Haiti Since 1804: Class, the State and the Indemnity

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2:08Patrick Jean-Baptiste Folks, we have a treat for you today. I have two distinguished guests appearing on the show for the first time together. We have Dr. Alex Dubier and Dr. Robert Platton. Welcome to the show, brothers. Thank you for having us.

2:27Guest Thank you. Yes, it's good.

2:29Patrick Jean-Baptiste Before we get into it, I was racking my brain last night thinking about famous examples of intellectual giants who were lifelong best friends. I could only think of two that came to mind, David Hume and Adam Smith, and the other is Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You two are writers. What's the title of the book that would best describe your long friendship? The title of the book? Yeah, if you had to give a book a title to describe your lifelong friendship, what would it be? Marxist capital. Who's Marx and who's capital? Karl Marx. No, yeah, I know. But for you, Marxist capital. Okay.

3:10Guest But I would use class, which is to some extent the same thing. But we both always talk about class, and we don't like what you might call race reductionism or gender reductionism. We think that class has primacy over all the other categories. Not that the other categories are not important, but they are subsumed under class. So I think that is our lineage. And obviously, it dates back to Marx. And you forgot, obviously, two friends, Marx and Engels. That's another long friendship.

3:49Patrick Jean-Baptiste Why would you subsume the other categories as causes? Where does class predominate?

3:55Guest I'll let Alex talk about it, because in his book, he has a chapter on gender. It's very clear that class is more important. And his chapter on the indemnity also shows that class is more important than one sort of nationalistic reaction, or that we are all Haitians, and we are all in this together. Class actually makes it clear that we are not all of us in this together. There are deep divisions, and some people benefit from those divisions. So why don't I let Alex talk about gender or the indemnity? Because in the book that he just published, Haiti, since 1804, I have a bluff at the end, and I said, the argument in the book are persuasive and will challenge many out of their comfort zones. That's why I met. Let Alex answer that.

4:51Patrick Jean-Baptiste I wanted to ask you, though, before we get into Professor DePriza's book, Haiti, since 1804, did Karl Marx and Engels have much to say about the Haitian Revolution?

5:03Guest He mentioned Haiti, one of his collected work volumes, but he didn't have much to say about that. He knew Haiti and the Revolution, but he didn't go into it. He didn't pay much attention to the Revolution or to what happened in Haiti's successor Revolution.

5:18Patrick Jean-Baptiste So, Professor DePriza, this new book that Dr. Faton mentioned that we're going to talk about today, the title is Haiti, since 1804, Critical Perspectives on Class, Power, and Gender. What's different about this book compared to the others you've written?

5:38Guest I just want to say that I owe a great deal of gratitude to Robert for reading the chapters of the book and giving me his feedback, and also another colleague, Anton Alahal, who is in Canada. He also read many of the chapters and gave me good feedback. So, I'm very grateful to both of them for doing that. And other people also read different chapters, and I mentioned them in the acknowledgement of the book. But basically, what I try to do in this book is to challenge many of the predominant perspectives on the indemnity, which basically portrayed Haiti as having simply capitulated to the demands of France for reparations, for having defeated the French during the Haitian Revolution. And I thought this was missing a central aspect of it, which is that there was a no Haitian rulers who first proposed to pay France an indemnity in return for its recognition of Haiti's independence, because as long as France was refusing to recognize Haiti's independence, no other Western power was willing to do, including the U.S. and the other European powers. For Haiti to be able to join the rest of the independent countries of the world, it had to pay a price to do that, which was to basically tell France, okay, we'll compensate the former planters for their loss. In return for that, you recognize Haiti's independence, which is what the indemnity was all about. Once Waiye put that on the agenda, France took it and ran with it and came to terms on the amount of the indemnity, initially $125 million. France later reduced to $60 million. And since Haiti had borrowed $30 million to pay their first installment on the indemnity, the total amount paid he owed to France came to $90 million francs, not $150 million francs, as most people have written about. That was the reason why I wanted to write that chapter, basically to offer a more critical perspective on the agency of the Haitian ruling class in proposing the indemnity. And most writers also have blamed the indemnity for Haiti's inability to develop its economy. And I argued instead that it was the inability of the new ruling class forces to subjugate the former slaves who became land-possessing peasants. And here again, the class issue was central in my argument because Waiye, after his draconian, was still unable to recreate the large-scale plantation system that the French had established during the colonial era. And having failed that, the peasants who became landowners or possessors of land were able to exercise a great deal more autonomy in what they produced, the Soviet Haitian, the bourgeoisie, even those who owned land had to rent their land to peasants to produce the crops they exported, which was primarily coffee. My argument was that it was the inability of the ruling class to reproduce the large-scale plantation system of the colonial era that was at the root of Haiti's inability to develop its economy, combined with, as I go on to argue, the constant internecine conflict among factions of the ruling class to control the state as a means of enrichment for those who controlled it. If you look at the revolutions, coup d'etats, or conflicts among members of the political ruling class, it explains Haiti's relative instability in creating a state that could function to develop the economy in a more sustainable fashion. And so that's what drove me to analyze those processes in the chapters of the book. In order for Haiti to be recognized as a nation by other powers, the indemnity issue had to be settled. And once Bwai put that on the table, no other ruler of Haiti challenged that. They never tried to renegotiate or get friends to stop being paid. That is, they all observed, they all respected Bwai's decision to pay the indemnity, and they all did so until the end of the 19th century when the indemnity was fully paid in 1883. So basically the factions of the ruling class who came to power accepted the indemnity as a fait accompli, and then the question was then how were they going to reorganize the economy to accumulate wealth. That led to the question of the inability to recreate the large-scale plantation, an economy of the colonial era, which meant the bourgeoisie was relying on products produced by the peasants who were either landowners or basically de facto occupied the land on which they produced the crops used for export, primarily coffee. Haiti was not able to create the infrastructure for sustained economic and industrial development during the 19th century, which culminated in the U.S. occupation of 1915. That's another aspect of the transformation of Haiti into primarily an export economy based on the relatively cheaper labor costs of Haitian workers than other parts of the Caribbean, but that's more into the 20th and 21st century.

11:44Patrick Jean-Baptiste I want to do a brief rundown on the use of state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence throughout Haiti's history, which you document really well here. You cite Leslie Payan, who said that the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti's first president in 1806, officially inaugurated what he called the recourse to organized criminality by heads of state who would use their monopoly over the use of force to suppress those who opposed their dictate.

12:17Guest Yeah, of course, because this was the only way that most of the early rulers could gain access to power. It was not going to be through democratic means, but Christophe imposed the old tried to gain power by force. There was a civil war that divided the country into basically initially three parts, with Christophe in the north, Pétion in the west, and Rigaud in the south, until the latter was defeated by Pétion, and Pétion reunified the south and the west. And when Christophe committed suicide, then Pétion reunified the whole country. But basically, they rule by draconian means, especially Christophe in the north, tried to impose a relatively less repressive system, but because he was not able to defeat the former slave workers and to recreate the plantation system in the south, they succeeded in preventing him from doing so. The country was reunified, and Abouye, he tried to reimpose the draconian system of labor, but couldn't succeed. So Haiti, during the 19th century, the presidents exercised produce and sold their crops or paid rents to the landowners and sold their crops to the export-oriented merchant class in Haiti. And that's how Haiti made most of its revenues from its exports.

13:38Patrick Jean-Baptiste I want to go through the catalog of these organized terror squads you called. Can you talk about 1847 to 1859?

13:47Guest The gang issue is not necessarily original to what's going on today. Many of them, Sulu and others, tried to create paramilitary organizations that could do their bidding. Aristide also did the same thing with his own Zegendo. Duvalier certainly had his Tautomac roots under his control. Now the gangs, obviously, are operating more autonomously and are not subjected to any political leader as such, like in the past where it was the heads of state who would create these apparatuses of repression that would sustain themselves in power. Can I ask a question, one question to Alex? I tend to agree with him, but there are many people in Haiti who do not agree with the idea that the failure to essentially transform peasants into workers led to the failure of economic development in Haiti. There are people who say, if we had accepted Marouinage as an alternative society, if we had accepted the LACOU system, we would be in a very different kind of situation. And my question to Alex, is that simply a romantic view of things and that, in fact, the leaders of Haiti after independence really had no other option but to try to put back the plantation economy together because that was the only game in town when you were operating white supremacist order dependent on plantation production? Yeah, absolutely. If you put the 19th century in the context of Haiti's position in the world economy during slavery, it was one of the most productive slave economies in the Western part of the world. That is far more productive than any of the other Caribbean colonies or slave colonies of the time. What happened after the revolution is that the former slaves refused to accept their subjugation by the new dominant classes by recreating the old plantation system of the slave era. They became land-possessing farmers. Even if they didn't have title, they resisted continuously the attempt by the dominant classes to resubjugate them. So finally, after Y8, it became clear that they weren't going to be able to do so. So the Haitian factions of the dominant class, those who owned land, rented the land to farmers as a source of revenue, and the state, the economy, became pretty much reliant on the productions of the peasants, whether they were land-owning peasants or simply land-possessing peasants, that produced the crops that Haiti exported, primarily coffee, lumber, and other crops that Haiti exported as its principal source of revenue. So in a way, the peasants successfully resisted their subjugation, and it wasn't until the U.S. occupation of 1915 that there was an attempt to create a new proletariat in Haiti by forcing them to work on plantations during the U.S. occupation, and the bringing in of new manufacturing industries after the occupation, particularly the assembly industries that relied heavily on the cheap labor that the peasants without land who were forced or compelled to go to the urban areas to work. As workers in those assembly industries, Haiti still became an export-oriented economy, but by supplying the assembly industries to the cheapest laborer in the region. So this is what is at the root of Haiti's inability to develop combined with the constant internecine conflicts among factions of the XX class to control the state as a source of revenue for those who controlled it. It was the inability to recreate a viable plantation system or large-scale industrial production that has kept Haiti as one of the most underdeveloped, if not the most underdeveloped economy in the Caribbean. So establishing a lacu system on the whole country with a very different state was not an option, or even if it were an option, it would not have changed structural Haiti? It would not have led to an industrialization process. To industrialize an economy, it wage laborers. Throughout the 19th century, Haiti was not able to do that. When it did so in the 20th century, it was only a small sector of the population who became monetarized. The majority of the population still remain rural and engage in agricultural production. Since the 20th century, labor export from Haiti has become one of the most important sources of revenue for the population who's depending on the remittances of Haitian emigrants to keep families afloat. So Haiti was never able to create any sort of a sustainable industrial infrastructure by proletarianizing the majority of the population to develop the economy, as has happened in other parts of the Caribbean and South America.

19:12Patrick Jean-Baptiste So are you both saying then that Jean Casimir's counterplantation system, his argument that it was self-sustaining, that it didn't need to be part of the organized, industrialized agricultural system, that for generations, the Haitians sustained themselves just fine with their subsistence farming. That wasn't sustainable. Are you both saying that there was no choice?

19:41Guest During the 19th century, it certainly was sustainable for the majority of the population. But in the 20th century, with the introduction of new industrial production systems and the inability of the majority of the population to sustain itself simply on agriculture, were compelled to migrate to urban areas to find outlets as wage laborers in the assembly industries with the cheapest cost of labor in those sectors. It did not enable them to really earn a decent living and hence emigration. Haiti has the cheapest labor in the assembly industries in the entire region. And it relies principally on women workers who are paid less and who can be suppressed more than male workers to produce the goods in the assembly industries. This is part of what I was trying to show in my article on gender, that it was not simply the suppression of women, but also the use of the ruling class, both men and women, to exploit the lower classes as much as they could by having access to a surplus and abundance of labor who could be paid lower wages and without any other sort of revenues from the state to keep the population afloat. And so when you have this kind of an economy where agriculture is deteriorating, is not being revitalized to make it possible for the majority of the population to live off agriculture, they emigrate into the urban centers where wages are low and they can't find meaningful jobs. And so emigration becomes the principal or relative. And the remittances now account for more than 25% of Haiti's gross domestic product. The question also is whether the kind of lacquot system could coexist in the world economy. And that's very difficult to see. If there had been a massive redistribution of land and that redistribution of land had been directed by some sort of more progressive state whereby all peasants would have titles and there would be significant investments in agriculture, that might have been a different story. But the way we did it, and I think this was almost overdetermined by the particular historical period, we were operating with only the plantation economy for that 1800 till very much the 1850s, 1860s. It was a plantation economy for the Caribbean, for all of the other, quote-unquote, third world societies or colonized societies. So if you don't redistribute the land, give titles, invest in agriculture, it's very difficult to see how that kind of agriculture would have sustained itself over the long haul. And in the 20th century, as Alex was saying, the American occupation change matters, and the incapacity of the ruling class in Haiti to establish some sort of productive capitalism meant that agriculture would collapse. And it did collapse. Now we have more people in the urban areas than in the rural areas. If you were to do something about the urban areas now, you probably would need to invest massively in the rural areas so you prevent the exodus of people into the slums or force people to have only one alternative, immigration. So I think that the idea that the plantation economy was so dominant at the time of the Haitian Revolution and immediately after, prevented Haiti from escaping that kind of cruel choice. I don't see that as an alternative then, and I don't see it as an alternative now. What we would need now is a modern agricultural system with investments, with distribution of land, and land reform. Without that, I think we are going nowhere. I think it was a considerable financial drain on Haiti. In other words, in order to repay the debt, we had to accept new debts. So there was loss in terms of the treasurer, Anthony Phillips is his name, and he studied in great detail the amount of money that was spent. He estimated that it was a considerable amount. The issue that is quite important, and this is why I want to return to class, is that the victims of the debt were not the ruling class of Haiti. They were really squeezed in order to repay the debt. People at the top couldn't care less about the debt because of the recognition of Haiti, and the security that they got by paying the French was that their properties, their land, was no longer going to be expropriated by another French invasion. But the peasants were the victims. This has been the story of Haiti, that the peasantry has been the victim of the underdevelopment of Haiti and also of paying the indemnity. So there's a class division here that is quite important. On the other hand, the treasury had to pay a huge amount. I think it was 90 million French francs at the time, which is considerable in terms of debt and accumulation of other debts to repay the first indemnity, the debt. So there is that story too, but I don't think that explains the predicament of modern Haiti. There are countries that have had to pay debt and managed to extricate themselves from their major problems of underdevelopment. The indemnity was not the only source of indebtedness in Haiti. Most subsequent governments, even after Baye paid the indemnity, continued to borrow large amounts of money from abroad, from bankers, that they could not repay, that were not tied to the indemnity. Indebtedness became a problem, but the root cause of the inability of Haiti to develop its economy, to me was neither the debt nor the indemnity, but the inability of the ruling class to create a viable industrial infrastructure to augment production and exports in the 19th century. And when they did so in the 20th century, it was primarily based on the cheapest labor paid in the Caribbean for the assembly industries that became all of the mainstays of Haiti's industrial production.

26:16Patrick Jean-Baptiste So what is it about the characters of the Haitian elite? Are they any different from any, I think, Professor Fath, the most repugnant elites, the MREs? Is there something particularly unique about them that, so you're putting the, you're pulling full weight of Haiti's current situation or for the last 220 years on the backs of those elites throughout our history. What is it particularly about them that makes them?

26:49Guest I'm saying that there is a convergence of interest between the elite and external forces and financial forces. The problem that the elite face, I think, is that the world economy was fushed, that it was constrained in pattern of behavior that led to the current outcome. And the business about the most repugnant elite, that was a term coined by the U.S. embassy. And I remember talking to someone and that person told me, yes, we are the most repugnant elite, but actually, we are not more repugnant than any other elite, whether it be in the United States or France. So it just happens that the conditions in which we are, we look like that, but we are as exploitative as any other elite. They essentially argued that they were no different from any other elite.

27:39Patrick Jean-Baptiste Alex, in the book, you talk about some skepticism about gender identity.

27:48Guest My argument was that one cannot understand the domination, suppression, and exploitation of women in Haiti outside of the class context of Haitian society. And so it's not only men who are exploiting and suppressing women, but equally women in the dominant classes and those in power are also part of the exploitation and subordination of women in the lower classes. So that's why I put it in the class context of Haiti rather than simply women being subjugated by men because women members of the dominant class are equally exploiting women in the lower classes as are men. Now, to be sure, women are subject to all sorts of violence at the hands of men, raping and suppression and other forms of domination. But we cannot, in my view, understand the position of women in Haitian society outside of understanding its class structure and the way that structure functions to subjugate women more so than men. Women with all other things being equal are paid less than men for doing the same job. That's one reason why in the assembly industries there is a larger percentage of women who are hired in those industries because they can be more discriminated against than men. But it's not just a matter of men doing that. Women also run and operate the assembly industries and pay women the same lower wages that the male employers do. So to me, yes, there is a gender dimension to the suppression and exploitation of women, but we cannot understand that unless we understand the overall class context in which Haitian society operates.

29:33Patrick Jean-Baptiste The Praslan Revolution, 1843, that led to Boire's overthrow and exile, I think it was in March in 1943. You said the indemnity was noticeably absent from the list of grievances that his enemies had against him.

29:49Guest Correct. That's correct. There's zero evidence as far as I could tell that they overthrew Boire because of the indemnity. In fact, none of them repudiated the indemnity. They continued to pay it. Because they benefited from it. They did not dispute the payment of the indemnity after they overthrew Boire. They continued to pay it until Ander Salomoye was finally paid off. So therefore, they had to rely on the rents that they extracted.

30:22Patrick Jean-Baptiste Gotcha.

30:23Guest Okay.

30:23Patrick Jean-Baptiste Because, okay, that was my misunderstanding there because I thought the land were divided between the soldiers. Didn't Christophe do that? They would get X number of K'au, that goes all the way from the generals gone to the privates and stuff like that. And then those soldiers would rent those out to the masses. I thought that was how the land was divided. The state owned most of the property.

30:47Guest But the soldiers never received land. Christophe divided land among the oligarchy of his regime who appropriated land but they never gave land to the military leaders. They appropriated it forcefully. Christophe succeeded to some extent in the north for a short period of time in forcing the former slaves to produce crops for export. But that didn't last long. As soon as Christophe was out of the way, the peasants, the former slaves would gain access de facto or by owning the properties on which they produced their crops or rented the crops from the landowners who subdivided their lands into smaller properties that they could rent to peasants. That was primarily the case as I have argued. Basically, you had a system of land ownership or land-possessing peasants who were able to maintain a fairly high degree of autonomy in what they produce and how they produced it and sold on the domestic market and for export. No ruling class was ever able to reproduce the old system of plantation production in India and minor exceptions. The U.S. did so under its occupation for a while, but that returned back to the old system after they left, which is what we have in Haiti currently now. Patrick pointed something out, too, that contributed to the incapacity of finding workers. It was the demographic condition. The revolution killed so many people. By the end of the revolution, you barely had 170,000 people who could, in fact, be healthy enough to contribute to the plantation economy. So there was indeed a shortage. But one has to remember that there were over 400,000 slaves, and by the end of the revolution, we are left with 170,000 or so former slaves. To constrain those people back into the plantation was exceedingly difficult, not only because they were emancipated. Why would people who had fought such a bloody revolution receive their freedom and then suddenly they would go back to the plantation because the ruling class wanted that? So the ruling class didn't have the capacity to do it. of the incapacity of the state itself to constrain people into particular forms of behavior. And here, marronage is important because people escape from the domination of the state. Now, whether marronage can or cannot be the means of an alternative is a very different discussion. I think both Alex and I don't think it would. You should ask Alex because also Alex has a controversial position. When we talk about the indemnity, we then talk about restitution. I think Alex has a very clear perspective on that whole business about restitution.

33:48Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah, that was going to be my next question. What do you think about reparations, Dr. Dupy, for Haiti?

33:53Guest I don't. I don't think there's a case that can be made for it. It was not the indemnity that was a problem that prevented Haiti from developing its economy. And basically, the indemnity was offered by members of the Haitian ruling class. They put the indemnity on the table, not France.

34:10Patrick Jean-Baptiste Was that a common idea at that time for you to pay back?

34:14Guest I don't know if it was a common idea, but in the case of Haiti, like I argued, Christophe, in my view, did the right thing when France sent three emissaries to Haiti. Haiti became independent to try to compel or convince the new rulers, Christophe in the North, Petrieu in the South, and Borgelais in the West, to resubmit to Haitians to French sovereignty. Christophe had the French envoys arrested and put in jail and let him stay there until he died. Petrieu, who had reunified the South and the West, offered the French envoy to pay an indemnity to France in return for France's recognition of Haiti's independence. That issue remained dormant until Borgelais reunified the country in 1825 or after Petrieu's death, after Christophe's suicide and Petrieu's death in 1820. And it was Borgelais who, when the French sent envoys, get Borgelais to resubmit to French sovereignty. Borgelais said they would not do that. They would never resubmit to French sovereignty, but they were, they would be willing to pay France an indemnity to compensate the former slave property owners. And many analysts thought it was because the French had set warships and were threatening to bombard and invade Port-au-Prince that led Boyer to capitulate. That was not the case. There was a French report issued long before Boyer came to power that basically ruled out the ability of France to reconquer and resubjugate Haiti. So the indemnity was one way for the Haitian ruling class to settle the issue of property ownership. Once France agreed to those terms, then of course the Haitian ruling class was saddled with the bill. And so they had to repay it. And as I pointed out, no subsequent ruler since Boyer ever challenged that idea of paying France an indemnity in return for its recognition of Haiti's independence and for them to become in full control of the land of the territory of the lands in Haiti of the proper properties. So there is, in my view, no case for restitution or reparations to Haiti without understanding that it was a Haitian ruling class under its own agency for its own interests that put the issue on the table.

36:48Patrick Jean-Baptiste You give Haiti's earlier leaders full agency. Absolutely.

36:53Guest We were not victims. That's right. There were pressure, of course, there were pressure in the context of having to operate in a world economy that required you to produce commodities for export. That was the pressure the Haitian ruling class faced. And to do that, they had to have a labor force to be able to do that. And they thought that recreating the plantation system was a way to do that and they failed in doing so. So why is this

37:18Patrick Jean-Baptiste a controversial thing to say when all of us non-academics were taught that Haiti agreed to the indemnity with a gun through its head?

37:30Guest Can I answer that question? That's up to people to come to their own understanding of what happened in Haiti. And of course, there are different controversies, different ways of looking at post-independence Haiti hands to different interpretations by the authors about what happened. One of the questions is that I think restitution whether it would be something that we are owed, as it were. I think restitution comes into being as a matter of power. We have no power to demand anything. So if you don't have the power, you can talk a lot, you can make a moral case, and some people are trying to make a moral and legal case. It's extremely difficult to contemplate the resolution that would be favorable to reparation being paid to Haiti. I'm going to give you another example of how the Western world reacts to those kind of things. You may be aware of there was when Hong became president, we wanted to improve relations with Africa. So he had a commission that was looking into objects of arts that had been essentially stolen from many African countries. So they had that committee and this was in the early days of Macron and the committee said that there were about 50,000 objects of arts that had been stolen and that France would return them immediately. And Macron initially said absolutely. Now, you know, that was 2017, 2018. Do you know how many objects of arts were returned to the African countries out of the 50,000? 27. And Macron is no longer talking about it. And those are objects of arts. This is not liquidity. This is not something that would come from Western budgets and treasuries. Because if you're talking about reparations, it was $23 billion that they owed us. I just don't see that happening. Now, there are plenty of countries in the Caribbean that are talking about reparations, but this is for slavery, which is a different matter than the indemnity per se. So if you were to look at Haiti as they should pay us for slavery, they should pay us for the indemnity, you would be talking probably about $50 billion. There is no way the West is going to do so. The West doesn't pay attention to international law when it does not correspond to its interests.

40:05Patrick Jean-Baptiste We can argue some of it is disaster capitalism. It goes back to it's not very efficient. But in terms of foreign aid to Haiti,

40:13Guest And where has that money gone? It usually goes back to the U.S. and stays in the coffers of the wealthy ruling. You can remember after the earthquake, they gave $3 billion to Haiti. And something like $800,000 of that $3 billion were given to a Haitian NGO, and 1% of that money went to the government. The rest went to all of the foreign NGOs and back to Washington where all the consultants got the money. You had to pay also for the military intervention of the United States. Most of the money doesn't stay in Haiti, and the little that stays really doesn't stay for the benefits of the Haitian population. We can see that also with the Venezuelan money, the Petro-Caribes scandal. The money doesn't stay and the ruling class steals it. That doesn't mean that you couldn't make a moral case. A plenty of people are making a moral case, but I doubt that moral case will eventually become reality. Alex was at the conference and I was there too at the University of Miami, and Alex was the only one saying that, keeping that position, that there is no juridical realm and that the Haitian rulers at the time accepted and actually proposed the indemnity. And all of the other people there were very much suggesting the opposite. But I think it was much more of a moral argument than an argument about the legitimacy of the claim itself because of the fact that the Haitian rulers at the time accepted and proposed the deal. Professor Alex,

42:03Patrick Jean-Baptiste there's a controversy there. There's a problem there. There's a lot of

42:07Guest some things that I find illogical or don't hold up to scrutiny. That's what leads me to formulate my own interpretation based on my research and the evidence that I can bring to support my arguments to develop my points of view. I take it one step at a time. I do my research and I look at the data that I have and the arguments that have been made and see where I stand in relation to all that. That's what leads me to formulate my questions and develop my arguments the way I have. Moral arguments are just what they are. They're moral arguments. They're not based on facts necessarily. So I try to base my arguments on the evidence that I can find to sustain my point of view. If you go back to the indemnity, I went to France, dug in the archives and came up with documentation that I supplied in the book. Other people have also done a great deal of research and I rely on their findings to supplement my own research and make my argument. If other scholars can come up with counter-evidence to challenge what I have to say, then more power to them. I'm willing to listen to that. From what I have seen so far, the argument is based more on the moral argument of reparations are due to Haiti because they were forced to pay an indemnity to France. And I just don't think that argument holds up so far as I know from the work that I have done. But it doesn't mean that I don't give my own interpretation of the facts. At least I try to support my claims on the base of the evidence that I can provide. Do you find it the moral

43:54Patrick Jean-Baptiste argument absence, the facts, do you find it persuasive at any time?

44:00Guest No, I don't. People can make all kinds of moral arguments to justify anything they want. Unless they have evidence to support their moral argument, it doesn't hold water with me. So,

44:10Patrick Jean-Baptiste what do you think? You're retired now, right? You've been retired for a little while. Happily so. Yes. So, where do you think Haitian studies, the new generation, are they going in the factual realm that you see in terms of the research or are they more into finding moral justification for whatever

44:30Guest they write? I can't generalize on that. It depends on whose work I read and I don't read everything that's published out there, so I don't know. Let me put it to you this way. To answer your question, moral arguments without facts are just that, moral arguments. They're not arguments. They're just based on people's sense of what's right and wrong and that may be okay for them, but for me, what's right and wrong needs to also be explained and sustained by evidence. When I was teaching, I expected my students to support their arguments with facts, with evidence. I didn't care about what they felt. I'm not into the feeling game. I'm not into the moral game. If you have an argument, show me the evidence to support it. I think there is something about the moment in which we are that explains some of that, especially after the Black Lives Matter. That overwhelmed scholarly attitude, in particular with people who are young and study Haiti, and they became, I will use that term which was brought forward by Adolf Reid, who is an American scholar. He said it's race reductionism. So when you have everything explained in terms of racial lenses, you cover up a lot of stuff that should be analyzed, and that's a real problem. In Haiti, we are having that kind of new scholarship which is also infused with a deep sense of nationalism. In other words, everything that goes wrong in Haiti because it's found in external factors. External factors are important, but they are not the only one. So obviously the debt becomes the key factor, and it was legitimized to some extent by the New York Times when they had that series where they essentially said if it had not been for the indemnity, Haiti would be a completely different country, which to me is a very simplistic way of looking at things, and I think Alex agrees. Most people who do Haiti now do their studies in the United States. So that, I think, colors that particular way. I fully agree with what Orberry is saying here, that there is also a tendency among many Haitian intellectuals to look at Haiti's problems as being caused by external forces rather than looking inward to what the Haitian dominant classes have done, how their interests conflict with those of the majority of Haitians, their own agency to create the Haiti that exists today in the context of Haiti's subordination to global power forces, especially the United States since the 20th century. To me, unless an analysis of what's going on in Haiti, be it only if you've race, gender, or class, doesn't look at Haiti. The power structure of Haiti, the social divisions, or class divisions of Haiti in the context of its relations with other powers, then all you're left with are feelings, not fact. Delhi Mackola

48:06Increasing Leh