00:03:14,870 --> 00:03:16,009 And another other ways, 28 00:03:16,010 --> 00:03:25,610 I think that the richness and the insights that that book put forward still deserve to be grappled with by students of Haiti today. 29 00:03:26,560 --> 00:03:31,420 In the 1970s, when much of distilling to Duvalier was researched and written, 30 00:03:31,420 --> 00:03:37,570 Nicholls took readers away from the view of Haiti as a case of pathological self-destruction, 31 00:03:37,750 --> 00:03:43,150 a perspective that seemed to guide far too much of what was being written about the Republic. 32 00:03:44,050 --> 00:03:51,820 There's a whole sort of genealogy of that sort of writing that one can can find going back to the 19th century travel literature and coming 33 00:03:51,820 --> 00:04:01,420 down by insisting on Haitian decolonisation as part of a battle between conflicting ideas of what the Haitian state could and should be. 34 00:04:01,780 --> 00:04:06,790 Nichols, in many ways stood alone, even if his conclusions drew criticism. 35 00:04:07,150 --> 00:04:13,870 Few could take issue with his methods and the rigour by which he set about his task and is not to be taken lightly. 36 00:04:14,380 --> 00:04:23,590 The fact that Nicholls was able to look and send to really Haitian sources at a time in which many non Haitian writers were not 37 00:04:23,590 --> 00:04:31,960 privileging Haitian sources in reconstructing the Haitian past and his many trips to Haiti and his his research in private libraries, 38 00:04:32,500 --> 00:04:39,159 I think really are a testament to that. It is also significant, as the late Trinidadian scholar of Haiti, Michael Dash, 39 00:04:39,160 --> 00:04:46,780 once remarked that Nicholls was based in Trinidad, employed at the UW Y when he began to work through the ideas of the book. 40 00:04:47,350 --> 00:04:49,600 Trinidad was, it must be remembered, 41 00:04:49,600 --> 00:04:58,300 the place where Celia James first avowed to write a book on the Haitian Revolution that would become his magisterial, the Black Jacobins in 1938. 42 00:04:59,050 --> 00:05:04,300 There is something very important here in the way the process of Anglophone political decolonisation 43 00:05:04,600 --> 00:05:10,360 and the discussion over independent nationalism forced a reconsideration of the Haitian model. 44 00:05:11,140 --> 00:05:18,550 James wrote about Haiti at the start of that process in Trinidad and Nichols just after its completion in the 1960s. 45 00:05:19,720 --> 00:05:25,150 The struggles over black consciousness and governance in the former British colonies were very much alive in the decade. 46 00:05:25,150 --> 00:05:30,460 Nichols worked on the book and no doubt had some impact on how he viewed Haiti's past. 47 00:05:30,470 --> 00:05:38,800 And he makes several references to the scene in from that scene to Duvalier, but more so in later works of Haiti and Caribbean context. 48 00:05:38,830 --> 00:05:47,410 In particular, the conclusions he drew are now classic race and colour have been dividers of effective national independence in Haiti. 49 00:05:48,190 --> 00:05:49,930 But this cannot be determinative. 50 00:05:50,170 --> 00:05:58,210 And Nichols, in the revised edition of the book in 1996, acknowledged a difference in social and political power of colour and race. 51 00:05:58,780 --> 00:06:00,280 In my own work on Haiti, 52 00:06:00,280 --> 00:06:07,480 I have argued for close attention to the peculiar implications of colour and race at various points in time in the Haitian past. 53 00:06:07,510 --> 00:06:15,790 This is, in a sense, adding nuance to the argument. But what is significant is the larger point Nichols makes about the brittleness of power in Haiti. 54 00:06:16,300 --> 00:06:25,390 Changes both internally and imposed from outside, can reshape the material structure of Haitian power and cause further distress for Haitians. 55 00:06:25,750 --> 00:06:31,060 And once that process begins, the past itself becomes redefined in light of it. 56 00:06:32,070 --> 00:06:37,690 It is in the preface to the revised edition that Nick Nichols, I think, best captures this point of his argument. 57 00:06:38,010 --> 00:06:44,700 He acknowledges that the deflation of end of Duvalier's optimism after 1986 and the Duvalier dictatorship 58 00:06:44,700 --> 00:06:50,550 fell and the splintering of the Duvalier's explanation of the Haitian path altered Haiti's trajectory. 59 00:06:51,390 --> 00:06:58,470 In his review of Haitian history from 1979, the year of the first publication of Dissident to Duvalier to 1996, 60 00:06:58,710 --> 00:07:04,920 he was keen to not force his model as an explanation of the crisis after Aristide's first overthrow in 1991. 61 00:07:05,160 --> 00:07:10,830 But to present Haiti as a state of new tensions connected yes to the past. 62 00:07:11,040 --> 00:07:19,740 But at the same time, exploring newer measures of correction as Nichols concluded, quote, What are the prospects for the future? 63 00:07:20,190 --> 00:07:25,440 Changes in Cabinet offices and speeches of self-styled presidential candidates hit the headlines. 64 00:07:25,740 --> 00:07:28,050 But the real life of Haiti goes on. 65 00:07:28,500 --> 00:07:36,120 The manifest weakness of the government has also led to an increase in crimes of crimes of robbery and violence, end quote. 66 00:07:36,300 --> 00:07:42,300 And this is a telling comment about the way in which you see a different sorts of creation of violence. 67 00:07:42,330 --> 00:07:45,390 It's not the violence of the Duvalier estate and the Macoutes, 68 00:07:45,810 --> 00:07:52,410 but a different type of violence that still was a bit too young in the mid-nineties when Nicholls wrote this. 69 00:07:52,530 --> 00:07:54,630 But it was something that was notable. 70 00:07:55,320 --> 00:08:01,709 The legacy of all the troubles of the Duvalier is past was effectively covered in nicol's descriptions of contrasting 71 00:08:01,710 --> 00:08:08,700 murals on Port-Au-Prince walls and the provocative cover of the new edition of the book From There selling to Duvalier. 72 00:08:09,210 --> 00:08:15,330 Now, if we consider the changes in the new appearance of the book, here's a 1979 edition. 73 00:08:15,630 --> 00:08:23,550 And here is the 1996 one. The 1979 cover image is very much a story of the triumph of the Haitian Revolution, 74 00:08:23,580 --> 00:08:31,200 the triumph of the freed men and women who marched stoically to overcome French colonialism. 75 00:08:31,560 --> 00:08:35,970 This tells a very different story. It's a different history of Haiti that is highlighted there. 76 00:08:36,000 --> 00:08:43,680 Yes, the revolution is present in the the figure of the man sat in the chair in the in the gingerbread house. 77 00:08:44,070 --> 00:08:53,640 But that person is wearing dark glasses, a routine costume for the Tonton Macoutes, then in jeans and carrying a sword. 78 00:08:54,000 --> 00:09:03,989 It seems as if this image in many ways is pointing to the way in which the presence of the Duvalier era has or takes or uses, 79 00:09:03,990 --> 00:09:09,170 or even in fact recreates a Haitian past to serve its own ends. 80 00:09:09,180 --> 00:09:17,340 And in many ways, I think that's that captures a lot of what I see as a major contribution and lasting contribution of nickel's work. 81 00:09:18,460 --> 00:09:22,480 But it is nevertheless crucial for those of us charged with the duty of revisiting 82 00:09:22,480 --> 00:09:27,370 that Haitian past to do as Nicholls did and encouraged to evaluate it. 83 00:09:27,370 --> 00:09:31,300 In terms of the present in the onetime colony of San Domingue, 84 00:09:31,660 --> 00:09:38,319 that has come to be known by an interminable set of mostly pejorative suffixes the poorest country in the world, poor Haiti, 85 00:09:38,320 --> 00:09:44,379 the Magic Island, the land of revolutions there in the middle of the western end of the universe of the Caribbean, 86 00:09:44,380 --> 00:09:48,040 Haitian national independence has been redefined many times over. 87 00:09:48,460 --> 00:09:54,970 It is the independence of Papa Dessalines that Haitians celebrate freedom from French colonialism in 1804. 88 00:09:55,300 --> 00:10:04,480 Emancipation from slavery and freedom to determine its own interpretation of race and nationalism, which would be expanded across the Americas. 89 00:10:06,030 --> 00:10:10,410 19th century Haitian writers spent much time interrogating this type of freedom. 90 00:10:10,650 --> 00:10:15,000 And David Nichols devoted a good bit of his intellectual work to show how they did so. 91 00:10:15,510 --> 00:10:22,169 One need only examine the works, the works of Edmond Paul and in our film and compare them with their inheritors. 92 00:10:22,170 --> 00:10:30,360 Michel Actor John Kazimir. To see how constant this process of redefining Haitian freedom and race is and the great 93 00:10:30,360 --> 00:10:36,360 disservice we make to Haiti when we apply conventions and interpretations from outside. 94 00:10:37,310 --> 00:10:43,280 Haitians. Self conceptions of race have always been guided by history and moments of great change. 95 00:10:43,820 --> 00:10:51,650 When Haitians might refer what Haitians might refer to as normal or belong can only be appreciated in context and chronology, 96 00:10:51,830 --> 00:10:58,820 as those terms do not travel unaffected through through time or are not reshaped by internal conflicts. 97 00:10:59,730 --> 00:11:07,410 Now, today, in 2023, a whole new social tension exists from the one that Nichols assessed in the nineties. 98 00:11:07,950 --> 00:11:12,420 The horror in Port au Prince, where major sectors are choking under the grip of gang violence. 99 00:11:12,690 --> 00:11:14,400 Seems almost incomprehensible. 100 00:11:14,880 --> 00:11:23,250 Evacuees from the violent areas are trying with fierce desperation to find a different type of freedom, a freedom just to live. 101 00:11:24,060 --> 00:11:31,950 It is, to be sure, a Caribbean problem. Gangs, guns and their trail of pain outline daily life in most islands of the Caribbean today. 102 00:11:32,460 --> 00:11:38,880 But in Haiti, it is most distressing because of the scale and because of the inability of political containment. 103 00:11:39,600 --> 00:11:47,580 Scholars of Haiti, myself included, struggle to find purchase on this situation and quite often missed the mark when asked to explain it. 104 00:11:48,540 --> 00:11:55,230 We cannot do so satisfactorily, I argue, because we cannot truly understand what the purpose of this violence is, 105 00:11:55,500 --> 00:12:02,540 what it might take to stem it, or more disturbingly, the tremendous effect it is having on Haitians today and for years to come. 106 00:12:02,550 --> 00:12:09,060 And indeed, what we're seeing in Haiti today with the gang violence is going to affect generations of Haitians to come. 107 00:12:09,900 --> 00:12:14,160 We often lean to the past for answer for answers. 108 00:12:14,760 --> 00:12:21,959 We denounce foreign intervention with good reason. French colonialism brought violence slavery in the 18th century, US occupation, 109 00:12:21,960 --> 00:12:30,480 the 20th seeded deep internal divisions and 21st century UN peacekeeping spread cholera and left little traces of stability. 110 00:12:31,540 --> 00:12:38,980 And today, a proposed Kenyan intervention has aroused considerable debate against foreign occupation or presence in Haiti. 111 00:12:39,990 --> 00:12:41,520 These are important insights, 112 00:12:41,520 --> 00:12:48,480 but they are defining our current situation of uncontrollable violence that seems carried out by mainly younger and younger males, 113 00:12:48,780 --> 00:12:52,530 where contexts of past conflicts simply do not apply. 114 00:12:53,250 --> 00:12:56,640 What are the prospects for the future of Haiti? 115 00:12:56,670 --> 00:13:03,180 Nicholls asked in 1996. And it was a question that embraced the possibility of parliamentary democracy 116 00:13:03,420 --> 00:13:08,310 and a national effort to expunge the lingering vestiges of Duvalier ism. 117 00:13:08,730 --> 00:13:11,130 But we are some distance now from all of that. 118 00:13:11,760 --> 00:13:20,400 Haiti in 2023 is not the Haiti of 30 years ago or 20 years ago, with the second Aristide coup or even the Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. 119 00:13:20,910 --> 00:13:28,350 It has to be faced by a whole new set of terms, as perplexing as the prospect may be to identify them. 120 00:13:29,430 --> 00:13:33,750 This is not to say discussing Haiti from the perspective of its past has no value. 121 00:13:33,840 --> 00:13:40,020 Far from it. The past is always necessary because it holds the aspects of Haitian life and evolution 122 00:13:40,210 --> 00:13:45,210 essential to knowledge of the present and that journey from enslavement to freedom. 123 00:13:46,550 --> 00:13:51,290 And the Haitian past cannot be seen neatly as one of on broken exploitation. 124 00:13:51,560 --> 00:13:53,330 As is so often the case. 125 00:13:53,930 --> 00:14:01,910 I wonder if there are other countries whose 220 years of national life are so glibly summarised in news reports of its present problems. 126 00:14:02,510 --> 00:14:06,350 That sort of approach, even by persons with great sympathy for Haiti, 127 00:14:06,560 --> 00:14:12,590 overlooks the remarkable history of the country and what it has given the world after 1804. 128 00:14:13,610 --> 00:14:22,310 What I am suggesting is that the Haitian pass is best approach as being always in motion and reshaped by how we observe its present. 129 00:14:22,820 --> 00:14:30,440 To get to some of this nuance, the scholar must spend a great deal of time with the records of an older Haiti, and at the same time, 130 00:14:30,470 --> 00:14:40,760 as Nichols demonstrated in in that preface to the revised edition, cast eyes closely on the responses to what is occurring presently. 131 00:14:41,420 --> 00:14:48,560 This is not unusual, I admit, but it is much more acute in the Haitian case, because we are even when we because even when we probe, 132 00:14:48,740 --> 00:14:54,770 profess and pronounce, we're always catching glimpses of something rather than fully seeing what it was. 133 00:14:56,050 --> 00:14:59,350 The massive expansion, the historiography of the Haitian Revolution, 134 00:14:59,560 --> 00:15:08,830 or the new exciting work being done on the 19th century when taken together humbly, remind us just how far we have come. 135 00:15:09,970 --> 00:15:17,680 Since the since the period of the 1970s when a generation of Haitians were writing. 136 00:15:19,030 --> 00:15:23,360 It is my contribution this evening. To that process. 137 00:15:24,780 --> 00:15:30,749 Of looking at the past and considering the present by supporting the project of re-examination 138 00:15:30,750 --> 00:15:35,219 of what we know about an early Haiti and focusing on a period of Haitian history, 139 00:15:35,220 --> 00:15:39,030 I've spent a great deal of my career living with the 1940s. 140 00:15:39,870 --> 00:15:45,390 My fascination with 1940s Haiti stemmed from how terribly misunderstood it had been. 141 00:15:45,780 --> 00:15:54,540 It was long treated by non Haitian writers as a prelude to the dictatorship of Duvalier in 1957 and its extreme rule in the 1960s. 142 00:15:55,050 --> 00:15:58,890 Nichols was a notable departure from this tendency, seeking, as he saw it, 143 00:15:59,280 --> 00:16:06,540 to explain Duvalier ism by closely investigating its ideological antecedents and approach that has influenced my own. 144 00:16:06,930 --> 00:16:15,210 But Nichols himself, given the scale and the scope of his work and the sharp analysis of ideology and political power 145 00:16:15,660 --> 00:16:21,710 did not treat as effectively or as thoroughly with the cultural tensions that lay beneath. 146 00:16:22,080 --> 00:16:29,340 Political context for power in Haiti, especially in the 1940s and far from being marginal, the 1940s, 147 00:16:29,340 --> 00:16:37,890 a major moment in which Haitian notions of freedom and emancipation and liberty were redefined in popular and intellectual spaces. 148 00:16:38,310 --> 00:16:44,490 It was in that it was in that decade that some of the most contentious interpretations of Haitian history and 149 00:16:44,490 --> 00:16:51,360 the place of race in its internal and external relations were penned by writers such as Etienne Charlier, 150 00:16:51,770 --> 00:16:55,950 Dawsonville and Duvalier himself, in partnership with Long Journey, 151 00:16:56,730 --> 00:17:02,010 but is especially useful to consider is that it was a period of crisis that compelled 152 00:17:02,010 --> 00:17:07,650 new strategies of his generation who which wish from it a different Haiti to emerge. 153 00:17:08,930 --> 00:17:14,690 The pivot of the 1940s. And this is something that that is very much pointed out in the timeline of how 154 00:17:14,690 --> 00:17:21,980 we understand Haiti after your saw was a revolutionary moment of January 1946. 155 00:17:23,060 --> 00:17:25,580 It was called a revolution by the people who made it. 156 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:33,709 Mostly initially students from the Haitian University, and then expanding from there to a core group of people, 157 00:17:33,710 --> 00:17:40,400 labourers, high school students and the general population, not only in Port au Prince, but in provincial areas. 158 00:17:40,970 --> 00:17:43,760 This was different from the revolution that led to independence. 159 00:17:44,060 --> 00:17:49,850 It is also different from the use of the term revolution in Haiti's long 19th century, when new military leaders, 160 00:17:50,390 --> 00:17:55,580 eager to call themselves revolutionaries, use the word frequently to define their overthrows. 161 00:17:55,580 --> 00:17:58,250 And. Almost every moment. 162 00:17:58,250 --> 00:18:08,390 You have an overthrow in Haiti in the 19th century, straight to 1915, was always referred to in official correspondence as a revolution. 163 00:18:08,960 --> 00:18:13,700 Revolution in the fever of 1946 meant an end to neo imperialism. 164 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:18,380 It meant an end to dictatorship. It meant a vision of Haitian democracy. 165 00:18:18,620 --> 00:18:21,650 It meant a new way of seeing race, nationalism and colour. 166 00:18:22,370 --> 00:18:25,549 But even these aspects of the political conflict change. 167 00:18:25,550 --> 00:18:29,780 In the months and years following the protests of January 1946. 168 00:18:30,470 --> 00:18:39,290 The statement of radical youth that ignited the spark of 19 of January 46 drew on French resistance, 169 00:18:39,290 --> 00:18:45,619 the Spanish Civil War and Haitian history in defining how it saw what was at stake in Haiti at that time. 170 00:18:45,620 --> 00:18:58,849 And here is the the celebrated appearance of a text in the student paper, LaRouche, that appeared in its New Year's edition in January 1st, 171 00:18:58,850 --> 00:19:09,980 1946, which is Haitian Independence Day, in which it eagerly talks about 1946 as the year of liberty, of the triumph of true democracy. 172 00:19:10,010 --> 00:19:13,940 And of course, this is important coming after the war. About to leave Franco. 173 00:19:14,570 --> 00:19:18,220 Vive la. Long live the youth. Long live democracy in action. 174 00:19:18,230 --> 00:19:21,930 Long live social justice. Long live the world proletariat. 175 00:19:21,950 --> 00:19:28,240 Long live. 1804. So this is really a key moment and it is from this that we get. 176 00:19:28,990 --> 00:19:37,660 The ousting of President Eli Lesko, the gentleman in the centre here just seven days after the the student protests began. 177 00:19:38,260 --> 00:19:46,120 And you get this mass national protest against not only the Lesko government, 178 00:19:46,120 --> 00:19:54,990 but what many interpreted the the Lesko government to sort of symbolise, which is foreign control of Haiti at that time. 179 00:19:55,000 --> 00:20:04,890 So 1946 is a crucial moment. The end result of much jostling, negotiating and fighting was the election of Dumas's Estimé, 180 00:20:05,280 --> 00:20:14,280 a black deputy from the Reds in August of that year, and the excitement of 1946 led its supporters to label it a dawn of a new freedom. 181 00:20:14,280 --> 00:20:19,700 And in fact, in the language of the times, it was seen as a new independence. 182 00:20:21,290 --> 00:20:27,800 The entire history of the country up to that point was portrayed quite different by the generation of 1946. 183 00:20:28,220 --> 00:20:32,540 Duvalier, in the mid forties, famously wrote that, quote, 1804 was an evolution. 184 00:20:33,140 --> 00:20:44,130 This is a revolution and quote. In explaining the factors that led to the revolutionary moment of 1946 and all that energy that carried it. 185 00:20:44,430 --> 00:20:50,909 I have in earlier work put forth several factors that ranged from ideological conflicts between black nationalists 186 00:20:50,910 --> 00:20:57,150 and socialists to a wartime radicalism that rejected perceived dictatorial tendencies of President Lesko, 187 00:20:57,390 --> 00:21:00,090 as we saw in the LaRouche advert earlier. 188 00:21:00,930 --> 00:21:08,940 I wish, however, to give my focus this afternoon to one which has a lot of relevance to how we see Haiti today. 189 00:21:09,450 --> 00:21:17,790 The role of intervention. The United States had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 34, and in the years after military withdrawal, 190 00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:23,820 the United States continued to not only hold powerful political influence over Haitian affairs. 191 00:21:24,090 --> 00:21:35,220 Let's Go had been ambassador to the United States prior to becoming president in 1941, but also determined the economic direction of the country. 192 00:21:35,670 --> 00:21:44,130 1946 was, in the moment, treated as a response to the failure of the post occupation decade to protect Haiti from US racism, 193 00:21:44,370 --> 00:21:47,610 control and economic and political interference. 194 00:21:47,910 --> 00:21:52,860 As one radical puts it, in 1946, men of 1934 you have lost. 195 00:21:53,100 --> 00:21:56,370 We will not lose. 1946. Now, 196 00:21:56,370 --> 00:22:01,650 what were the specifics of US imperialism that so incensed the Haitian progressives 197 00:22:01,830 --> 00:22:06,330 who would eventually lead the country after estimated coming to power, 198 00:22:07,110 --> 00:22:14,700 especially in that critical period between estimates coming to power in 46 and the coming to power of Duvalier in 57, 199 00:22:14,700 --> 00:22:18,030 what was it that was so deeply upsetting? 200 00:22:18,840 --> 00:22:24,690 The most determinative feature of the 1940s insofar as foreign intervention and economic 201 00:22:25,380 --> 00:22:31,140 control was concerned was the establishment of a massive project of rubber planting in Haiti. 202 00:22:31,530 --> 00:22:36,090 Now, here you see for those of you who were curious why rubber is in the title, here is the answer. 203 00:22:37,970 --> 00:22:46,100 It was under the aegis of a corporation referred to as the Societe Eternal American Pool, a development that we call. 204 00:22:47,210 --> 00:22:50,270 Or more commonly known by its acronym, Shada. 205 00:22:51,630 --> 00:22:56,490 The basic facts around the shadow robot project indicates something incredibly ambitious, 206 00:22:56,520 --> 00:22:59,730 not only for Haiti, but for the entire Caribbean at the time. 207 00:23:00,210 --> 00:23:06,270 In the war years, the Caribbean support for the allies, most typically included by the service, as in the British West Indies, 208 00:23:06,510 --> 00:23:13,469 who joined the British Army or NGO strategic arrangements, the Lend-Lease contracts that led to bases in Chicago, 209 00:23:13,470 --> 00:23:17,880 Ramos, Trinidad and Vernon Field in Jamaica was part of that. 210 00:23:18,270 --> 00:23:27,360 But Shadow was much more than this because it involved the plan not just to extract space people or produce from the Caribbean, 211 00:23:27,660 --> 00:23:31,410 but to put in place long term agricultural development for Haiti. 212 00:23:32,940 --> 00:23:40,260 The plan arose when the blockade of the Pacific made it impossible for the United States to get rubber supplies from Asia. 213 00:23:40,860 --> 00:23:44,850 The Cut-off compelled the United States to look elsewhere for much needed rubber. 214 00:23:45,030 --> 00:23:49,080 Rubber for tires. Rubber for boots. Rubber for raw material. 215 00:23:49,710 --> 00:23:53,490 Haiti had previously been surveyed in the early 20th century by Belgians, 216 00:23:53,490 --> 00:23:59,040 who determined it was highly suitable for growing heavy and possibly crypts to go rubber, 217 00:23:59,310 --> 00:24:04,350 a vine from which a form of latex would be extracted and then produced into rubber. 218 00:24:04,980 --> 00:24:09,360 By the autumn of 1941, Sharda was established and developed quite rapidly. 219 00:24:10,370 --> 00:24:18,000 It must be stress just how enormous this undertaking was with a US $5 million loan from the EXIM Bank. 220 00:24:18,020 --> 00:24:30,020 The Haitian state gave a 50 year monopoly to shadow 150,000 acres of pine forest, and 25,000 acres were devoted for sorry of pine forests, 221 00:24:30,020 --> 00:24:37,070 went to shadow for rubble, and 25,000 acres went for sisal production for for making rope. 222 00:24:37,610 --> 00:24:45,650 The largest effort was the land devoted for capacity, which was a total of 67,603 acres. 223 00:24:45,980 --> 00:24:53,780 This means, therefore, that what land once occupied with sugar and coffee cultivation in the 18th and 19th century was 224 00:24:53,780 --> 00:24:59,270 now under the control of shadow for this massive undertaking of a new plantation agriculture. 225 00:24:59,630 --> 00:25:08,360 There were five regional divisions across the country, each with ten farms at its height, shot at a total of 92,000 Haitian employees. 226 00:25:08,960 --> 00:25:15,530 To break this down a little bit further. If successful, Shadow would have achieved something that Haiti had not seen since independence. 227 00:25:15,830 --> 00:25:22,850 Mass production of favourable products such as sisal from the plantations, food crops such as spices and fruits, 228 00:25:23,030 --> 00:25:28,220 lumber from the pine forests and most of all, rubber for the war effort that could then. 229 00:25:28,820 --> 00:25:35,120 Many of the optimists hoped generate a new export commodity for Haiti in rubble. 230 00:25:35,720 --> 00:25:40,820 From the vantage point of August 1941, the possibilities for Haiti to modernise was very real. 231 00:25:41,300 --> 00:25:48,290 Haiti could displace Malaysia in the post-war world and become a leading global supply of latex for less coal. 232 00:25:48,320 --> 00:25:53,570 The presidents who came to power in May 1941. This potential was incredibly alluring. 233 00:25:54,200 --> 00:25:58,280 Haiti could move leaps and bounds above its Caribbean neighbours and Latin America. 234 00:25:58,700 --> 00:26:01,819 Unsurprisingly, he gave Shadow a ringing endorsement. 235 00:26:01,820 --> 00:26:05,719 And this is a quote from. In the summer of 1941, 236 00:26:05,720 --> 00:26:13,610 I proclaimed once more the total desire of our government to put at the disposal of shudder all the land which it may 237 00:26:13,610 --> 00:26:20,000 need for the cultivation of the strategic produce necessary for the war efforts of our great friend the United States. 238 00:26:20,330 --> 00:26:26,780 Even if in order to do it becomes necessary to tighten our belts and to neglect the cultivation of all the produce. 239 00:26:27,820 --> 00:26:33,580 For us. Just as for all the United Nations, there can only be one task when the war and court. 240 00:26:34,840 --> 00:26:38,470 Now less goes. Position here requires a little bit more explanation. 241 00:26:39,010 --> 00:26:43,690 The war had negative effects on economic dependent states such as Haiti. 242 00:26:44,110 --> 00:26:51,220 There was a crisis on the horizon that Haitian exports, such as coffee, would be reduced if the US, its greatest ally, went to war. 243 00:26:51,690 --> 00:26:57,850 Shada was a relief to a problem that seemed to be drawing closer support from Port au Prince. 244 00:26:58,210 --> 00:27:02,770 Support from Washington. Encouraged and fuelled the Shah to project. 245 00:27:03,430 --> 00:27:07,510 The president of Chada was appointed in August 1941. 246 00:27:07,570 --> 00:27:16,580 A man from Kentucky named Thomas Dudley Finnell was charged with the enormous responsibility of overseeing this entire operation. 247 00:27:16,610 --> 00:27:21,550 And now here are some images of just how extensive the shadow operations were. 248 00:27:21,970 --> 00:27:27,340 I think it's important to note before I proceed that what you'll be seeing from this part of the 249 00:27:27,340 --> 00:27:34,959 presentation through is from private archives of the shadow operations that I was given access to. 250 00:27:34,960 --> 00:27:39,940 And I'm working through those records now which have actually contributed to my own revision 251 00:27:40,180 --> 00:27:46,150 of Haiti in the 1940s and the significance of Shadow and how much effort was put into it. 252 00:27:47,060 --> 00:27:53,360 What is clear from my review of the documents so far is that shadow was far more significant than historians have given credit. 253 00:27:53,840 --> 00:28:02,060 It was unprecedented in its reach and scale and could very well have transformed Haiti's foreign exports and led the country to a different future. 254 00:28:04,180 --> 00:28:10,910 As I hope to make clear in the remaining time of this lecture is that shadows collapsed four years after it began Law, 255 00:28:11,020 --> 00:28:16,900 a sorry, four years after it was launch was due not to rapacious intentions of either let score for no. 256 00:28:17,260 --> 00:28:23,050 As has often been stated, but to the contingencies of the 1940s, the backdrop that created it, 257 00:28:23,350 --> 00:28:31,000 the abrupt US policy changes to antediluvian processing methods of rubber and to the decentralisation of its operations. 258 00:28:32,630 --> 00:28:35,270 Fornals papers, which I have looked at, 259 00:28:35,270 --> 00:28:41,600 reveal that he was convinced that Shadow would function with as little disruption as possible to Haitian farmers. 260 00:28:42,110 --> 00:28:45,050 Lesko may have promised as much land as shadow needed. 261 00:28:45,620 --> 00:28:53,090 But Finnell insisted that whatever land was taken from the Haitian farmers was rented with an understanding that should the project fail, 262 00:28:53,300 --> 00:29:00,770 the plots would revert to the original holders. The farmers would in turn be employed to work on the shadow lands for pay. 263 00:29:01,490 --> 00:29:05,240 Fennell's position on this was no doubt influenced by his time in Haiti. 264 00:29:05,720 --> 00:29:09,220 Prior to the Shadow project being launched. 265 00:29:09,230 --> 00:29:11,510 He was in Haiti since 1939, 266 00:29:11,780 --> 00:29:19,610 working at the agricultural school in Haiti to help develop new methods of agricultural development in core subsistence crops. 267 00:29:20,270 --> 00:29:23,690 Before that, he worked as a horticulturalist in Florida. 268 00:29:25,270 --> 00:29:34,960 In these two years, he had worked closely with Haitian peasants and agronomists on projects intended to increase agricultural production. 269 00:29:35,620 --> 00:29:40,930 This work involved a good bit of time spent with the Haitian peasantry observing their techniques. 270 00:29:41,320 --> 00:29:47,350 It was Fennell who saw the crypts. The crew saw the corpses of a rubber project as an opportunity. 271 00:29:48,470 --> 00:29:56,000 To do more than plant rubble, but an effort to transform Haitian agriculture and and lift the country out of its poverty. 272 00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:04,250 And there's a lot in this early material, both from the Haitian Department of Agriculture and from charter records itself, 273 00:30:04,580 --> 00:30:09,500 that that really point to this this idea. There's this sort of united view. 274 00:30:09,620 --> 00:30:13,850 That shadow could have been an answer to Haiti's economic problems. 275 00:30:16,140 --> 00:30:25,320 As he puts it himself. And this is taken from from the first report that Finnell filed in 1942, quote, 276 00:30:25,320 --> 00:30:28,980 Hate is one of the most economically depressed countries in Latin America. 277 00:30:29,280 --> 00:30:33,180 Yet Haiti is so full of opportunities, both agricultural and industrial, 278 00:30:33,420 --> 00:30:41,250 that the sort of management is embarrassed by its unwillingness to do more than can be properly, properly administered and financed and quote. 279 00:30:44,340 --> 00:30:52,500 Farnell oversaw the building of roads and electricity and water projects to the largest Saada areas in the Golden Valley and bayou in the north. 280 00:30:52,890 --> 00:30:59,610 The corporation even purchased a former railroad station with the intention of reviving and expanding rail transports in Haiti, 281 00:30:59,610 --> 00:31:03,240 which have been largely defunct in the decade before. 282 00:31:03,750 --> 00:31:10,740 For now, travel to the United States. Excited by the early promise of his corporation carrying samples of essential oils. 283 00:31:11,040 --> 00:31:12,960 Ginger, Haitian cacao. 284 00:31:13,230 --> 00:31:20,220 The last he took to the Hershey Chocolate Corporation in the US, hoping that Haiti could become a new supplier of chocolate for the United States. 285 00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:27,250 In a private letter from 1943, a visitor from the US Agricultural Department was enthusiastic with what he found. 286 00:31:27,270 --> 00:31:34,049 He said, quote, The more I see of the operation, the more convinced I am that it is the sorry, 287 00:31:34,050 --> 00:31:37,320 the more convinced I am that it is well conceived and executed. 288 00:31:37,620 --> 00:31:42,930 Nothing like it in the magnet in this magnitude has ever been undertaken in tropical agriculture. 289 00:31:43,500 --> 00:31:52,080 If Tom, referencing Finnell, is left until late fall alone, left alone until late fall, he will have his acreage planted. 290 00:31:52,410 --> 00:31:55,520 Planted meddling from Washington could ruin it now. 291 00:31:55,590 --> 00:32:03,809 And. This is an important admonition that came just at the apex of trips that the planting rubber planting 292 00:32:03,810 --> 00:32:09,090 was introduced to shutter operations in 1942 and came to dominate the entire production line. 293 00:32:09,480 --> 00:32:17,100 Nowhere before had such massive planting of it. Of this kind had been done, and Finnell and his board were well aware of the risks. 294 00:32:17,100 --> 00:32:19,800 As much as Lesko was hopeful of the potential, 295 00:32:20,460 --> 00:32:27,810 the US Rubber Reserve Company and Board of Economic Warfare asked for an increase in focus on the new rubber project. 296 00:32:27,810 --> 00:32:37,500 And so all attention was now being directed to that. But at the same time, there were other projects for rubber development in the United States. 297 00:32:38,160 --> 00:32:42,390 The plant was was particularly centred in Gonaives, in Haiti. 298 00:32:43,410 --> 00:32:50,900 And at the time in 1942, when this has been unravelled, there was no perceived end to the war. 299 00:32:53,210 --> 00:32:59,630 The US Robo Reserve Company was preparing for at least another 3 to 5 years for the provide provision of crucial rubber supplies. 300 00:32:59,990 --> 00:33:09,410 By the following year, 1943, crypto plantations were introduced at capacity and buyer, and by the summer there were plantations across six divisions. 301 00:33:09,410 --> 00:33:15,020 And at the end of the year there were a total of 45,000 Haitian labourers working on robo planting. 302 00:33:15,710 --> 00:33:22,940 It was at this point of widening that the feared Washington interference that I mentioned just previously came. 303 00:33:23,450 --> 00:33:31,160 The rubber development company had, with the effort in Haiti also been expanding rubber supplies in the United States and elsewhere. 304 00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:35,479 Synthetic rubber was successful in the US in 1941. 305 00:33:35,480 --> 00:33:39,020 The US produced 231 tons of synthetic rubber. 306 00:33:39,470 --> 00:33:45,590 Heavy investment with petrochemical industries and university chemists and labs revolutionised production. 307 00:33:45,770 --> 00:33:52,130 At the same time, Finnell was putting thousands of Haitians to work on the plantations in northern Haiti. 308 00:33:52,790 --> 00:34:00,110 By 1944, the United States was producing over 70,000 tons of of synthetic rubber. 309 00:34:00,590 --> 00:34:07,399 In February 1944, a delegation from Washington visited Haiti and immediately terminated the Cripps. 310 00:34:07,400 --> 00:34:12,710 It's a contract. Fennell was directed to return all land to Haitian tenants. 311 00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:19,430 The shock of this was hard for all who had believed in. Sharda Vesco begged Washington to reconsider. 312 00:34:20,330 --> 00:34:25,879 Aware of the damage it would cause to his government, his Minister of Agriculture, Morris Da Teague, 313 00:34:25,880 --> 00:34:33,740 also wrote several letters to Washington asking, Please do this in a graduated way of ending. 314 00:34:33,740 --> 00:34:39,110 Don't do this abruptly. Farnell took this outcome as a personal betrayal. 315 00:34:39,500 --> 00:34:44,209 He knew that the real reason was that US robot developers now wanted to protect us. 316 00:34:44,210 --> 00:34:51,770 Robert from overseas competition. Within months, all equipped sets of geo plantations were burned and cleared and the land returned. 317 00:34:52,310 --> 00:34:57,800 Some, Robert, continue to be grown in buyer and sizeable production continued. 318 00:34:58,190 --> 00:35:06,950 The US government gave us $175,000, which works out to be roughly US $2.8 million in 2020. 319 00:35:06,950 --> 00:35:13,070 Three figures for rehabilitation of families displaced on lands that were turned over to the jail. 320 00:35:13,670 --> 00:35:22,489 Embittered by the experience, Fidel resigned in September 1944 and moved to Puerto Rico for a few years and eventually returned to Florida, 321 00:35:22,490 --> 00:35:24,650 where he worked on the family orchid business. 322 00:35:25,220 --> 00:35:33,620 Just before he left, Lesko gave him the Haitian Order of Merit for his service and efforts to improve Haitian agriculture with the Chada project. 323 00:35:34,790 --> 00:35:38,360 Now public indictments against Chavez came very quickly after that. 324 00:35:38,840 --> 00:35:44,540 Farnell was blamed for the fallout as a self-interested modern coloniser who exploited the Haitian people, 325 00:35:44,690 --> 00:35:52,580 then left them without anything from Puerto Rico. Just months after leaving Haiti, he wrote a statement defending his job and his work in Haiti. 326 00:35:52,850 --> 00:35:57,200 He said, quote, It is obvious that they make no attempt and they meaning his critics, 327 00:35:57,530 --> 00:36:03,500 to present the facts in the case, but merely to smear my record with totally unsupported statements and quote, 328 00:36:04,130 --> 00:36:12,020 The criticism of fennel and Shahada, however, greatly expanded and have echoed loudly in the historical historiography of Haiti. 329 00:36:12,410 --> 00:36:16,850 Shada and all the people are associated with it, whereby in 1945, 330 00:36:16,850 --> 00:36:22,790 on the eve of the revolutionary moment of 1946, synonymous with exploitation of Haitians. 331 00:36:23,300 --> 00:36:28,190 That narrative only deepened after 1946 and the election of Estimé and the profound 332 00:36:28,190 --> 00:36:33,500 black consciousness that defined Haiti's 1940s and its cultural legacies. 333 00:36:35,240 --> 00:36:44,810 The student protests and even more, the estimated Previn's presidency might be seen as outcomes of an anger that demand closer investigation. 334 00:36:45,410 --> 00:36:52,820 What might we learn from all of this if we treat the colossal failure of SHADO as one part of the drama of Haiti's 1940s? 335 00:36:53,090 --> 00:36:58,490 This revision of intent and outcome might be applied to other elements of how we understand the Haitian past. 336 00:36:59,030 --> 00:37:06,860 There is inherent in all of this a question of memory, always so vital to how we engage with Haiti, memory and history. 337 00:37:07,840 --> 00:37:15,070 Sometime in the late 1990s in Petionville, Haiti, I attended a concert by Russian voodoo group Bookman Experience. 338 00:37:15,710 --> 00:37:24,010 At the concert, the lead singer Lolo out during one of the songs adlibbed a list of historical moments of Haitian exploitation, 339 00:37:24,010 --> 00:37:25,780 starting with French colonialism. 340 00:37:26,320 --> 00:37:35,050 As he came closer to the present, he roared when he reached a 1940s new song Shada, which translates as we remember Shada. 341 00:37:35,680 --> 00:37:42,610 The memory, he recalled, was a bitter collective memory borne in the powerful expression of Haitian nationalism of the 1940s. 342 00:37:43,240 --> 00:37:51,670 As with all memories created in crisis, it carries forward emotions and it creates its own history. 343 00:37:52,390 --> 00:37:57,640 Haiti has had too many moments of crisis which have sprung many conflicting histories of its past. 344 00:37:58,210 --> 00:38:02,500 The crisis of gang violence of today is creating new explanations and rewriting 345 00:38:02,500 --> 00:38:06,580 all memories of the journey that brought Haiti to this distressed point. 346 00:38:07,150 --> 00:38:11,980 But if we are to remember the forces that sought to improve and those that sought to destroy Haiti, 347 00:38:12,160 --> 00:38:19,270 we have to first see the Haitian past not as an unbroken chord of disaster, but loop threads frayed, but still firm. 348 00:38:19,960 --> 00:38:28,240 And we must equally return to the past, as Nichols insisted in the seventies with his work with new questions from which we might get 349 00:38:28,240 --> 00:38:33,820 some closer understanding of what we thought we knew about the many lives of Haitian freedom. 350 00:38:34,270 --> 00:38:34,750 Thank you.