Jean Casimir publishes La culture de l'opprime

Jean Casimir published La culture de l'opprime in 1982. The book has not received the recognition it deserves. Casimir's account of Haiti and the Caribbean is strikingly close to the positions worked out by the group of Latin American scholars who later gathered under the heading of modernity and coloniality, and the convergence is no accident, since his intellectual formation ran parallel to that of Anibal Quijano and Enrique Dussel. Casimir's subject is the culture built by people held at the bottom of a colonial order, treated as something they made rather than something done to them. Haiti supplies him with the longest available case, a population that took the country by force in 1804 and then spent the nineteenth century constructing a rural society the state never controlled. Work of this kind from Port-au-Prince tends to be read as local material rather than as theory.

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

In July 1981 the government signed a protocol with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture providing for the killing of every pig in Haiti within two years, so that African swine fever should not reach the North American mainland. Peasants were to be compensated and foreign animals brought in afterwards. What the countryside saw was the forced sale, often at distress prices, of the one asset a family could turn into cash in a bad month. Some hid their animals. Others killed them as offerings to the lwa rather than hand them to the blan, and such sacrifices were reported from every part of the country. Within a year registration at rural schools had dropped by thirty percent. On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be stationed permanently off Haiti, with other vessels rotating through, to stop boats carrying Haitians toward Florida. The United Nations questioned whether it was legal. Haitian officials spent October in Washington settling their price, and in November American aid was increased.

UNESCO placed Haiti's National History Park on the World Heritage list in 1982. The park is the Citadelle Laferriere, the ruins of the palace at Sans-Souci and the buildings at Ramiers, all of them in the mountains above Cap-Haitien, all built in the decade after independence on the orders of Henry Christophe. The Citadelle is the largest fortress in the Americas and was raised against a French return that never came. Sans-Souci was designed to stand comparison with a European court. Both were put up by people who had been enslaved twenty years earlier and who were proving, at their own cost, what a free black state could build in stone. It remains the only World Heritage Site in the country. The listing came in a year when Haiti was governed by a man whose accomplishments were the enrichment of his family and the impoverishment of everyone else, which is the sort of coincidence a timeline should keep rather than tidy away.