Haiti Archives - Not Even Past

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor to the southeast and sought to emulate its success. After the revolution in Haiti, Cuba was able to take advantage of the implosion of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry. Sugar production machinery and human expertise vanished from Saint-Domingue and reappeared in Cuba. Within twenty years of the first Haitian slave revolt, Cuba had surged ahead to become the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean. Necessary to that, of course, was human capital in the form of enslaved Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, some of whom may have been captives from Haiti. Between 1791 and 1821, slaves were imported into Cuba at a rate four times greater than in the previous thirty-year period. As a result, Cuban elites were forced to confront the growing probability, and then actual occurrence, of slave revolts.

Ferrer shapes her narrative around the “mirror,” or reversal, of historical processes: the collapse of one colony’s sugar economy and the rapid growth of another’s; the liberation gained by slaves on one island and the expansion of slavery and entrenchment of enslavement structures on the other; revolution and independence in one place and colonialist counterrevolution in the other; fears of re-enslavement on the part of former slaves and fears of revolt on the part of the elites. She argues that for Cuba, the Haitian Revolution in 1791 served as a temporal “hinge” between the “first and second slaveries.” The second slavery distinguished itself from the first in its larger scale and in its existence alongside a growing “specter” of abolitionist political movements and the reality of enslaved people successfully claiming and obtaining their own freedom.

Nineteenth-Century Photograph of Enslaved People Drying Bagasse in Cuba via University of Miami Digital Collections

The first half of Freedom’s Mirror takes the reader up to Haitian independence and victory over Napoleon’s forces in 1804. These chapters trace the evolution of Cuba’s “sugar revolution,” Cuban attempts to deter the import of negros franceses – Saint-Domingue slaves who might foment rebellion — and a short-lived alliance between the Spanish army based in the city of Santo Domingo (including soldiers from Cuba) and the Haitian rebels. The second half of the book showcases the conflicts resulting from the rise of coffee plantations in lands occupied by communities of runaway slaves, the 1808 turmoil in Cuba caused by Napoleon’s installation of his brother on the Spanish throne, featuring discussions of independence and slavery abolition, and the 1812 Aponte Rebellion.

Map of Haiti via Digital Public Library of America

Freedom’s Mirror, however, is not just a story about the causal relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba’s transformation, and Ferrer does not confine her investigation to economic or political factors. What interests Ferrer are the “quotidian links – material and symbolic – between the radical antislavery movement that emerged in Saint-Domingue at the same time that slavery was expanding in colonial Cuba” (11). In particular, she tracks the circulation of knowledge, rumor, conversation, religious symbolism, anxieties and hopes that mapped onto infrastructures of commerce, slave-trading, government activity, and military action.

Toussaint L’Ouverture via New York Public Library

In 1801, for example, Toussaint Louverture’s forces occupied Santo Domingo and issued public proclamations. These were carried by ship crews and disseminated in Cuba, as were first-hand accounts of Spanish refugees from that occupation who had fled to Cuba. This, according to Ferrer, is the mechanism by which Cubans came to know of the events of the rebellion and the “spectacular ascent” of Toussaint Louverture (153). Eleven years later, images of the coronation of the Haitian King Christophe appeared in the prison holding suspects from Aponte’s revolutionary movement in Cuba. In the tradition of Lynn Hunt’s treatment of the “invention” of human rights, Ferrer uses her sources—city council minutes, port registers, trading licenses, letters, confessions of revolutionaries on the eve of their executions, and printed images of Haitian leaders—to document that this circulation of information and rumor transformed the interior experiences and decision-making of historical actors and ordinary people in both Cuba and Haiti.

Freedom’s Mirror situates Cuba in a regional history, primarily the interactions between Cuba and Haiti. Ferrer is fundamentally attuned to the circulation of knowledge, symbolism, and ideas. In bringing those into the light, she shows us that economic, political, and military realities never cease to shape, and be shaped by, subjective perceptions and individual actions.

You might also like:

Cuba’s Revolutionary World
Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)
Che Guevara’s Last Interview
Black is Beautiful – And Profitable
Making History: Takkara Brunson

Other Articles by Isabelle Headrick:
Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)
Building a Jewish School in Iran

by Blake Scott

In 1983, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia announced that there were four major risk groups for AIDS in the United States – homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin-users, and Haitians. The report acknowledged that each of the four groups – widely known as the “Four-H Club” – contained many individuals who were not at risk for AIDS. In the early years of the epidemic, however, those exceptions meant little to the public. AIDS was a new, mysterious disease and these people were its supposed carriers. The warning, in the end, may have caused more harm than good, intensifying paranoia and discrimination.

While all four groups experienced the stigma of accusation, there was something particularly arbitrary about the ‘Haitian’ risk pool. It was the only risk group based on nationality rather than specific behavioral factors. Why were all the citizens of Haiti included in the CDC warning? In his well-crafted book, Paul Farmer takes “a geographically broad and historically deep” approach to explain the roots of the AIDS accusation afflicting the Haitian community.

Leading up to the official warning, the media and a handful of prominent scientists in the U.S. had erroneously concluded that Haiti was the original source of AIDS in the Americas. As Farmer convincingly argues, though, the Haitian origin theory represented a “systematic misreading” of both epidemiology and history. The false accusations that swirled around the Haitian community, he explains, drew on a long history of racism and ethnocentrism.

Over the course of the 1980s, Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist at Harvard University, carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti, while at the same time, offering medical services to rural communities. In his writings, Farmer combines medical and anthropological knowledge to explain how both international and local forces shaped disparate responses to the epidemic.

U.S. troops marching during the occupation of Haiti, 1915, via Wikimedia Commons.

The book is made up of highly readable essays that allow the reader to approach the story from several angles – from Haitian community dynamics to larger medical debates to transnational economic and political issues. In one essay, for example, Farmer narrates the local history of the village of Do Kay to illuminate how poverty and cultural beliefs, such as sorcery, helped to direct responses to the disease. In another section, he explores the intersections between epidemiology and history to explain how HIV most likely arrived to Haiti via North American tourists. The arrival of AIDS, he concludes, was linked to Haiti’s historical and continually evolving role in a regional economy dominated by the United States.

Haiti after the earthquake. Photograph by Eva Hershaw.

Farmer offers a compelling argument for why medical professionals need to better understand the histories and cultural practices of the people they hope to help, at home and abroad. Haitian counter-theories, which vehemently blamed North American imperialism for the arrival of AIDS, originally baffled U.S. medical doctors and scientists. A greater awareness of the history of U.S.-Haitian relations would have led to a more sympathetic and likely, a more effective medical response. In short, anyone interested in learning how history and culture affect societal responses to disease will find Dr. Farmer’s book well worth their time.

For those interested in learning more:

The Agronomist. In this documentary, award-winning director Jonathan Demme profiles the life of Haitian journalist and radio pioneer Jean Dominique. Through the life of Dominique and his family, The Agronomist offers a compelling portrait of Haiti in the second half century of the twentieth-century.

Paul Farmer’s Haiti After the Earthquake. Dr. Farmer offers an on-the-ground account of the most recent earthquake in Haiti, discussing its aftermath and recovery projects, past, present, and future.

Mary A. Renda’s Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Professor Renda explores the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the 1915 intervention and its aftermath. She shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism.

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Professor Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators to explain how the Haitian Revolution became a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)

AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer (1992)

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