Rotberg’s analysis of contemporary Haiti is a masterly accomplishment. From the opening chapter on “the matrix of Haitian politics,” one comes gradually to perceive the anomalies of the beautiful and tragic land which in 1790 was the world’s richest colony but is now among the poorest and most troubled of countries. Rotberg traces the path by which Haiti lurched from one dictatorship to another, until absolutism became its characteristic mode of government and turbulence its political lot, with the tyrannous rule of “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-1971) merely the culmination of “the politics of squalor.”
The implicit purpose of this Twentieth Century Fund study is to examine the possibility of improving the quality of life for Haitians. Rotberg sets forth the realities. The cardinal political fact is authoritarian rule by a dictator and his favorites; the social reality is dominance by a small elite group, absence of a middle class, and the existence of four million peasants who still use hoes instead of plows. Since the country lacks every qualification essential for democracy, there is no likelihood of any movement toward representative government. These realities, therefore, circumscribe the possibilities for improvement.
Under recent rulers a new, chiefly black, elite has partially superseded the traditional mulatto elite; new economic strategy must consequently benefit the new dominant class. Expansion of peasant crops would offer little to them, since foods consumed in rural areas are difficult to tax. Governmental revenues, which provide most of the income for the elite, would be increased most readily by encouragement of foreign private investment in mines and plantations producing for export. Rotberg outlines ways in which this strategy might be effected.
When he did his research, Duvalier was still “président à vie;” some of the most revealing pages are devoted to the rise of this dictator, and to the ruthlessly astute manner in which he consolidated his power. For years Duvalier sat “like a solitary spider in the middle of a finely spun web, each filament transmitting authority outward and intelligence inward.” Certain recurrent words define Duvaliers Haiti: squalor, stagnation, plunder, predation, rapacity, brutality.
That Duvalier is now dead and that his gross 20-year-old son has become Président à vie detracts little from the pertinence of the book. The careful economic analysis (part of it done in collaboration with Christopher K. Clague), the 34 tables and three appendices, and the demographic materials, will be relevant for many years, especially if any of Rotberg’s ten suggestions for effecting “change from without” (by the UN, the OAS, and the USA) should be undertaken. Politically, Rotberg sees Haiti doomed for the forseeable future to dictatorship, if of a kind “hopefully less bestial in its methods” than Duvalier’s.
Rotberg’s book is well written and handsomely made. Some of the comparisons of Haiti with 18th-century Sicily and with the new states of Africa are revealing. Efforts to psychoanalyze Duvalier, and even the whole elite and peasant classes, are less successful. Rotberg is certainly no meliorist. He records almost casually the injustices of the caste system; and as for the teeming, disease-ridden peasantry, he sees little practical hope of altering their ingrained suspicion of change or their fatalistic acceptance of rule from above.
