https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/world/america...
Temporal causality is not a difficult concept.
The only things that matter, according to those who love to shit on Haiti, is their apparent inability to self govern. This inability must have come from nowhere, or is genetically innate to the people.
It's crazy how every country who has had it's sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state. Total mystery!
While there might be structural issues in Haiti, a colonial apologist starts with simplified one sided history -> The colonizers civilized the country -> the people deserved it -> The better side won, survival of the fittest
What I have seen is that unlike the Star Trek post scarcity world visions, all discussions are stuck at some sort of national or ethnic identities at one end or a very simplified oppressed vs oppressor ideology at the other end which prevents discussing many ideologies based on their teachings through a modern civilized lens.
It does not look like the divisions would ever improve because we are now moving into a post labor world and the asymmetry is probably a feature that defines geopolitical clout and power and no one has the incentive to think bigger.
My own understanding of 20th century Haitian poltics is fairly limited. I don't know if "prioritized tourism via cruise ships over education" is a fair characterization of Magliore's policies in Haiti, or, assuming it is, that this constitutes a good casual explanation of the Haiti/DR economic divergence. I'm frankly skeptical - lots of places that are not Haiti have tourism as a major, government-supported component of the economy, and nonetheless are capable of providing some kind of useful formal education to their populace and have better economic outcomes than Haiti. I suspect the story in Haiti is a lot more complicated than this. But sure, if there's a specific education policy that the DR did implement in the 1950s and that Haiti under Magliore did not, that explains DR's greater economic development today, feel free to make the case.
The colonialist apologist case with respect to Haiti is something like: rich white nations are already spending money and other resources providing humanitarian aid to Haiti, because the human need there is real and the native Haitian government is not capable of governing in a way that would fix these problems. If those same rich white nations were actually formally in charge of Haiti in a neo-colonialist poltical arrangement, they could govern it better and improve the lives of the average Haitian in a material sense. It's not directly related to the colonial history of Haiti, which is over 200 years in the past at this point.
I personally think there are serious issues with this argument, but it's not completely crazy to suggest that the revealed preference of many Haitians is to live under the governance of rich white countries, especially in light of Haitian immigration to the US which was a major issue in the 2024 US presidential election.
It's not the case that every country that has had its sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state, and this is an important observation if you're trying to come up with a theory for why Haiti is in the state it is in. As the sibling comment mentions, a number of countries that today are peaceful and prosperous places to live, the sorts of places Haitians might want to immigrate to rather than live in Haiti, are countries that earlier in history were badly defeated in war and conquered - this descibes the losing WWII powers such as Germany, Japan, and Italy, it describes countries subject to some kind of colonial influence until well into the 20th century like Vietnam, South Korea, China, India, and many other places. Most of these countries are doing fairly well today, certainly much better than Haiti, which hasn't been directly ruled by a colonial power since the beginning of the 19th century.
Germany in particular was badly defeated and occupied twice in the first half of the 20th century and had crippling debt obligations imposed on it by (largely) France, and is nonetheless a much much better place to live today than Haiti is. This is a fact about the world that needs to be explained.
While Cuba is pretty poor(and we can talk about embargo in those respects), they generally met their revolutionary goals. They got the mobsters out of Havana, who previously had massive sway in the government alongside the American ambassador. They massively improved literacy, put tons of effort into health for their citizens(prior to the revolution, a majority of cuban children suffered from foot parasites among other things), and did a relatively forgiving land reform to remove the big land-owners from power(ie Land reform in Japan post WWII by the US was considerably harsher policy wise iirc).
As far as a country with a huge trade embargo against it, they've done pretty well and built up allies around the world.
If Haiti followed a similar path, we'd see just as many complaints over their governance, but from a totally different angle.
As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success.
I think any time a country is kicked in the shins for being a little too democratic, there's going to be a period of rebuilding. That period gets longer each time they get kicked in the shins, with the more intelligent folks leaving each time, until they're left with the people you don't want leading a country. A self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
> As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success.
Haiti was also ruled by brutal dictators in the mid-20th century, and was receiving aid from the United States for much of this time. So this can't in and of itself be an explanatory factor for why Haiti is so much worse off than the Dominican Republic.
