Michael Imhotep is a historian, researcher, and founder of the African History Network. He teaches a 10-week course connecting the Haitian Revolution to the U.S. Civil War, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Black Power Movement. His breakdown of the New York Times 2022 investigative series cuts straight to why Haiti is poor. And who is responsible.
“Haiti became the first and only nation to pay reparations to its former masters and their descendants for generations.”
1. France Demanded Reparations From the People It Had Enslaved, and Haiti Paid
In 1825, a French warship sailed into Port-au-Prince harbor. It was bristling with cannons. The message from King Charles X was simple: pay France 150 million francs, or face war again. Haiti had already beaten Napoleon’s forces. The Haitian Revolution ran from 1791 to 1803. Haiti declared independence on January 1, 1804. It became the world’s first free Black republic. None of that mattered to France. France wanted compensation for its slaveholders’ “lost property.” In other words, France wanted payment for the people who had freed themselves. Haiti had no powerful allies. It was desperate for trade recognition. So it agreed. As a result, Haiti became the only nation in history forced to pay its former colonizers for the crime of winning its own freedom.
2. The “Double Debt” Was Designed to Trap Haiti Forever
Haiti could not pay 150 million francs outright. So France pushed Haiti to borrow from a group of French banks to begin the payments. This created what historians call the double debt. Haiti owed France. It also owed the French banks it borrowed from to pay France. A New York Times team then reviewed thousands of pages of archival documents. They also consulted 15 leading economists. Together, they calculated that Haiti’s tracked payments totaled approximately $560 million in today’s dollars. Even so, Haiti did not fully settle its debt until 1947, more than 140 years after independence. Economist Thomas Piketty stated it plainly: “Neo-colonialism through debt. This drain has totally disrupted the process of state building.”
3. The Real Cost Isn’t $560 Million. It’s Up to $115 Billion in Lost Growth.
Every franc France took was a franc Haiti could not spend on its own people. That meant no investment in roads, schools, hospitals, or factories. Those are the building blocks of a functioning nation. Because of this drain, Haiti fell further behind with every payment. The New York Times consulted 15 of the world’s leading economists on the full cost. Their conclusion: the payments cost Haiti between $21 billion and $115 billion in lost economic growth. That is as much as eight times the size of Haiti’s entire economy in 2020. In fact, one French historian called it “meta slavery,” a system that kept Haiti economically captive long after independence.
4. When Haiti’s President Demanded the Money Back, France and the U.S. Removed Him
In April 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stood before a crowd of farmers, workers, and students. Aristide was Haiti’s first democratically elected president. He demanded France repay Haiti $21,685,135,571.48. That was the precise amount his government calculated France owed. France’s ambassador called the demand “an explosive.” He said France had to “diffuse it” immediately. Within a year, France and the United States organized a coup. They removed Aristide from power in February 2004. France’s former ambassador to Haiti, Thierry Burkard, later admitted the truth. The ouster was “probably a bit about his call for reparations from France, too.” He added: “It made our job easier to dismiss the reparations claims without Mr. Aristide in office.”
5. The U.S. Didn’t Just Watch. It Treated Haiti Like a Cash Register.
In the summer of 1915, U.S. Marines invaded Haiti. The official explanation was that Haiti was “too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices.” However, the real motives surfaced quickly. Before the invasion formally began, a small team of Marines walked into Haiti’s National Bank. They carried out $500,000 in gold. Within days, it was sitting in a Wall Street vault. For a decade after that, a quarter of Haiti’s total revenue went directly to National City Bank, the predecessor to Citigroup, and its affiliates. General Smedley Butler led U.S. forces in Haiti. He later described himself as “a racketeer for capitalism.” His words: “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues.”