Book Talk: "Haiti Will Not Perish" with Michael Deibert

SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: We're very fortunate, tonight, to have Michael Deibert here with us. Michael, thanks so much for coming to Columbia. You've seen the bio, probably online. In case you haven't, let me give you some of the highlights. Michael is a journalist who has covered most of the hotspots, some of the most interesting and most dangerous conflict zones. He also has written for many high-profile newspapers, not only here in the US, but also abroad. So he's published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Le Monde diplomatique, and so on and so forth. He's also appeared on many well-known TV channels, and he has won several awards for his work. And on top of that, because that's not enough, he has also written three books. So, he's written one book on Haiti that was published in 2005, one on the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then one on the drug war in Mexico. That was his latest book. And he's been working, for the past few years, on a fourth book that is focused on Haiti again. And the book will be released by Zed Books in a couple of months. And Michael has very kindly agreed to come to Colombia tonight to give us a sneak peek of the book and to give us the highlights of the forthcoming book, which is a really great privilege for us. So, Michael is going to talk for about 30, 35 minutes, and then we're going to open the floor for Q&As. And we're going to wrap up by 8:00 PM tonight. Thank you so much again, Michael, for coming. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Thank you very much. Thank you, Severine, and Ingrid, and SIPA, and the Saltzman Institute, as well, for having me. I'm glad at any opportunity when we can get a bunch of people together to talk about what's going on in Haiti. So, without further comments, I'll just begin. "Long live democracy, mesocracy, bureaucracy, slumocracy, shamocracy, stupidocracy, kleptocracy, all the squalor and ineptitude, all the bigwigs and their filthy tricks, all the civilian military decorum, so they can feast themselves on our illusions and desperation. All they have to do is change the color of their uniforms or scrap them completely, as though painting the robe blue would make a hanged man feel better." These words were written by the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot, in his book Rue des pas perdus, nearly 20 years ago. And I think they're worth remembering at the beginning of this talk which will look at the history of Haiti, in general, but more specifically, the period since 2004, which my forthcoming book concentrates on and tries to provide a very precise anatomy of. Haiti is a country that often has one of two effects on people who visit it. Either it sends them running for the exits immediately, or it completely captures their hearts, as it did with me. In addition to the political tumult that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, the country has, for me, a pretty much unmatched level of cultural achievement. Not just in literature, but also in music, visual art, its cuisine, its beautiful, poetic Creole language, and extraordinary physical gifts from its volting, mysterious mountains and its shimmering coastline. I say this at the outset because this talk focuses on some of the harsher aspects of Haiti's political culture. And I don't want to deceive the audience into thinking Haiti is simply a catalog of miseries. It's not. Far from it. But first, a little background that is probably familiar to some of you, but perhaps, not all of you. Following the arrival of Columbus on the island we now call Hispaniola, in 1492, the enslaved indigenous Arawak were quickly worked to death by the Spanish. And by way of replacement, by the mid-1500s, there were over 30,000 African slaves on the island, only a foretaste of what was to come. When the Treaty of Ryswick granted the western third of Hispaniola to the French, in 1697, that swath of land was renamed Sainte-Domingue, and sugar cultivation became the touchstone of its economy. By the end of the 1700s, Sainte-Domingue supplied 3/4 of the world's sugar, and its economy was generating more income than all of the 13 original North American colonies combined. It quickly became France's wealthiest colony, but one where a population of 40,000 whites lorded over 30,000 mulattoes and free Blacks and 500,000 slaves living in conditions of nightmarish brutality. In a rebellion that began in 1791 and finally ended with rebel forces defeating the French in 1804, Haiti became the second independent nation in the western hemisphere, after the United States, and the sight of the world's only successful slave revolt. The impact of this event reverberated far beyond Haiti. The Haitian's stunning defeat of Napoleon's army, perhaps the greatest military force in the world at the time, prompted the French dictator to sell Louisiana to the United States, doubling the size of the country in which I am now speaking. The city of Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, served as a base for South American leader Simon Bolivar, providing material and logistical support at a crucial time, during his campaign to liberate the southern hemisphere from Spanish rule. Surrounded by hostile slave-owning nations-- not least of all, the United States-- Haiti was ostracized, and vilified, and forced to pay a 90 million franc indemnity to France for its liberty, comparable to roughly about $40 billion today. Squeezed and plotted against from the outside and violently factionalized from the inside, by 1904, Haiti's lot, as the writer and diplomat Frederic Marcelin wrote, was one of "civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social misery, economic ignorance and idolatrous militarism. Haiti's political autonomy, however, was interrupted in dramatic fashion in 1915 when, following the murder of President Guillaume Sam, the United States invaded and occupied the country for nearly 20 years. That occupation proved pivotal in Haiti's modern political development, as the presence of foreign troops in Haiti nurtured the grievances of a range of anti-occupation political currents, ranging from Haiti's interpretation of negritude-- later to become noirisme-- and leftist communist influence, such as the Parti Communiste Haitien, founded by the author Jacques Roumain at the very tail end of the occupation. From 1957 until 1986, Haiti was ruled by the Duvalier family dictatorship. Until 1971, by Francois Duvalier or Papa Doc, and then until 1986, by his Jean-Claude Duvalier or Baby Doc, the latter often acting in concert with his mother, sister or, later, his wife. Though there were some similarities with other dictatorial regimes of the era-- such as that of Somoza in Nicaragua or Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, next door-- Duvalierism, particularly as practiced by the father, outdid almost all of them in maintaining an atmosphere of repression and static terror buttressed, in no small part, by Duvalier's feared militia, the Tontons Macoutes, which he saw as a bulwark against the US-created Haitian army that had ousted so many of his predecessors. To be clear, Duvalier was not the first Haitian leader to use irregular paramilitary forces. Faustin Soulouque, who crowned himself emperor and ruled Haiti from 1849 to 1859, had armed groups supporting him that were referred to as "zinglin." The renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau had what were referred to as "l'armee souffrante," or "the suffering army," around the same time. But as another leader would do in coming decades, by creating the Macoutes, Duvalier empowered a certain sector of the [INAUDIBLE] black masses that had so long been excluded from political power and whetted their fate, inextricably, to that of his highly criminal regime. With the overthrow of Duvalier the younger in 1986, I believe we arrive at one of the critical moments in Haiti's modern history. In many ways, the same powers who were responsible for the final decision that it was time for Duvalier to leave Haiti's army, its economic elite, the US government, sent a very clear message to Haiti's politicians and its people. He's gone. Please don't bother us with things like truth commissions. Now is not the time. Once Duvalier was gone, the Americans decided their logical partner was not the Social Democratic sector, but the Haitian army, who they, in fact, had help to create during the occupation, some 50 years before. It was the mistake of Haiti's political parties to accept that deal, and it's a mistake that the country rues to this day. After Duvalier's departure, there was tremendous pressure to engage in elections, but who controlled the electoral system? When pressure resulted in the 1987 constitution and a quasi independent electoral body, the army, quite literally, killed the process in the Ruelle Vaillant massacre in 1987. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest who had been one of the leaders of the anti-Duvalier movement, was elected in 1990, there was a coup attempt by scions of the Ancien regime, before he even took office, and then a successful coup from the military that ousted him in September 1991. No matter how rotten he later became-- and I will touch on this shortly. I believe that the 1991 coup was one of those critical moments in Haiti's history. The Haitian people had made a clear decision, a clear choice, in the 1990 elections. And they should have been given the opportunity to see, for better or for worse, the implications of that choice, as part of the country's process of democratic maturation. That opportunity was snatched brutally from them, along with the lives of thousands of people. When he was returned to Haiti by the US military, after his exile in Washington DC, three years later, Mr. Aristide had a distinct taste for the creature comforts of his office. And quickly, his political current began, in a very systematic way, in replacing the old democratic vanguard with political operatives loyal to him, alone, and collaborating closely with armed gangs-- not only in the capital, but also in provincial cities such as Petit Goave, Saint-Marc, and Gonaives, some of the leaders of whom I knew quite well. Between 2001 and 2004, I spent many hours in the sprawling Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil, and I counted some of the president's most fervent supporters among my friends. A huge expanse blighted by poverty between the airport road and the bay, the vast majority of city Soleil residents I found to be new or first-generation arrivals from the countryside-- honest, hardworking people scrambling to keep afloat in the economic shipwreck that was Haiti. However, after 1994 and especially after around 2000, the neighborhood had been ruled by armed factions led by young men such as Robinson Thomas, known as Labanye or Banner; Emmanuel Wilmer, known as Dread Wilme; Winston Jean-Bart, known as Tupac; and James Petit-Frere, ultimately known as Billy or Kanson Fe, Iron Pants, which was a reference to Paul Magloire, who was a former military dictator. Many of the young men had grown up within the orbit of Lafanmi Selavi, the home for street children that Aristide had been instrumental in founding, while still a Catholic priest. All, for a time, at least, believe that he was the only chance that Haiti had to dynamite itself out of its futile backwardness and brutal inequality, the latter of which the people of Cite Soleil felt as sharply as anyone. Far from being the simple thugs they were sometimes portrayed as, these young men-- and they were all quite young, most barely into their 20s-- viewed themselves as a combination of community organizers, in the hopes that presidential largesse would be bestowed upon their communities, and local police forces, and refer to themselves not as gangs, but as the baz or base of the neighborhood. From the young gunmen in Cite Soleil and the other poor neighborhoods, such as Bel Air and, indeed, around the country, supporting the government meant regular, if meager, paychecks from state entities such as the Ministry of Social Affairs for supposed work at Teleco, the state telephone company, despite the fact that they had never set foot there. In some areas of Cite Soleil, it was CAMEP, the state water company, that doled out checks for no-show jobs. For others, it was work at the capitalist port or the ports in Gonaives, or Saint-Marc, or Petit Goave. It was naked patronage and corruption, to be sure, but it was also an opening of the spigot of state money to a sector of society that had, heretofore, been largely denied that. And it was the only rope holding them from falling off into the cliff of economic disaster. The young men would march, praising the president, disrupt opposition demonstrations and became known as the chimere-- after a mythical, fire-breathing demon-- appearing en mass and then disappearing back into the slums, at a moment's notice. By this point, Haiti's economy was the most liberalized in the Caribbean, with the average import tariff decreased from 35% to 3%, and the import tariffs on rice reduced from 50% to 3%, as part of a deal brokered for Aristide's return in 1994. At the time, the Caribbean average tariff on imported rice was 38%. By 2004, Haiti had become the third largest market for US rice exports in the world, after Japan and Mexico. Much of the imported rice flooded the country came from Arkansas, the home state of US president Bill Clinton, and it effectively destroyed the ability of Haiti's rice farmers to compete competitively. This blow came on the heels of the US-Canadian-funded PEPPADEP in the early 1980s, which was a program that destroyed 1.2 million Creole pigs in the country, pigs that formed one of the backbones of the peasant economy, when tests showed that nearly a quarter of the island's pigs were infected with African Swine Fever. Food imports rose from 21% in 1996 to 32% in 2001, and would finally reach 50% in 2006. Between 2000 and 2005, the agricultural sector accounted for only 2.5% of the development aid that Haiti received. In ever greater numbers, at the beginning of this century, the 2000s, Haitians flooded to the capital, Port-au-Prince, desperate for work that wasn't there. When Aristide was overthrown in February 2004, after months of large-scale protests against his rule from a large swath of Haiti's society, the armed rebellion against him began among the very strata that he thought would protect him, the urban gangs. Specifically, a group called [INAUDIBLE] in Gonaives, who believed that Aristide had killed their leader. They were joined by dissident former police and army personnel, many of whom had been biding their time in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Once Aristide was gone, there was political revenge against some of his supporters, some of whom were thrown into jail without trial. Once again, as after the after the ouster of Duvalier, no real process of accountability, justice, or reconciliation for the very real crimes that people had been subjected to occurred. A brutal war of attrition developed between Aristide's armed supporters and the Haitian police. It was not, however, a one-sided war. Mario Andresol, who served as the chief of Haiti's police from 2006 until 2013, told me, "There were bad guys in those slum areas, of course, but the elite and the politicians also used the police as a weapon against the poor people. Probably 65% of what happened in Port-au-Prince, in terms of criminality, the police were responsible. This is the same scheme for 200 years, the elite using the security forces against the people," end of quote. There were two investigating bodies set up to investigate the corruption during the Aristide era, which concluded that his government illegally pumped at least $21 million of his country's meager public funds into private firms that existed only on paper, shell companies-- the Panama Papers, for example, same concept-- and into his charities. One of the areas in which they focused was the looting of the state telephone company, Teleco, which was helped along, a later lawsuit alleged, by, among others, two US companies-- IDT and Fusion-- which had, as their CEOs, respectively, former Republican Congressman Jim Courter, who would be a major fundraiser in the 2008 presidential campaign of John McCain, and former Democratic Party finance chairman Marvin Rosen. But again, despite the meticulous investigations, no one would go to jail in Haiti for this corruption, though several would be jailed in the United States. After two years of bloodshed under the interim government, Haitians voted massively in 2006 for the election of Renee Preval, who had first served as Haiti's president from 1996 to 2001, and was and remains a unique figure. A former Aristide associate who took his distance from the former president years earlier, Preval was a figure in whom Haiti's lower class and bourgeois could meet, who could manage the trick of being on good terms with divergent political leaders such as George Bush and Hugo Chavez, simultaneously. In an interview with AFP, Preval said that the rich are cloistered in their walled villas and the poor are crammed into slums and know nothing. The gap is too big. Weapons must be taken from the hands of children and replaced with pens and books. But like so many others, the election of Preval had to be decided with support from the street. And large-scale protests finally forced Haiti's electoral council to subtract enough of the blank ballots cast from the total number of votes counted to push Preval over the 50% mark, where he would have to face a runoff against former President Leslie Manigat. Not everyone was convinced of the wisdom of this decision, with historian Claude Moise writing a bitter dissent in [INAUDIBLE] accusing the international community of simply tossing aside the democratic process in favor of calm. Preval went some way in mending bridges between Haiti's bitterly divided political factions, in no small part, by freeing the partisans of previous governments that had been languishing in jail, and began a demobilization and reintegration process aimed at urban gangs, along with intervention by the Haitian police and the UN mission that had been in Haiti since Aristide's overthrow, known as MINUSTAH, that saw the country largely back under control by the beginning of 2007. As Haiti's eternal political crisis appeared to be edging towards a truce, disaster of a different sort was visited on the country in the form of no less than four immense storms-- Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, Hurricane Hanna, and Hurricane Ike-- that made landfall in Haiti between mid-August and September 2008. Despite the devastation wrought by the hurricanes, which basically turned the city of Gonaives into a mud lake, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said there were no plans for the body to forgo demanding payments on Haiti's foreign debt that, at the time, were around the neighborhood of $1 million per week. But that calm came at a price. Victims of problematic human rights abuses, such as the survivors of a February 2004 massacre of at least 27 people in the northern city of Saint-Marc, received no more support than they ever did. The leader of one victims' organization in Saint-Marc, in a heart rending June 2007 letter to the United Nations, asked the International community at large, who cares about our case? The victims of these horrors live under the constant threat of criminals who were all released under pressure, in particular, from some agencies in international civil society. Today, what justice should we expect? Who can testify freely, while the assassins are free and could circulate with impunity? The victims want to flee the city, and the witnesses, to hide. It was a refrain that could have been repeated many times. Though Preval did a lot to stabilize Haiti, he showed no more appetite for going after the cancer of impunity that plagues Haiti than his predecessors had. He also had something of a schizophrenic personality, one that, at times, was open to working with domestic and international actors to ameliorate Haiti's many problems. But he could also be quite Machiavellian and plotting. He saw one prime minister ousted in the spring of 2008 and played an active role in getting rid of another one, a little over a year later. He seemed to greatly enjoy moving the chess pieces around. At the beginning of 2009, a report was issued by Oxford University economist Paul Collier that concluded rather too rosily, that Haiti did not have intractable structural sociopolitical problems that beset most other fragile states, or an armed and organized political group ready to launch a rebellion, which must have come as quite a surprise to many of Haiti's former leaders. And it said that the sectors, such as the garment industry and the construction industry, the construction of various export zones, would be the ticket to Haiti's development. While, in terms of agriculture, the report suggested a food-for-work program. But nowhere did it suggest revisiting the draconian free trade policies that had so devastated Haiti's peasantry. The plan became something of an article of faith among UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former US President Bill Clinton and others, even as Haiti's 2009 parliamentary elections were marred by violence and boasted a turnout of around 11% of eligible voters. And then came the January 2010 earthquake. As this is part of Haiti's history that most of you are probably somewhat familiar with, I won't belabor it. But I'll highlight a few key details. It appears that no one will ever know exactly how many people died. Days after the quake, the Red Cross was estimating that up to 50,000 people had been killed. By early February, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive was saying that more than 200,000 people had been clearly identified as dead. The government would eventually estimate that at least 225,000 residences had been rendered uninhabitable and that 2.1 billion cubic feet of concrete and rubble would have to be removed. The already teetering electrical system suffered $40 million worth of damage. The Inter-American Development Bank estimated that damage from the quake was in the neighborhood of $14 billion. During the earthquake, 60% of Haiti's gross domestic product disappeared in a matter of seconds. Despite calls to refound Haiti after the destruction, what came to pass? Immediately in the aftermath of the quake, one of the stated great concerns of the international community in Haiti was a looming collapse into anarchy that never occurred. Amnesty International would conclude, later, that the self-organized camp management committees confirmed that sexual violence was not an issue and that security commissions that patrol the camps at night had been set up. Most of the women in the camps interviewed by Amnesty did not express concerns about sexual violence. But in the Artibonite Valley, the poor sanitary conditions of a camp of Nepalese UN peacekeepers ended up dumping raw sewage into the Kanni and Jenba Rivers and, according to the US Center for Disease Control and other bodies, infected the country with cholera, which had been all but extinct at that point. And that's a plague that up to today has killed at least 9,000 people. To this day, the UN denies its responsibility for the outbreak. The earthquake had the bad timing to occur just before Haiti was scheduled to have a presidential election, as well, which it did in two rounds, in late 2010 and early 2011. Preval, determined to impose a successor on the country and, no doubt, concerned about a possible slide back into anarchy, picked Jude Celestin, the little-known head of the state construction company, as his designated successor. Other candidates would be Mirlande Manigat, the wife of former President Leslie Manigat, the man Preval had beaten in 2006. Another was Michel Martelly, a well-known singer of Haiti's Kompa music known as Sweet Micky. One aspect of Haiti that it seems is often lost on foreigners who are deluged by ceaseless images of poverty, violence, wailing women and political strife-- a stereotype that existed long before the earthquake-- is the country's tremendous capacity for joy and ribaldry, an aspect of the Haitian personality that Michel Martelly embodied probably more than any other single individual in the country. The rise of Martelly's candidacy, which had been viewed as a joke by many, only weeks before, came as a surprise to nearly all foreign observers in the country, many of whom were only dimly aware of who he was, up to that point. Building on his years of playing before large audiences and a fluid, often humorous, command of Creole, Martelly formed the natural gravitational orbit for disaffected youth who would have otherwise voted for the singer Wyclef Jean, who had been disqualified from the contest amid questions about his residency. Martelly's chances were further bolstered by the presence, in his campaign, of the Miami-based, Spanish political strategist Antonio Sola, who played a key role in the successful 2006 presidential campaign of Mexico's Felipe Calderon. Martelly also suggestively gathered around him a coterie of highly able supporters and surrogates, many of them with links to the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier. We were seeing, once more, the flowering of the Duvalierist or, more specifically, the Jean-Claudeist, for Jean-Claude Duvalier was, by then, back in the country. Political strain in Haiti, a right-wing populism that proved itself every bit as potent as the anarcho-populism that Aristide-- who had also returned to Haiti-- and his acolytes were still pushing. One of the more insightful readings of Martelly's rise came from the Haitian sociologist and former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Guy Alexandre, who wrote that it was explained by the frustration of a population and its rejection of Preval, who had not been able to manage the country since the earthquake. Martelly is a right-wing populist backed by former Duvalierists and the youth of the popular classes for whom he represents a break with the traditional political system. And indeed, that was the case. Shortly after Martelly was elected, I spent time among the baz in the Port-au-Prince neighborhoods of Saint Martin and Martissant, and there, was told that everyone in the zones had voted for Martelly. After a contested election in which the hand of the international community played a strong role, but not one, I believe, which skewed the results, Martelly advanced to the second round against Mirlande Manigat and one. Jude Celestin having been cut from the runoff. Once in office, Martelly, like Preval, before him, had a devil of a time getting a prime minister through parliament, with two rejected before Gary Conille served a few months and then was replaced by telecoms mogul Laurent Lamothe. Martelly assumed office in a country where nearly 700,000 people were still living in temporary camps. Of the $4.58 billion that had been pledged after the earthquake, at an international donors conference, only $1.74 billion had been disbursed. Relations between Martelly, a man not known for mincing words, and parliament-- many of whom behaved like roosters in a yard, and not an insignificant number of whom would be accused of crimes up to and including murder-- were dismal from the start. Martelly's own entourage, consisting of some characters of dubious reputation, to say the least, didn't help matters. Though Martelly and Lamothe did succeed in going some way in changing Haiti's dismal image and attracting foreign investment, they were unable to agree with parliament on a formula for elections. And once those elections were finally held, last year, they were met again with cries of fraud. And the second round was canceled under threat of violence from Martelly's domestic opponents. As Aristide had, two decades earlier, with Preval, and as Preval had done in the previous election, with Jude Celestin, Martelly plucked agri-businessman Jovenel Moise, as it plucking a rabbit out of a hat, to be his hand-picked successor. Again, many saw the hand of the international community, with an editor in the daily La Nouvelliste asking, of the foreigners, do you know what is being done here in your name? Where does this leave us now? Why does this keep happening? Why is every election in Haiti disputed? I believe that much of it comes down to one word, impunity. There was no accountability for Duvalier-era crimes, Aristide-era crimes, Preval-era crimes, or Martelly-era crimes. There is a certain victor's revenge, wherever whoever is in power at any given moment can try and exact revenge on those who oppose them, but this can't be confused with justice. The international community calls for stability in Haiti, while having, for decades, pushed policies that undermine stability, both in terms of their economic policies-- by 2013, Haiti, a country that only three decades earlier had produced 80% of the food it consumed, now imported half of that food and 80% of that rice-- but also by making deal after deal with the same discredited political figures of years past, who keep recycling themselves in different guises. There were few who believed that Martelly, who stepped down at the end of his mandate, this past February, wanted to organize transparent elections. There are fewer still who believe that the current interim president, Jocelerme Privert, who was minister of interior during some of the worst excesses of Aristide's second term, has an interest in doing so. Rather than address the structural defects in the political and economic system that appeared to make the country ungovernable, the country's varied elites, often with foreign backing, are content to attempt, time and again, to try and impose stand-ins to advance their narrow interests-- only then to have their chosen proxy rebel, often violently, to assert their own rule. I believe what Haiti needs today, more than anything, is a body similar to the Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, CICIG, the international UN-backed tribunal in Guatemala, tasked with investigating the existence of illegal security forces, supporting the work of Guatemalan institutions to investigate and prosecute individuals involved in illegality, and make recommendations to the government for the adoption of new public policies directed at the eradication of these groups, that will strengthen the state's capacity to protect the basic rights of its citizens, and providing technical assistance to legal institutions, in order to leave them better-equipped to fight organized crime. And don't confuse yourself. Politics in Haiti is often just organized crime by other means. There are very brave, committed people in Haiti, but there are too many people, in Haiti's political elite, who have been too criminal for too long. The Haitians can't do this, themselves. The pressures are too great. They need help. And I believe in international body such as this would help initiate that work, work that should have begun in the post of Duvalier era, but never did. If ongoing impunity is not rooted out of the body politic of Haiti, nothing will change, no matter how many elections or how many foreign missions the country has. To close, I wanted to end-- I started with a reference to Lyonel Trouillot, a great Haitian writer. And I wanted to close with a reference to another great Haitian writer and a journalist named Jacques Roche, who was murdered in 2005, who was another victim of Haiti's impunity. And it's a poem that he wrote, shortly before he was killed, called Survive. And for me, despite everything that goes on in Haiti, when you see these people who miraculously and heroically get up, day after day, and c'est la vie, look for life, look for some small job, behave with incredible dignity, and honesty, and gentleness, so that someone like me can travel all over the country, in public transportation, and never have a hostile world said against them. This, to me, sums up that attitude. "You can destroy my home, steal my money, my clothes, and my shoes, leave me naked in the middle of winter. But you cannot kill my dream. You cannot kill hope. You can shut my mouth, throw me in prison, keep my friends away from me and sully my reputation, leave me naked in the middle of the desert. But you cannot kill my dream. You cannot kill hope. You can put out my eyes and burst my eardrums, cut off my arms and legs, leave me naked in the middle of the road. But you cannot kill my dream. You cannot kill hope. You can cover me with open sores, poke an iron into the wounds, take pleasure in torturing me, make me piss blood, you can shut me away without pen or paper, treat me like a madman, drive me mad, humiliate me, crush me, give me no food or water, make me sign my surrender. But you cannot kill my dream. You cannot kill hope. You can kill my children, kill my wife, kill all those I hold dear, kill me. But you cannot kill my dream. You cannot kill hope." Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Thank you so much, Michael, first, for this beautiful poem, and second, for managing to summarize the 300- or 500-page book in 30 minutes. That was quite an achievement. So, now, we have about an hour for Q&A. So, if you don't mind using the microphone-- we are recording this event. So we need to use the mic to make sure that people who view the event online can listen to your question. So, please go ahead. And when you ask a question, if you could introduce yourself and, first, give us your name and your affiliation. And then, ask any questions you want. AUDIENCE: Well, I came late, but I caught some interesting things you said at the end. And I'm Haitian. My name is Carl Nicholas. I'm a visitor here. And I'm wondering how justice can really be implemented in Haiti in the way you're talking, since it's a whole culture in the country. And also, even those people who are not guilty, but they are so connected with the people who are committing those injustices, in all kinds of ways, that the solution I've ever thought about was to have a center outside the country-- like the Rosenthal Center for the Jews pursuing the Nazis-- and be able to fund prosecution in Haiti. And also to be able to pursue these people outside of the country, so that we can help change the culture of impunity. Because most of these people, they want to travel the country with their money, to put it in the bag, and all kinds of things. And definitely, we need a culture of impunity in the country, so that people know that when they do something, even in 10 or 20 years, somebody is going to go after them. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah. For me, I mean, I guess, in my years working in Haiti, there were honest, decent people in Haiti. I mean, particularly among the police, I've known really decent, hardworking police in Haiti. But their problem is they'll arrest some guy and then some corrupt judge will take a bribe and let them out, 10 minutes later. I mean, there's a story in my new book about a policeman called Walky Calixte. He lived in Carrefour, but he patrolled the Martissant area, which is a very hot zone in Port-au-Prince. And he arrested an armed cadre of a deputy. And the deputy went, reportedly, to the police station, and said, I'm going to kill you for doing that. And he was killed. And the parliament, rather than saying how awful that this policeman was killed, their whole rhetoric was, how dare you question the immunity that we enjoy as parliamentarians? And so I think there are people willing to do that in Haiti but they need some kind of system. They need some kind of support, basically. Because as I said-- AUDIENCE: Financial. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Financial, yeah. And just some sort of, I guess-- you know, is CICIG, for example, in this body that I talked about in Guatemala, the successive chief prosecutors with it were Spanish, Costa Rican, and Colombian. And they had, I think, a really salutary effect on justice in Guatemala. Now, that doesn't mean, obviously, that there's no corruption or violence in Guatemala. There's plenty of it. But they took down a sitting president and put him in prison, where he sits today, Otto Pérez Molina, and the vice president. And I think just the germ of that being in some Haitian politicians' head, that hey, I could actually be held accountable for doing all of this, would be an incredible improvement from what exists now, which is no one's afraid of going to jail no matter what they do. And I think, a lot of time, foreigners go there and they get overly wrapped up in the kind of ideology. They think it's some battle of ideologies when it's not. It's just it's my moment to get what I need now. And no matter what people say publicly, I mean, a lot a lot of these politicians do the same thing once they're in office, no matter what ideology they wrap it in. So for me personally, I think it would be a great thing for Haiti to have a body like that in Haiti itself. Because then I guess Haitians need to have-- they've been so, I feel, demoralized about the electoral process. Especially, I mean, one of the most enlightened people I know in Haiti is a young guy from Cité Soleil who formed an organization there called Soleil Lever, which is all about changing the image of Cité Soleil and building bridges between different people there. And he's kind of one of the people you wish there were thousands of in Haiti. And when I went back after the elections, he said, I didn't vote. Vote for who? And that was the response of 90% of the people that I talked to. And you know as well as I do, I'm sure, the fact that a couple of thousand young men between the ages of 16 and 35 appear on the streets to protest, that's not a real protest in Haiti. When you see women and people like that protesting, then that's a protest in Haiti. So I think that the idea of getting some accountability for the politicians might go a bit to giving people a bit more faith in the political process itself, at least I hope. AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Nick Cannell. In my spare time, I formed a nonprofit organization called Konbit Mizik. But I'm not talking about that. My question is really about MINUSTAH. I'm wondering if you've had any particular knowledge about what their timeline is, spoken with anyone at the UN about them. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, they're drawing down now. And during the kind of anarchy that was going on around the last election, I didn't see any MINUSTAH troops anywhere in the capital. I mean, they're completely gone from the south. I think there's still some people in Cap-Haitien and I think there's still some people in Port-au-Prince. But I did not see them as any sort of a presence in my visits there over the past year. And the sad thing is, I mean, after the earthquake, something happened to MINUSTAH. I think something structurally went awry. And whereas they had done some good things before. I mean, I think that their partnership with the Haitian national police, in terms of, also, hand in hand with Préval's reintegration and demobilization program, and bringing security back to the capital especially was good. But after the earthquake, this kind of, I guess, bunker mentality developed, probably because they had lost over 100 people, including the head of the mission, and the deputy head, and all of these people. But I don't feel like the mission was ever the same after that, really, in its effectiveness. And it's just gotten less effective with time. AUDIENCE: And I know, is it Louino Robillard that you're talking about? AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah. He's a good friend-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: Great guy. AUDIENCE: --of mine. AUDIENCE: My name is Dr. Manuel Pereira. My question essentially is that during the Bush-Clinton Initiative, we had a situation where a lot of money, and a lot of funds, and essentially a lot of power was in the hands of these two individuals. Why isn't anyone just say, right out, that the problem is the United States? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Because it's not. [SCATTERED APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: You have a situation where Obama took an individual like George Bush and team him up with Bill Clinton, who essentially, along with his wife, Hillary Clinton, wield tremendous power in Haiti. Bought a lot of assets, a lot of properties. And yet no one is talking about it, not even during an election year, in which Hillary Clinton-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: Do you really think that Obama wakes up in the morning and thinks, what will we do about Haiti? AUDIENCE: Obviously no. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK. AUDIENCE: But this needs to be the discussion. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Look, I agree with you in the sense that I think the international community certainly has played a very rotten role in Haiti. But look, I know the country too well. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the Haitian politicians are a bunch of helpless children who are just-- the United States is being mean to them. The United States has a lot to answer for, and not just the United States. But the Haitian politicians who lord over the misery of their fellow Haitians and couldn't care less if they live or die also have a lot to answer for. And it's a dysfunctional, abusive relationship between the two, I think. So that's my answer to you. It's not all one or the other. It's not all the Haitians, and it's not all the international community. They enable one another. I think that's the term they use for alcoholics and drug addicts, you know, enablers. And I think that's a lot of what you're seeing in Haiti. And I have a lot, also, in the book-- I couldn't get into it here-- about different foreign companies that are working in Haiti and the way they profited. I mean, I go into a lot of detail about the telephone company, which was a very profitable state industry in Haiti. And international politicos, along with their Haitian partners, broke it up and sold it off piece by piece. And not a dime of that was seen by the Haitian people. But a lot of people in the States got rich. There were a lot of nice mansions bought in Miami with that money from Teleco. So yeah, I do get into a lot of detail about the international role in Haiti, for sure. AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Gary [INAUDIBLE] I write for Revolution newspaper. I wanted to make a quick comment on what you've been saying. I also want to make an announcement, very briefly, about an important event. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Actually, you can make that afterwards. Do you have a question? AUDIENCE: I have a comment on what you're saying. Haiti needs a revolution. And we can go into that deeper afterwards. MICHAEL DEIBERT: You know how many revolutions Haiti has had? AUDIENCE: I'm talking about a real revolution. I'm not talking about an upheaval in which people come out in the streets and are used by the upper strata in order to rearrange the power arrangements of the top. I'm talking about a revolution that actually aims to uproot the deadly grip of the US-- and yes, other imperialist powers-- which has been shaping and controlling Haiti since early after its foundation and which is responsible for this class of people that rules Haiti now. And yes, sometimes they have their contradictions. But fundamentally this is not a mutually enabling situation. The tail does not wag the dog. The US is the greatest superpower in the world. And it has been dictating, to the greatest extent possible, what happens in Haiti for a long time, including with repeated invasions, repeated coups. It's done it partly for profit, partly for strategic interests. But it's true, you're right, it's not just the US. There is a strata in Haiti that profits tremendously from this, that is sort of the enforcers on the ground, that those two groups, the US and the sort of semi-feudal commodore bourgeois forces, they need to be overthrown. A whole new society needs to be brought into being. MICHAEL DEIBERT: It's easy to say that here in New York. It's easy to say that there should be a revolution. Believe me. Do you know how many people I know who have been murdered in Haiti in the last 20 years? And they've been murdered by people who thought they were working for this or that political current that they thought were going to change things. All of those kids that I knew in Cité Soleil, all of those kids who thought they were working for Aristide or they thought were revolutionary, they're all dead. And none of them made it to 30. AUDIENCE: So here's the decisive point that I want to make, is in making revolution, the question of leadership is crucial. And in 1986, the Haitian people rose up with, yes, tremendous hope, tremendous dreams, almost unfathomable courage, over and over again, against these brutal powerful forces, first the Macoutes and then the army, regime after regime, fought against US invasions. But there was not actually revolutionary leadership. Today, in the world, there is revolutionary leadership that's concentrated in what Bob Avakian has brought forward in the New Synthesis that actually represents a path forward for people who want liberation to be able to navigate all the contradictions that you face, which are tremendous. Yes, it's true, there are tremendous problems you face if you're trying to get free of this. But that is what people have to do. And anything else-- people say revolution is unrealistic. But there is nothing more unrealistic than trying to reform this-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] MICHAEL DEIBERT: Can I ask you a question? AUDIENCE: That goes for this country too. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Have you been to Haiti? AUDIENCE: Yes. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK. I mean, well, you know, if you've traveled around Haiti, if you've talked to Haitian people, I would say, in my experience at least, their analysis of the problem there is not quite so binary. I think they would tell you also that one of the big problems is the fact that no one ever goes to jail for anything in Haiti no matter how odious it is. And as you said-- and I think this is a point on which maybe we agree-- that there is a war that kind of goes on between political elites which differ among themselves. But they have the same modus operandi. No matter what rhetoric they dress themselves up in, I might be a Jean-Claudiste, I might be Lavalas, I might be whatever. But the life of the person in the countryside in Grande-Saline, the Artibonite, the life of somebody in Maissade in the plateau central, doesn't really change, doesn't get any better. But these cadres in the Republic of Port-au-Prince, which is what Port-au-Prince is so often referred to because it's so separate from the rest of the country. And I always tell people, if you go to Haiti, don't just stay in Port-au-Prince because there's an amazing country to be discovered outside of the capital. It's a kind of coffee filter that drains all of the potential that comes into Haiti out of it. And I think some people have done some attempts at decentralization, Préval a little bit. But it was far too little and it was far too late. And when you go to places like Anse-Rouge or Jean-Rabel in the Northwest, I mean, Port-au-Prince, you might as well be talking about Venus or Mars or something. It's so detached from people's everyday reality. And generally, if something comes from the government, it's trouble. Which is another sad thing, is that in a country you know that sacrificed so much, overthrowing Duvalier, opposing the military regimes, there is now a pervasive sense that I find among ordinary people that politics is the kind of provenance of dangerous people who you don't want to get involved in. And you want to just stay as far away from politics as you possibly can because no good can come of it. And that, to me, is maybe the saddest development over the last 30 years that that is the path we have come to. You have to talk in the microphone. AUDIENCE: To the mic? OK. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Because they're recording it. AUDIENCE: Hi my name is Emmanuelle Gilles. Nice to meet you. I just have one question. Since I came late, I don't know whether you addressed the information that Haiti has so much natural resources, notably oil discoveries and gold, copper, and resources that could have made Haiti so rich that it wouldn't need to be dependent economically on the Western world. But so far, there hasn't been any confirmation that actually these resources exist because they've been hidden from the Haitian people, specifically from the government. But I read, in the Dominican Republic, the government has done the contrary. They've informed the people that actually they did discover oil. And they were tested somewhere in England, and discovered that they have high-quality oil, both in the Dominican Republic and the eastern part of the Hispaniola Island. So I was wondering why is it that this is hidden from the Haitian people? Isn't it really some form an injustice that is being done to the Haitian people? MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, you know, there is some gold in the North of Haiti. And one of the goldmines, actually, one of the guys on the board is Hillary Clinton's brother, actually. And-- AUDIENCE: She divvied up the country already. MICHAEL DEIBERT: But I mean, there may be more than I know, sitting here telling you. And I don't want to pretend that it doesn't exist if it does. But of what I know, of what I've been able to confirm, I'm sure there's some there. But what have they been waiting for? I mean, I've been in countries like Congo that are totally at war. And they're plucking the resources out of the ground. And foreign companies are making bank off that left and right what are they waiting for in Haiti? It's not a rhetorical question. I'm literally asking. Because Haiti is, in many ways, a much more desirable location for that. It's not all the way over in the middle of Africa, it's right here in the Caribbean. So I mean, certainly Haiti has-- I mean, the poverty-inducing policies in terms of agriculture and whatnot are things that have been intentionally repeated over and over and over again. And that's something that I don't think people can argue with. A country that goes from producing almost all the food that it eats to producing almost none of the food that it eats in 30 years, that's a pretty amazing change. And it's not something that I think really happened by accident. But for me, I mean, that's what I concentrated on a bit more, is the fact that, why has so little attention been paid to the rural part of agriculture and things like that in Haiti over the years, and so much to this kind of faux [INAUDIBLE] model that doesn't really provide that many jobs. I mean, Caracol, which was the big kind of showpiece for the international community in Haiti, it opened up outside of Cap-Haitien. It was supposed to employ 60,000 people. And now, years later, it's still at about 3,000. And it's been at that level for years and years now so I mean that model obviously doesn't work. AUDIENCE: Hello. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Hey. AUDIENCE: How are you? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Good. AUDIENCE: As you were speaking, you talked about political elites. Who are they? MICHAEL DEIBERT: The political elites in Haiti? AUDIENCE: In Haiti, yes. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, you have a couple of different ones. I mean, you have some who are linked to the economic elites. And sometimes they're one and the same, but they're not always the same. And then you have, basically, kind of career politicians who have made their money off of a system whereby a lot of people say-- you know, you pay and threaten to get elected. And once you're in office, then that's your excuse to steal as much money as you can and bully whoever gets in your way. And the sad thing is is you see people who, outside of politics, are extremely reasonable, nice people, and the minute they get into the parliament, it's a transformation. It's like corruption possesses the Haitian body politic. AUDIENCE: What qualifies them to be politically involved? What qualifies them to do that? MICHAEL DEIBERT: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] AUDIENCE: How do they get the education they need to collaborate together and become politically, so-called, elites? MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, myself-- AUDIENCE: I just want to clarify, this has been going on since 1803, and then today, if they're all political elite people, what are they doing with their eliteness? Are they helping the poor? Are they helping connect with schools so that everyone can learn how to speak, read, and write? Are they going to be able to develop the country where you can go to the bathroom and have enough toilet paper and have water to drink, things like that. All along, the only thing they've been talking about as far as Haiti is concerned, the elite, the elite, elite. What is that? What does that mean? To me, it equals a bunch of thieves and people who don't care about the other that are people that lives in the United States of America that are constantly building big houses in Haiti, so forth and so on, for themselves. But if you go outside, there's no electricity, there's no lights, there's no places to go to the bathroom, there's no hospital. The only thing you talk about is the elite. What the hell does that mean? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Elite is a-- wait, let me just respond. Elite is a pejorative term the way it's used in Haiti. It's not a term of endearment. AUDIENCE: That's not helping the country any shape and form. And the gentleman that was here before, he stated something about the revolutionary liberation. What does that mean, please? MICHAEL DEIBERT: You'd have to ask him what he meant. I don't know. AUDIENCE: Whoever was that, what does that mean, revolutionary? Can you define that for me? AUDIENCE: He left. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK, well, let me answer the first part of your question before I forget it. In terms of what qualifies them as elites, I mean, you have a couple of different facets of who would be considered that. One is the economic elite that's ruled the country for years and years. And that's 30, 40, 50 families. I mean, it's a little-known fact Haiti has the largest number of millionaires in the Caribbean. AUDIENCE: But they need to show it. MICHAEL DEIBERT: And yeah, but you have to let me finish when I'm answering. Sorry. AUDIENCE: I apologize. MICHAEL DEIBERT: No, it's OK. But in terms of the political elites, something interesting, I think, happened with both Duvalier and Aristide, in the sense of the Black majority that had been highly excluded from politics, were included in politics by both Duvalier and Aristide in a way they had not been before. It came at a terrible cost for the country because both of those men were not good leaders. But you had this kind of nouveau riche Black political class that didn't really exist before them. And it brought them a few steps ahead. But it came, as I said, at a terrible cost. Because the people who felt the brunt of the bad governance from both of those men were the were the Black underclass. It wasn't the rich bourgeois who could just fly to Miami or whatever and hang out. So there are those two different strata of elite. And sometimes the political elites cooperate with the economic elite, and sometimes they're adversarial to them. But it depends on who we're talking about. I mean, there's a bunch of different ones who have kind of different allegiances depending on who they are. AUDIENCE: I think that the Haitian people need to explore a little more with different parts of the world and try to really learn and educate the people that are down there. If it's money that involves, I'm educated because I have money, it's the wrong process. And I also feel that they need to get some help from wherever they can get it, not just the Haitians, who still have a slavery mentality in ways that govern such situation. Now, they talk about, if I'm going to Haiti, I want to find a place to go to the bathroom. It's not going to be only about the elite. I have electricity in my house because I can buy this operation, whatever you call it, General Electric, whatever, I can buy it. But the next person after that, they can't afford it. Something needs to be done. It's not the Haitians that are going to elevate and help the country. Just them by themselves, it's not going to happen. 1803 keeps going on and on and on. It needs to stop. And they're not very far from the US. One hour away from Miami, you're right there. So how dare you go to Haiti and don't have a place to go to the bathroom unless I'm the elite. It needs to stop. MICHAEL DEIBERT: What I would say is Préval, when he was elected in 2006, said something that I think was very perceptive and very telling, which he told the rich in Haiti, he was like, don't forget, you live in a ghetto too. And they do. And I think that that realization, any kind of bridging of this huge Gulf in Haiti has to begin with that realization, that they may be living in a ghetto with a great house, but it's still a ghetto. AUDIENCE: And when you come out, there's no electricity in the streets for you. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah, exactly. AUDIENCE: It needs to stop. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Ayibobo. AUDIENCE: Ayibobo, yeah. AUDIENCE: Hi, Michael. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Hi, Javier. AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Javi Hernandez. I'm Peruvian. I worked twice in Haiti, for seven years. As you, I'm enamored with Haiti. And I just want to dispel something that has been said here. The only thing you will not find in Haiti is the slave mentality. AUDIENCE: Thanks you. AUDIENCE: Oh, there's plenty of slaves. That's not true. That's not true. Plenty of slave mentality. Stiff. AUDIENCE: Hello, my name is Allen Lewis. I work here for the Columbia Graduate School of Business. I'm from the Midwest. And I didn't know as much as I do know, thanks to some friends and thanks to this, as much as what's going on with Haiti. And personally, when I heard that it was the first slave revolt, I just had immense pride. But I do have a question. And it's who do you think benefits most from the destabilization of Haiti, internal or external stakeholders? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Again, I think it's an abusive dysfunctional symbiotic relationship between both. Because I mean, a lot of the politicians in Haiti, what would they do? I met them. I mean, they're not going to go get a job and work for Apple or something like that, let me tell you. I mean, the brilliant people feel, most of them, that their only ticket is to leave the country and come here. And then, of course, you have cadres in the US that make tons of money. I mean, when Aristide was president, there was a law firm in Miami that made almost $6 million off of Haiti when people were so poor that they were eating clay. In the meantime, it's not the only law firm either. I mean, there's a lot of others. So I mean, I think we can't just have this kind of, again, binary it's all the Haitians fault or it's all the foreigners' fault, because it's, I believe, a combination of both of those things. And neither one seems to want to extricate themselves from the other. The Haitian political class and economic class benefits from this constant turmoil. And some sectors on the outside benefit from it too, benefit from it financially. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] MICHAEL DEIBERT: Well, the diaspora, I feel like, are treated very badly in Haiti, because basically they're this constant ATM that keeps the country afloat, sending money, sending remittances back to Haiti. But when they want to get involved in politics there, people are like, get out. You're diaspora. I've seen this over and over. AUDIENCE: It goes on. It needs to stop. It needs to stop. AUDIENCE: I want to engage in a nuanced discussion with you. I realize you're another country and want to stay away from stereotypes. Because most of the time they don't really reflect the dynamism of what's really going on in the country. But let's start by saying that a lot of these elites, they are Americans. A lot of them are naturalized. Once there is a problem, you'll find out. They go to the embassy. By the way, a lot of them. We all know that. And all the Canadian citizens or whatever. But one important question, they show that there is a symbiotic relationship. But the leverage is with the US. It's with the US. [INTERPOSING VOICES] AUDIENCE: Excuse me, I'm sorry, I beg to differ. You said it's a symbiotic relationship. A symbiotic relationship benefits. It is a parasitic relationship. Whereas they are sucking the blood-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] MICHAEL DEIBERT: You know, if you want to say that, if you say it at the microphone, they'll be able to hear you on the-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] AUDIENCE: So I think the US is leading-- the point I want to make is, we didn't bring that up, but there's a lot of racism going on, not only in the way they deal with Haiti, but there is racism in the country itself. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Oh, absolutely. AUDIENCE: The color problem is a big problem when you look at the economic elite, it's much light-skinned people, almost white. MICHAEL DEIBERT: But if I could respond just-- I mean, that is true to some extent. But also, in the last 50 years, that has changed somewhat. You have highly wealthy Black Haitians as well, which you didn't probably 50 years before. AUDIENCE: Yeah, but they're not really as much involved in the economy of the country. They're involve in the-- how do I say that, drugs or some kind of other activities, some businesses. But if you really-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: Well, the thing is, also, I mean, I think, because the economy is controlled by such a handful of people, basically, if you're an ambitious young Black Haitian in the provinces or something like that, the way you think you can get money is by politics. And people have told me that themselves, politicians. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] MICHAEL DEIBERT: They were like, look-- can I finish? They were saying, look, I was some guy. I was growing up outside of Cap-Haitien. And I wanted to do something with my life. So what was I going to do, stay here and hoe corn my whole time? No, I didn't want to do that. So I went and made politics in Port-au-Prince. AUDIENCE: And my last point, clearly there needs to be some kind of organization outside of the country, with people who have leverage, intellectual leverage, economic leverage, or whatever. But the problem is, it's not that Haitians have a slave mentality. It's because, as you said, people are afraid of politics and people don't want to take charge. And the culture is kind of promoted in Haiti that you can't do anything. The elites want you to think that so that you don't get involved and try to change things. So not only the Haitian people outside of the country, but people outside of the country who really want to help, should try to get involved in organizing some institutions to give leverage to people who are trying hard in Haiti. But the problem is there's clientelism. Some of the liberal people who are supposedly talking about how sad the situation is in Haiti, they are professionally profiting from the country, you know what I'm saying. Even the journalists, they go out there and they look for the worst pictures, because those pictures sell. MICHAEL DEIBERT: And this is another problem that I think, is that so much of the image of Haiti, I feel, that gets depicted, especially in the media, is simply Port-au-Prince, which as I said, has such a different feel and dynamic and look than the rest of the country. I mean, so if the entire prism through which you see Haiti is Cité Soleil, that's not accurate. It's an aspect of it. And it's an aspect that has to be addressed and not whitewashed. But I mean, if you go-- there's also a reality of Haiti in a place like the plateau central, where there is very, very strong peasant unions that have existed for decades. Same in Jean-Rabel in the Northwest. There is places like Jacmel which have this incredible history and this beauty. And that has to be-- that, I feel like, has to be explained as well. I mean, I only had 30 minutes, so I didn't get into all of that. But in the first book and in this book, I get into a lot more, in terms of the literature and all of that. I mean, it's an extraordinarily creative country that produces very captivating things. It's not all just politics. But unfortunately the politics dominate all the other aspects because that's what has the boot on the throat of the rest of the society. Question. AUDIENCE: What concerns me in your approach, at least part of your approach-- I'm sure not all of your approach, but part of it-- is that I get the sense that every time you start talking about "there are many actors involved," Haitian actors, foreign actors, maybe these other guys, or whatever, it almost seems as if that, within the parentheses, you're telling me that I can't find a solution to this problem. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I just tried to-- well, my solution that I think would work-- not fix everything, but I think would be productive for the country-- is I said some sort of body that would fight against impunity, that would be based in Haiti. AUDIENCE: And that body would need to be the international community. Because who, within all of the actors that you mentioned, actually feed all of these little guys who are trying to make money off this system? Certainly not the politicians. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I could tell you-- I mean, I've known some people that I think are decent people who have been involved in politics in Haiti. Michele Pierre-Louis was one. Guy Alexandre, who I quoted, was another one. Mario Andrewsol, who's the chief of police, I think, was basically an honest civil servant. AUDIENCE: I'm not talking about good guys and bad guys, I'm talking about people who have power who can actually effectuate change and hold on to it and make it happen. Let's take an example. During the earthquake, or right after the earthquake, I found out that the administration was actually sending deportees back to Haiti. How do you do that without having incredible power within a country that is broken, that doesn't even have a decent jail that was in operation at that time? So evidently we do have an actor that has the power that can actually make things happen that these other little actors-- and I'm not saying they're unimportant-- will have to submit to. And this is, to me, where the solution to the problem is. I seek the solution to problems. By trade, I'm an architect and I'm an engineer. Whenever I see a problem, I like to find solutions. AUDIENCE: Then go down there. AUDIENCE: And we are not going to have solutions if we keep going around and around and saying that this guy is a bad guy, these people here are bad guys, and there are so many bad guys, and gosh, we're really "hmm" where the answer is. When we know, if we target the United States, the international community, and put enough pressure upon them, they can put people on trial, they can incarcerate people, they can dry up their money. They can even arrest drug dealers right in the middle of Haiti who have little armies. Why can they not do these other things? MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, if you're asking me, do I have faith-- wait, let me respond. Do I have faith that the United States is going to come in and save Haiti? No, I do not. I do not. And the thing is, I think that only Haitians can save Haiti. The United States is not going to do it. They don't care. They don't care. And most of the international community doesn't either. And when I suggest having a body that is based in Haiti, fighting against impunity across all political persuasions, not just targeting one group or one party or one strata of society, I think that would help build the rule of law in the country and I think it would help move the country forward. It did help in Guatemala. AUDIENCE: I'd like to just add on to that. I generally agree with the points you're making to advocate for some sort of body against impunity. It seems to me that it does need to be an international body. But international actors have exploited Haiti historically. So that's hard. And I'm curious to know what steps you're doing other than writing a book and telling this room full of people, all of whom we all love Haiti, right? Everyone agrees on that, right? OK, so my solution-- or another solution, and I think a critical aspect of strengthening Haiti, is to work closely with young people in areas like Cité Soleil or in [INAUDIBLE] or other downtown areas of Port-au-Prince. Port-au-Prince is very densely populated. That's the vast majority of Haiti's population lives in Port-au-Prince, right, for no reason other-- it's not for lack of intelligence. There are masses of young people who are not privileged enough to attain higher levels of education. And so through working on a community based level with young people to organize trash collection, for example, is one of the things we do. I mean, we use music as the platform to do that. I believe that if you want to work with young people, you either do it through music or through soccer. And so I love music. All Haitians love music. We use music as that platform. So it's, I guess, a question to you and really an invitation to everyone in the room to think about ways, in your own lives, to go the next step, to not just talk about it, come to a talk about Haiti, and then forget about it, but actually go to Haiti if you haven't been there, keep going there, go again, go again, meet people, work with people. SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Would you restate your question. What is the question you're asking? AUDIENCE: Well, I'm curious to know I'm curious to know about what steps are you making to advocate for your position for this international body or this body. MICHAEL DEIBERT: The road to hell in Haiti is paved with foreign NGOs, let me tell you. AUDIENCE: Yeah, I mean, I've seen-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] AUDIENCE: We're small but we have a huge impact. MICHAEL DEIBERT: And I'm not saying your-- I don't know your NGO. I don't know anything about it or how it operates. It might be wonderfully effective. But if I had a nickel for every white foreigner who went down to Haiti and was going to save it with their NGO, I would not have to write books or do anything. AUDIENCE: I'm happy to contribute to that. I'm not saying I'm saving it. We all have to contribute. MICHAEL DEIBERT: But the thing is, I mean, generally, in my experience, when foreign NGOs go down to Haiti, what they contribute is the growth of themselves more than they contribute with the growth of the people in Haiti. And not all of them-- I've seen some that have been wonderfully effective. But the ones that I've seen are most effective are generally ones that have their genesis in the analysis of a Haitian of Haiti, like Fonkoze, which was founded by a Haitian priest, for example, is a microfinance organization that does great work. FOKAL, which was founded by Michele Pierre-Louis and Lorraine Magonez, that's another great organization. But I mean, there's this-- I mean, Lakou Lape is another really good one, which was founded by Louis-Henri Mars. And they do kind of conflict resolution in neighborhoods that begins with an intense kind of coming to terms and talking among different strata of society. And they talk, and they talk, and they talk. And sometimes an elite guy or a baz guy, or something, they're like, we want to do something. Let's go do something. And you know, Lakou Lape's approach is that, look, you guys are not even really seeing one another yet. You're not even recognizing one another yet. So we have to talk more so we get to know one another more. I think organization-- I mean, and if you want to say-- I think everybody-- they have a saying in Haiti, little by little, the bird builds its nest. And I think everybody has something to contribute. And whether that's writing or music or NGO or whatever, I mean, I don't think one should-- some of the most influential people in Haiti have been writers, have been people like Jacques Stephen Alexis and Jacques Roumain. And Lyonel Trouillot. So I mean, I think everybody has their contribution they can make. And for me, I would not feel comfortable going down to Haiti with some kind of group and telling people there I was going to show them how things work. AUDIENCE: No, I don't. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I listen. AUDIENCE: But that's your own judgment as to how Konbit Mizik works. I mean, you respect Robi, right? MICHAEL DEIBERT: I respect-- yeah. AUDIENCE: OK, so we work very closely with Robi, in addition to so many other young people. And I'll tell you an actual thing that is being planned right now is a concert. SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Why don't you phrase it as a question? AUDIENCE: OK. Who would like to-- SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: For Michael. AUDIENCE: [SCOFFS] To Michael. Would you like to come to a concert that we're organizing in Parc Sainte-Therese-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: Sure. AUDIENCE: --in the summertime, with many of Haiti's biggest rappers and singers, many of whom I know personally. The cost of admission is free for anybody who takes a rapid HIV test. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Who takes a what? AUDIENCE: A rapid HIV test. We're partnering with the GHESKIO centers, we're partnering with Cornell-- who's under Cornell Medical Center. So that's my invitation to you. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Anale. AUDIENCE: That's something-- sorry? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Anale, let's go. [INTERPOSING VOICES] AUDIENCE: Hi. Maybe I'm one of the few people who doesn't know much about Haiti. So I was just wondering, since you said that the capital was much different from the rest of the country, if you could explain a bit more about this difference. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Well, I mean, most of the kind of land area of Haiti is a rural peasant society. And the capital is this kind of concentration of humanity. It was built for about, I think, 200,000 or 300,000 people. Now I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million live there. And you feel it. So I mean, when you land in this huge swirl of humanity and these images of what, in some neighborhoods, are pretty miserable poverty, I think sometimes people think that that is Haiti in its totality, is what you see in the capital. And that certainly is not my experience. If you walk from, like, this town in the plateau central Anse Papaye, you see a much gentler side of life in Haiti, I think. You see a "much closer to the land" side of Haiti, which is also the reality of the country. And I think, sometimes, when people just go in Port-au-Prince and don't go anywhere else, they have this image of Haiti which, in my opinion, is not very realistic. So I hope that answered-- AUDIENCE: There are also a lot of nice spots in the capital. MICHAEL DEIBERT: True. I used to live in Pacot, which is a beautiful neighborhood. AUDIENCE: I just have one last question. I agree with you when you say that Haiti's problem is actually mainly in its justice system, that Haiti needs a very strong justice system. But my question is how do you realize this justice system with the type of democracy that we have? I don't see it possible unless we come up with another system, something that we would have to invent. MICHAEL DEIBERT: But would you think, also, that perhaps the democracy is in the state that it's in because of this rule of impunity that goes across society? The people who rule Haiti's political situation are people who are able to do so because they never have to fear, from the justice system, anything. They can just do whatever they want. And I feel like maybe-- it's just one building block of multiple things, but I feel that if there was a system to counter that pervasive and total impunity, that would at least be one step to move the country a bit forward, to have some accountability. so that just a badge of parliament or a uniform wasn't a license to commit unbridled banditry and murder and whatnot, which it seems to be too often today, I think. AUDIENCE: Yes, but at the same time, democracy works just anybody in power. For instance, if you're going to have democracy and you elect a president, the people has to actually have a knowledge of whom they are voting for and what they are voting for. If you're just voting for a thinker, if you're voting for a priest, or if you're voting, I don't know-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: Former banker. AUDIENCE: Exactly. So what do you expect? What we need is a group of people who actually know what they're doing, people who are going to discuss issues like decentralization. Nobody ever talks about decentralization in Haiti. So if we're just going to just vote every five years just to vote, it isn't going to work. So we're never going to accomplish this strong justice system that you are advocating for. AUDIENCE: We need some kind of order before we can roll it out. MICHAEL DEIBERT: But do you think not that perhaps the order would come from a strengthened justice system, or no? AUDIENCE: Yeah, maybe from a strongman like Duvalier. I'm not Duvalierist, but look, we tend, in Haiti, to talk bad about everything. But there were some good aspects to Duvalier's regime also. There was order. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I was 13 and in high school in Pennsylvania when Baby Doc fled. So I can't really speak to personal experience about that era. Yes, please. AUDIENCE: OK, my name is Dr. Jessie Martin. And my question is, you mentioned about the agricultural system in Haiti and how now we are not producing. How can Haiti feed itself if most of the food now is being flooded internationally into Haiti at a less expensive rate than it cost them to produce? Do you think that is happening just by chance? Or is that being done on purpose? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Oh, it was definitely done on purpose. And it was definitely done in the 1990s. I mean, this is something-- AUDIENCE: And it's happening again. First it happened with the rice, now it's happening with the peanuts. MICHAEL DEIBERT: That's something that's been going on for, now, decades. And I think-- I quoted the statistic. It's like 2.5% or something like that of development aid went to agriculture. Well, that tells you something right there. You have a peasant-majority country, a country where a lot of people are or were subsistence farmers. But they get a fraction, a tiny, minuscule amount of aid. AUDIENCE: But who is getting benefited? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Oh, the people who are having this parasitic import economy. AUDIENCE: Exactly. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah, I mean, that's who's benefiting for sure. AUDIENCE: The ones who are sucking the blood out of Haiti. And it's not within-- well, I know you say it is in Haiti. Yes, we have an elite group that does. But let's not be blind that most of Haiti's problems come outside of Haiti, not within Haiti. [INAUDIBLE] blaming outsiders. MICHAEL DEIBERT: I mean, there wasn't a question there. So go ahead. AUDIENCE: My name is [INAUDIBLE].. I'm from Connecticut. One question that I have, you mentioned the blame on the elite, which one of the ladies talked about. Where do you think the intellectual elite of Haiti [INAUDIBLE]? Isn't it them to blame as well? Because they accept all of these things come from Haiti from outside of Haiti. All the-- you say the US, the international community, everybody else, played a role in making Haiti what it is today. But where's the will of Haitian elites to say-- I mean, intellectual ones to say, OK, we are not going to accept the way you present whatever program that you-- we need our say in there? In your experience in Haiti, what do you see? Where do you see themselves think it's their fault as well? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah. I mean, historically, the Haitian intellectual class has played a very active role in kind of the political gyrations of the country. I mean, Jacques Stephen Alexis and Jacques Roumain were very active in the overthrow of Elie Lescot in 1946. During the kind of anti-Aristide movement in 2003-2004, Lyonel Trouillot, Gary Victor, Boukmon Eksperyans, all of these bands, were active like that. And for me, what I could say is, reading Haitian literature, listening to Haitian music, that provided me as a foreigner with a window into Haiti that I would have never had by simply reading history. It helped me understand a lot about the country. I mean, if you read a book like Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain, that's a great novel. If you read Streets of Lost Footsteps, the one I quoted here, or Children of Heroes, by Lyonel Trouillot, there's an insight I think one gets into the experience of Haiti that you don't get from, say, a book like mine, a history or whatnot. So in that sense, I think they played a productive role by helping people understand a bit of the reality of the country, I think. AUDIENCE: But-- to go a bit further, will that be enough? Because we've always had that elite in Haiti, since the beginning. Not the beginning, but since 1804. We've had that class of people there. And there's still-- till today. Haiti doesn't seem to move any further ahead. The one thing that I'm seeing, I mean I may see, as a nation-- it seems we as Haitians seems to be more interested in poetry. Saying this is what wrong, this is who's to blame, instead of having taking action for ourselves. Why, I mean the guys initially talk about the revolution. I'm not for, but it may be necessary. But not brutal, like where there's killing. No, not that. It's a revolution of mind, I think it should be. Personally, that's what I'm thinking. MICHAEL DEIBERT: A friend of mine-- a friend of mine who's active in a lot of marginalized communities in Port-au-Prince has a theory, basically. And his theory is that the country's leaders have not recovered from the trauma of slavery, yet. And he said until the country collectively, and the leaders, recover from this trauma, that they won't move forward. That it's still somehow there in their psyches. That's his that's his analysis. AUDIENCE: That's an [INAUDIBLE] They've been talking about it. AUDIENCE: You talked about, you come from the area of Pacot. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Not come from, but I lived there, yeah. AUDIENCE: That area is basically, really is-- the word that's redundant, elite, elite, elite. I happen to know that area, as well. Not long ago, I visited Pacot. People still doesn't have any electricity there. And the toiletry, where you go to the bathroom, we used to have so-called, a [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, let's say. I don't know how to say that in [INAUDIBLE].. And you go to the bathroom. And the ones who don't have the money, American dollars-- and this is Haiti-- and this is American dollars you need to have in order for them to come in to remove feces from holes, toilet holes. So therefore, multiple people are using these toilet holes, and get to a point where if you go put your tush there, you're going to be touching somebody else's feces. This is 2016. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK, I understand. We're getting rather scatological. AUDIENCE: But these are the things that are still going on in Haiti. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK. AUDIENCE: There's no law-- and they keep talking about-- I'm making a statement. They're still talking about-- SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Thank you for the statement, but would you phrase it as a question for Michael? AUDIENCE: Well, what can we do to solve these poverty level, as opposed to elite poor. When are we going to help the poor people to go to school, and stop the blaming on other parts of the world? Haiti has gotten many, many help from the world. But every time they do it, they don't accomplish much. What are we going to do? What can everybody do to help them? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Well, a couple of things that I said, that I think would help are-- stop completely ignoring, basically, the agricultural sector, because then people wouldn't be flooding into the capital for jobs that don't exist. And they could stay where they grew up and work. And another thing would be to have some rule of law, which is totally absent now. Those are the two things I would say. AUDIENCE: Sometimes I donate money to people trying to send them to school and so forth. AUDIENCE: Stop doing that. They go in and they get robbed. When are they going to stop? When are they going to-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: If you have another question-- AUDIENCE: Humanity needs to be focused on Haiti. Humanity. SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Hello, Michael, it's lovely to be here. I apologize for being a little late. I did want to focus on kind of-- I'm curious about this question of the elite, and what we've heard coined as the "morally repugnant elite." And after having traveled to Haiti, and seen it from a firsthand kind of take, I'm wondering what are some productive ways to move forward in terms of-- maybe perhaps you addressed this in your talk-- but to bridge the gap between the elite and the general public? What are some productive ways? What do you think is-- what are some steps that could be taken in terms of forging genuine connections, bonds, and a sense of a common goal, a sense of civic engagement from the elite, and a sense of general eye-to-eye understanding between the population and the elite. MICHAEL DEIBERT: At the height of Operation Baghdad, which was this two year period of hell in Port-au-Prince, there was an initiative formed by local Haitians, with the support of an Irish NGO called Concern, that was called the Committee for Peace and Prosperity in Saint Martin. And Saint Martin is one of these [FRENCH],, poor neighborhoods. You would say. But it's on the outskirts of an area, an industrial area with a lot of factories. And the whole kind of impetus for that, was to get the elite who ran the factories, and the baz in Saint Martin to talk with one another. Just to talk. To recognize the common humanity that they both had. Because there was this, and is, this huge gulf of misunderstanding between different strata of society. Where they basically look at one another as devils. I mean, you know, if you talk to a guy from a place like Saint Martin about a guy who lives in La Boule, I mean, it's as if they're on different planets. And by sitting and talking for hours and hours, and doing retreats-- they went up to the mountains and would spend days together just discussing their lives and how they perceive one another. I saw, myself, these people from very different backgrounds, begin to recognize some common humanity in one another. And that is a process that's continuing today. You know, it's continuing in Grande Ravine and [INAUDIBLE] and some of these other areas. So I think that-- and especially because it was an it was an indigenous initiative. It was these two different communities in this, basically the same zone, deciding, look if we-- we're basically committing collective suicide and we can't continue doing this. So I think initiatives like that are incredibly valuable. And then after that, you get to the whole aspect of bridging the gap between urban and rural, which is a huge other gulf of misunderstanding in Haiti. You know, where people from-- it's kind of a mini diaspora thing, where in the sense of, a lot of times, people-- you know, there's this kind of hatred, but at the same time envy of a lot of diaspora in Haiti when they go back there. I mean people need them to send money back. But then they think that, OK well now you live in the States or Canada or whatever, you think you're better than us. And people who leave, say San Raphael in the north, and go to Port-au-Prince, there's the people back in the countryside feel that about them when they come back. Like, oh now they're big city people. So I think, although it's not building a wall, or putting a hoe in the ground, or digging a well, I think that kind of dialogue between the strata of Haitian society is really valuable. And I think it's something that should be continued and fostered more. Because I saw the difference in the way these people viewed one another from the beginning to the end. And it changed a lot. AUDIENCE: Yeah. I just wanted to touch on one other aspect, that's kind of maybe a bigger picture aspect, as far as Blackness and the way it's construed in the States. So my father, being Haitian, having left Haiti in 1963, came to the United States and experienced what it was to be black. So I think that, in a lot of ways, even the elite classes, when they come to the United States to study, they have this realization. They're Black, right? They're considered Black. So I think that there is a potential point of solidarity. That I think there's something productive there. I think if we can just kind of maybe start to, in a weird way, use that as a unifying factor-- or potentially unifying factor-- to start to kind of break down some of these kind of racial imaginations, in ways that the Haitian identity can be more-- can have a point of reference. And just from that point of kind of trauma and experiencing race in a different way, so that solidarity is more the center point. That's a more of a statement. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Sure. No, that's interesting. Yeah, no, you're completely right. I mean, the people who are considered "mulatto" in Haiti, which is the term that's used, I mean, if they come to a place like the States they're Black. And it's a very schizophrenic kind of-- because they would not consider themselves so in Haiti, most of the time. AUDIENCE: Right. You know, after living here long enough, the consciousness is awakened. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah, for sure. AUDIENCE: Once it's on, you don't turn it off. Anyway just a thought. Thank you. MICHAEL DEIBERT: Thank you very much. AUDIENCE: Hi, everyone. My name is Najla. I grew up in Haiti and I miss it a lot, and I wish the situation was better. You might have addressed this before. My question is regarding how to make Haiti a stable place for a Haitian to stay home, and not to have to flee. I think-- I agree with you, I think it has to come from the people living in Haiti. But my concern is, can we have a fairer justice system with a destabilized political system? I think they work with each other. And do we have the infrastructure to strengthen the justice system in Haiti. MICHAEL DEIBERT: My analysis of that is, I feel that the destabilized political system proceeds from the broken justice system. Because, do you know, in the last election in Haiti, they didn't bother to check if any of the candidates had criminal records or not? I mean you know, which is quite spectacular. I mean in some areas, it's almost a prerequisite, right, to run for office in Haiti. But that-- AUDIENCE: But some were eventually disqualified, right? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah. Well, but some of the worst ones continued in. I mean, you know-- a lot of the people who go to parliament, they shouldn't be at liberty to circulate among the public, let alone be making laws for the society at large. So my analysis of it-- and people may disagree with this-- is I feel like the broken political system is enabled by the broken justice system. Because the country should have at least one pillar that works. Now it has none. I think during Andersol's time in the panache, I think the police functioned as a basically non-political body for the only time in the country's history. That completely ended when he left. And they became again, a kind of political tool. AUDIENCE: But you don't think the lack of physical infrastructure, like not having great jail facilities, that doesn't really allow the justice system to function properly, or-- MICHAEL DEIBERT: They have a lovely jail in Croix-des-Bouquet that Clifford Brandt is sitting in right now, that you could go visit. AUDIENCE: But he was able to escape, how lovely is it? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah they got him though, eventually. The Dominican army turned him back over to the police. But, yeah, I mean that is-- I mean hopefully, I would say that the country would reach a point where its solution wouldn't be imprisoning vast numbers of its citizens. Because, as you know again, the people who are in jail, most of them have never seen a judge, and won't. And so you have a guy who was arrested for, like, stealing a chicken, housed in the same cell as somebody with multiple homicides, who was a hit man for some sort of gang. And they're all in the mix together. And so again, I think that the justice system would be the pillar that I personally would focus on, along with the rural economy. To try and change the situation a bit. Because the fact that the capital is constantly flooded with wave after wave of young men, especially-- because in any society, when you get lots of idle young men with nothing to do together, that's kind of a recipe for trouble. Not just in Haiti. And you know, they arrive in Port-au-Prince and they have no hope of any sort of paying wage. And of course, some politician is always there to say, hey, I'll give you 50 gourds today if you burn tires at the intersection of [INAUDIBLE] and whatever. And it's a political tool that most all the politicians use. It's not just one party. I would say back 15 years ago, 16 years ago, Lavalas kind of refined it to an art. But now it's completely pervasive with every political party. I mean it's just something that they all do. Thanks. SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: Thank you. So we have 10 minutes left. So what we're going to do is that I saw two people who were waiting to ask questions. We're going to take the two last questions together. And then Michael will answer the two last questions together. MICHAEL DEIBERT: OK SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: OK? AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you. I haven't heard anything about the function of the spiritual houses of Haiti, and what power they can wield over the youth and over the families. And also, what is the relationship of Haiti to the Dominican Republic? MICHAEL DEIBERT: You want me to answer that in the last 10 minutes? AUDIENCE: OK. So my question is-- I work in academic evaluations where we deal with foreign credentials, basically, from all over the world. I don't work specifically with Haiti, but I've noticed, that out of all the Caribbean nations, they seem to have the stronger-- I mean, we are evaluating it at an equal to the United States level, high school. So if you have a high school degree from Haiti or New York, that would be equivalent. Whereas the rest of the Caribbean countries do not. They're evaluating them at lower grades. Of course these evaluation systems are private. I don't know what the basis is. But can you just give me an idea of what public education is like? What percentage of the population is being educated, and if there is really a high quality of education compared to the rest of the Caribbean or the world? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah. So I'll start with that question and then work my way back to the question about Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the spiritual houses. Haiti, in the public education system, which is mostly actually a private education system. It's not really a public education system as we understand it. Turns out lots of people who go on to advanced degrees. There's lots of, like, sociologists and lawyers and philosophers, and things like that, which are not perhaps the most practical professions in Haiti. I would say psychoanalyst would probably be good if you're planning on analyzing the country's political situation. But, I mean, yeah, there is-- and I don't think people should confuse the idea of, maybe, a lack of what we would consider formal education here, with a lack of education. When I would go to neighborhoods like Cité Soleil and Grande Ravine and things like that, you'll meet people there who have never been outside of Haiti who can speak to you in idiomatic English, as if they grew up in Queens, or something like that. You'll see some kid working through a version of Machiavelli's The Prince in French. So there's certainly a great hunger there, I find, of people to learn and to be educated. Which is, I think also, maybe tied up with this incredible urge of beautification that you see. There are murals everywhere. The public camionets are-- the tap taps-- are decorated in these beautiful murals and things. And if you see the Haitians getting out of the tap taps in a street that's covered in mud and dirt, they're completely immaculate. I mean there's this kind of inner dignity in this inner pride in-- I might be living in these conditions, but this isn't the totality of who I am. And I think this the impulse towards education is somewhat tied up with that. The other question about the spiritual houses. I mean, I'm not sure if you were talking about voodoo or Christian, vaguely, various Christian denominations or-- AUDIENCE: What other spiritual leaders are there? MICHAEL DEIBERT: Yeah, I mean there's-- voodoo is something that I think is a really interesting and very poignant commentary on Haiti. That there is this connection that Haiti has been able to maintain, after all these years with Africa. I mean there were UN peacekeepers who were from Benin who went to this voodoo festival called Souvenance, and they were like weeping, because it was as if this these ceremonies had been taken from Benin and transplanted directly to Haiti. And I think voodoo gets a real bad rap. You know, people think it's all hocus pocus. And it's just a religion. I mean it's no stranger than any other religion. All religions are pretty strange and believe very strange things. And require some suspension of disbelief. But I would say voodoo has better music than most. And it's a real-- like any other religion, like Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Islam, or Buddhism, or Hinduism, it is what people make it. So you can have great voodoo priests who are pillars of the community, and really bad ones, too. But I think, yeah, certainly it plays an important role in people's lives. In terms of Haiti's relationship to the Dominican Republic, that's pretty much a whole other book. I have one section in this book that deals with it. But the DR is ruled, at the moment, and has been for the last decade plus, by a political current that exists on anti-Haitianism and anti-- and exists on an incredibly schizophrenic approach to the own Dominican color issue. Peña Goméz, who is a famous leader of the party opposing the current party in power, was of Haitian descent. And when he was running against Lionel Fernández, there was an incredible campaign of calumny, saying that because of his color, he wasn't really Dominican. And again, a bit like what Noelle was saying earlier, the Dominicans-- some of them, not all of them, because I don't think all Dominicans walk around informed by anti-Haitian racism. I think this is something exploited by the politicians in the Dominican Republic. But a lot of Dominicans view themselves as white, and then when they come to a place like the United States are amazed that they are not viewed the way they envision themselves. Haiti depends-- sorry, the Dominican Republic-- its economy is totally tied in to having disempowered Haitian labor, and not just in the agricultural sector, which people know, but also in the construction sector and the tourism sector. If you go seeing a construction site in the Dominican Republic, way more than half of the people there will be Haitian. But at the same time, it also falls on the Haitian politicians for creating a situation that's so unbearable, that their countrymen will go to a place like the Dominican Republic and deal with all the problems and all the racism there, just because there's this slender chance that they might have a life. Where in Haiti they feel like they can't have a life. But I don't envision, unfortunately, relations getting much better between Haiti and the DR with the current party in power in Santo Domingo. So I wish I could end on a more hopeful note. But, there you have it. SEVERINE AUTESSERRE: So I'm going to end on a hopeful note. Thank you so much, Michael, for all this wonderful event. And thanks to all of you for all of your questions.

Channel: Columbia SIPA

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Length: 98min 35sec (5915 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2016