Why is Haiti so poor and very unstable?

For context, this is a question I answered on Quora

Before we can understand why Haiti is retarded we also have to understand how the country was retarded by foreign meddling from the ‘international community’ because their lack of development problem was not created in a vacuum apart from the burdens imposed on the country by Western powers. If you repeatedly drop a child on its head as baby and feed it a high sugar high trans-fat diet and give it lead contaminated water to drink it will likely grow up to be a retarded adult. It’s not much different when you impose an insurmountable debt on a country in its infancy and prevent it from engaging in foreign trade with others.

BTW retard and it’s past participle are not slurs; they are accurate descriptions of what occurs/occurred. Try that with any other actual slur.

re-tard-ed: to delay or impede the development or progress of : to slow up especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment

After independence, Haiti was originally forced to pay France 150 million francs for the loss of the plantations and free labor. This was negotiated down to 100 million francs in 1838 the early 19th century equivalent to $21,685,135,571.48 in inflation adjusted dollars which is still greater than Haiti’s GDP 200 years later. Paying the debt, which took over a century to pay off, was the only means to gain French and western recognition of sovereignty and the ability to engage in foreign trade as well as the only way to avoid being bombarded by the French navy at the time.

In 1914 the Wilson admin sent marines to seize $500,000 in gold reserves from the Haitian treasury and transported it to New York. 110 years later that is the inflation adjusted equivalent of > $15 million. In 1915 the Wilson Admin invaded Haiti and imposed U.S. marshal law for nearly 20 years at the behest of Citibank, which was then known as National City Bank of New York, installing various puppet regimes, killing several thousand civilians, imposing a two year system of forced labor called the corvee to build highways for U.S. military transport and press censorship on the populace. The corvee system by itself resulted in 5,500 deaths.

Source:

As Wikileaks exposed in exhumed diplomatic cables between the U.S. and Haiti, U.S.G. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier until 1963 and Baby Doc Duvalier from 1971 until his exile in 1986 in military aid that included both weapons and training that were ultimately used against the Haitian populace.

After the World bank, IMF and USAID encouraged Haiti to make sweeping economic reforms in the 1980s, as a condition of lending agreements and aid, including lowering tariffs on imported food and eliminating import quotas the U.S. began dumping heavily subsidized surplus food in Haitian markets at below market prices putting Haitian farmers out of business and making the country dependent on foreign imports and food aid. For instance, after Haiti eliminated import quotas on rice and lowered the tariff from 50% to 3% the U.S. began flooding the country with U.S. subsidized rice from the port of Miami. Today 80% of Haiti’s rice is imported. In 2016, USDA dumped 500 metric tons of peanuts in the country for free, putting 150,000 Haitian peanut farmers in jeopardy as they cannot give away their crops for free.

Foundation for Economic Education: How U.S. Crop Dumping Keeps Haiti Poor and Dependent

Columbia Law: Starved for Justice

Under the Bush Admin, CIA backed 2004 Coup against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. This was confirmed by the former French ambassador to Haiti: NYT: Demanding Reparations and Ending Up in Exile

The Obama admin added to the dogpile not only by continuing agricultural dumping masquerading as humanitarian aid but also, as I noted 8 years ago in Haiti Open for Plunder, rewarding the vast majority of contracts to rebuild the island to American contractors and funding an industrial park for foreign factory owners built on valuable farmland seized from several hundred native farmers. A few U.S. and Canadian mining companies got cheap mining concessions amounting to 15% of Haiti’s territory, after the World bank and Haitian elites conspired to unilateral change the country’s mining regulations, including a North Carolina firm who had Hillary Clinton’s brother on the board of directors.

While it’s plausible that Haiti could have turned out the same as Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados or any other majority black Caribbean tourist trap without foreign meddling stunting its development it could have also turned out the same way it currently exists. We’ll never know unless we could view an alternative timeline in a parallel world.