Haiti Today

After the United States, Haiti is the earliest “decolonized” nation in the Americas. Unfortunately it benefited less from colonialism than any other country of the Hemisphere. To understand Haiti today we must recall that its dominant cultural pattern is neither Spanish nor British but French; and that at the same time it is the most “African” nation outside Africa. Haiti lives in proverbial enmity with its only neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Whereas the vast majority of Haitians are Negroes and only a small minority is of mixed blood, Santo Domingo has a white upper crust, a mulatto middle layer, and a Negro substratum—all of them with a Spanish background.

Haiti’s mulatto top layer is by and large highly cultured, French educated, internationally connected and often intermarried with whites. The Negro masses also have some white blood; in most cases this is readily observed. Yet they have come to dislike the mulattoes who have been more successful than they, and it is consequently easy to mobilize these masses, totalitarian fashion, into a “dynamically democratic” movement based on envy and jealousy of the mulatto upper crust.

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Francis J. Cook

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Haiti

After the United States, Haiti is the earliest “decolonized” nation in the Americas. Unfortunately it benefited less from colonialism than any other country of the Hemisphere. To understand Haiti today we must recall that its dominant cultural pattern is neither Spanish nor British but French; and that at the same time it is the most “African” nation outside Africa. Haiti lives in proverbial enmity with its only neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Whereas the vast majority of Haitians are Negroes and only a small minority is of mixed blood, Santo Domingo has a white upper crust, a mulatto middle layer, and a Negro substratum—all of them with a Spanish background.

Haiti’s mulatto top layer is by and large highly cultured, French educated, internationally connected and often intermarried with whites. The Negro masses also have some white blood; in most cases this is readily observed. Yet they have come to dislike the mulattoes who have been more successful than they, and it is consequently easy to mobilize these masses, totalitarian fashion, into a “dynamically democratic” movement based on envy and jealousy of the mulatto upper crust.