What form of government would best serve the interests of the Haitian people remains a conundrum, though one seldom acknowledged. Aristide’s original populist program, driven by liberation theology on the one hand and bedrock Haitian communal values on the other, was never given a fair chance to succeed. The 18th-century model of democracy we use in the United States has begun to falter even at home; imposing a simulacrum of that on Haitian society remains intractably difficult. In the 200 years since their revolution, most Haitians have experienced little from any government but oppression. No great surprise, then, if what we call democratization inspires only muted enthusiasm.Haiti’s default sociopolitical solution is a feudalism that, though many of its origins are African, would be perfectly recognizable to the lords and ladies of King Arthur’s court. My grasp of this system improved when, in the late 1990s, I realized I was enacting it myself on a very small scale. I was operating a miniature feudal state, quartered first in my rented vehicle, later on that acre of ground near Bwa Kayiman. My intentions didn’t matter; the thing naturally, inevitably, assumed this form.Someone in charge of a feudal state must feed his retainers. They deserve it, they expect it, and without it they grow disloyal. The process can be disarmingly simple: it’s traditional, for example, for drug lords in the Cap-Haïtien area to hand out the equivalent of $20 to each of a hundred or so people in their neighborhoods every Saturday night. The necessity of such procedures does something to explain the chronic corruption of Haitian government....Poisoned at the instigation of U.S. evangelicals bent on extirpating Vodou, the mapou tree of Bwa Kayiman was burned for charcoal after it died. In the face of such desperation, my own resources were utterly inadequate and I couldn’t muster other resources quickly enough. In the end, my house was burned, which as an absentee blan proprietor at Bwa Kayiman, I had always had every right to expect....During the five-year interim between his two presidencies, René Préval had completely regenerated the area surrounding his hometown of Marmelade, a village so desolate in the late 1990s that when my mud-spattered vehicle lurched onto the square, most of the population turned out to look at it. Using $5 million from Taiwan—which came without the cat’s cradle of strings normally attached to international aid to Haiti—Préval had paved the roads, refurbished the town center, restored a colonial plantation to resume production (with cooperative labor) of top-quality coffee for the export market, started a bamboo plantation and furniture factory, installed an Internet café, staffed a clinic with Cuban doctors, and started a music school attracting students from all over the country. Naysayers dismissed this success as the exploitation of a personal fief (it was true that exuberant townspeople liked to salute Préval as “Excellence!” whenever he appeared among them), but I saw it as a shining example of what Haitians could do for themselves, given sufficient resources and a free hand to deploy them. With such a high level of achievement, an element of patronage seemed forgivable; one could imagine the restoration of the whole country in this manner, a bit at a time.
For a little more than a decade, beginning in 1995, I had made the trip frequently, and once there I traveled far and wide, often with another blan (non-Haitian) from Europe or the United States and a Haitian companion-guide. I would rent a four-by-four truck and drive all over the northern part of the country, with the object of seeing firsthand...
