Abroad

Port-au-Prince The Meaning of Poverty

Pope John Paul IPs swing through Central America and the Caribbean Basin, beginning this week, will take him to an episcopal conference in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, where he will be obliged to confront what must be the poorest and most consistently miserable country in the Western world. Haiti has the proud history of having become the first black independent nation when its slave heroes threw off the domination of the French colonial regime almost two hundred years ago. Yet ever since, the Haitians have been sinking downward on the political and economic scale. In recent years they have been at the political mercy of the ferocious Duvalier dynasty—first the bloodthirsty Papa Doc, who became “president for life” in 1964, and now his son, Bébé Doc—which has exploited the country’s traditional political corruption with unprincipled violence. No other country receives so much foreign aid and is yet so poor. Six Western countries, the U.S. most heavily, contribute to keep the Haitian economy alive. So do six multinational lending agencies and almost 150 private organizations, many of them religious. This money keeps the crops irrigated, the roads paved, the streetlights burning, the schools and hospitals open, and a whole range of “salvation” agricultural experiments functioning in an overpopulated country of six million inhabitants on the western third of the island of Hispaniola. As an example of its problems, Haiti must replace its entire pig population this year because of an infestation of swine fever, and it has hardly a dozen veterinarians in the whole country. The United States, whose Marine Corps occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, has taken first responsibility, but despite enormous private and public investment and fifty years of work by dedicated battalions of civil servants, engineers, doctors, and bankers, the vast majority of Haitians still live below the absolute poverty line of $135 per capita per year.

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Port-au-Prince The Meaning of Poverty

Pope John Paul IPs swing through Central America and the Caribbean Basin, beginning this week, will take him to an episcopal conference in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, where he will be obliged to confront what must be the poorest and most consistently miserable country in the Western world. Haiti has the proud history of having become the first black independent nation when its slave heroes threw off the domination of the French colonial regime almost two hundred years ago. Yet ever since, the Haitians have been sinking downward on the political and economic scale. In recent years they have been at the political mercy of the ferocious Duvalier dynasty—first the bloodthirsty Papa Doc, who became “president for life” in 1964, and now his son, Bébé Doc—which has exploited the country’s traditional political corruption with unprincipled violence. No other country receives so much foreign aid and is yet so poor. Six Western countries, the U.S. most heavily, contribute to keep the Haitian economy alive. So do six multinational lending agencies and almost 150 private organizations, many of them religious. This money keeps the crops irrigated, the roads paved, the streetlights burning, the schools and hospitals open, and a whole range of “salvation” agricultural experiments functioning in an overpopulated country of six million inhabitants on the western third of the island of Hispaniola. As an example of its problems, Haiti must replace its entire pig population this year because of an infestation of swine fever, and it has hardly a dozen veterinarians in the whole country. The United States, whose Marine Corps occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, has taken first responsibility, but despite enormous private and public investment and fifty years of work by dedicated battalions of civil servants, engineers, doctors, and bankers, the vast majority of Haitians still live below the absolute poverty line of $135 per capita per year.