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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin from the WNYC and Gotham is newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer who's got the day off, we hope he gets some better weather soon. Coming up on the show today we'll be talking about the implications of all these flash storms and the flooding. Did you see the flooding around the city over the weekend? Well, all that water has to go somewhere and has already affected last weekend's New York City triathlon. Plus, we'll be talking to New York City Council Member for the 39th district in Brooklyn Brad Lander. He's the apparent winner of the city comptrollers Democratic primary.

Then later in the show, we'll get some helpful cooking tips that don't require heat from Vaughn Breeland but to start, an update on the ongoing situation in Haiti after the assassination of their president last week. Last Wednesday, Brian spoke to Garry Pierre-Pierre of the Haitian Times about the breaking news. It's been almost a week since then, and over 20 people have been arrested for the murder. We'll hear more about that.

The Biden administration has also responded to a request for reinforcements, and has sent a team of FBI and Homeland Security officials to Haiti but refused to send requested military assistance for now. Haiti's troubled history goes deep from colonialism to independence, then years of occupation and crushing debt, plus suffering more than two decades of brutal dictatorship in just the last 200 years. Then after a powerful earthquake devastated the country in 2010, an influx of foreign aid and peacekeeping forces appeared to only worsen the country's woes and instability.

Joining us now to look at Haiti's history and how it can inform what's happening now is Marlene Daut professor of African Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Caribbean US African American and French colonial literary and historical studies. Also from Haiti is Catherine Porter, Toronto bureau chief for the New York Times and author of A Girl Named Lovely about the experience in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Thank you for joining us, Professor Daut and Catherine. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Daut: Thank you for having.

Catherine Porter: Hi nice to be here. Nice to be talking to you too Marlene.

Professor Daut: Nice to see you too or see you virtually rather.

[chuckles]

Brigid Bergin: Catherine, I'll start with you. For listeners who are catching up on this story, can you tell us about what happened last week starting with the assassination early Wednesday morning?

Catherine Porter: Well, early Wednesday morning, around 1:00 AM neighbors of the president who live in a pretty plush suburb of Port-au-Prince awoke to gunfire and some of them awoke to the sound of a loudspeaker, someone saying that it was a DEA and not to shoot and to stay in their homes. They heard explosions, and soon after they learned that the President had been assassinated. There's not much known about what happened. Later on that morning, the Justice of the Peace came in and found the president in his bedroom, covered in blood, filled with at least 12 bullet holes, it looked like his place had been pillaged. They were looking for something he said. The hunt was quickly on for what seems to be or at least what the government says is a group of mostly Colombian, former military men or some acting that we're here.

There's lots that we still don't know about the story. The government says that these are the culprits. They are the ones that have been found, and they were swiftly found not just by police, but also by the population in small carte Populaire, the small, poor areas of the city that cling to the mountainsides. People were basically finding these guys and bringing them out. We're at a point now that there still are some at large, but we don't really know what this was about and why these Colombians were here, were they really the ones behind the attack? Why would these guys not have an exit plan? They seem to be just running down the street about a kilometer or a mile or so from the president's house and did not make it far. There's just lots of questions we don't know the answers to.

Brigid Bergin: Catherine, some of the reports allege that the President was tortured before being assassinated. What do we know about that, and what does that tell us about the motivation here?

Catherine Porter: Well, we don't know that to be true. It's hard here, you have to realize that there's been very little information coming out from the police at this point, during the investigation. They're hosting news conferences in which the chief of police speaks for only maybe seven or eight minutes. The information is coming out very slowly and so in the void, which Marlene will tell you, I'm sure is there's something called [unintelligible 00:05:42] the rumor mill, and we don't know, there were photos of the president body at the morgue circulated on WhatsApp a couple of days ago all over, as well as x-rays purported to be of his body.

We don't know for sure that the x-rays are real. We couldn't get confirmation from anyone in the government that they are real. They do show a broken bone, but it could be from a bullet wound. We have talked to forensic experts who say that he didn't show signs of torture, but we just don't know. We're at the beginning here. The President certainly had enemies. He'd made some enemies among some of the very wealthy powerful people here. There had been said to be linked with gangs. There's huge civil protests against him, who knows who's behind this and why they would torture him if they did, but we really don't have that evidence yet. We have to wait.

Brigid Bergin: Catherine, just one other question about the what happened last week, the first lady of Haiti was also injured in that attack. Has there been any update to her condition?

Catherine Porter: The interim Prime Minister said the other day that she was stable. She's in a hospital in Miami. His government has said that there was a Twitter voicemail put out on her account, where she was saying that she was in hospital and saying that the assassination had happened because they wanted to silence the President's voice and mission. No one is entirely sure if it was her, but the government said that was her. If that's the case, she's spoken once we understand she's going to speak out again. According to the Prime Minister, the threat to her death is no longer a threat. She's stable.

Brigid Bergin: Okay. Listeners, we want to hear from you. Are you from Haiti or of Haitian descent? What is your reaction to the news of the President's assassination? Where do you think Haiti goes from here? Call us at 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Also, what are you hearing from friends and family in Haiti? Help us report the story. Again, the number is 646-435-7280. Professor Daut, Haiti's history is interesting because the first ruler of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution against French colonial rule was also assassinated in the early 19th century. What are the ripple effects for a country when the person who led them to freedom is murdered?

Professor Daut: Haiti, gained its independence from France on January 1st, 1804. Very quickly, Dessalines became the first Governor-General of the state of Haiti. He soon thereafter named himself and was nominated as Emperor, so by the fall, he had been crowned emperor of Haiti, and they had set up an empire even though the limits were the island itself. They did have designs to reunify the eastern side of the island that is now the Dominican Republic. Actually, that conflict between the western part of the island and the eastern part of the island existed in Dessalines' era, and is one contributing factor to the reason for which he was assassinated.

The interesting thing about the parallel with this situation is that so Dessalines was assassinated on October 17th, 1806 and we still don't really know, we know who did it, who was there at Pont Rouge on that day just outside of Port-au-Prince, but we don't know exactly who plotted and planned it. Two of Dessalines rivals one, Alexandre Pétion, and another, Henri Christophe who was actually the head of his army, were quickly accused, they accused one another. This led to a huge fracturing and split of the island into then three parts of the eastern side, where France and then Spain was occupying and then Henri Christophe became ruler over the north, and Alexandre Pétion set up a republic in the south. That was in 1806, 1807, and that's when Haiti had a first Black Republic. That's the first time there's a Republic at Haiti.

Brigid Bergin: Then in the aftermath of that, years later in 1825, the French demanded that this newly independent country pay what I understand to be the equivalent of $21 billion to the French government and French slaveholders. How long did it take for Haiti to pay that bill? What's the legacy of such debt for such a long time?

Professor Daut: That debt was "agreed to" by a later Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who not only reunified the north and south, but also the eastern side of the island. At that time, Haiti was the entire island of Hispaniola, which is the name that Spain had given to the island in the 16th century. Haiti did finish paying off the debt with the interest in 1947. The latest estimates by French economist Thomas Piketty put the amount closer to $28 billion.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Professor Daut: There are some estimates that reach as high as $40 billion, and the reason for that is one part of it was the indemnity for the former "slaveholders" to be compensated for the loss of their plantations and the labor and their proceeds from that. The other part was that Haiti was forced to give France the most favorite nation status, which meant that they traded with Haiti at lower tariffs, and other nations that had been great partners like Great Britain traded at higher tariffs so Haiti ended up losing a lot of money.

This meant that that money wasn't poured into infrastructure and roads and schools, all projects of both Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion. Boyer levied very draconian taxes on the Haitian people. He told them that the taxes were for the price of their freedom. That legacy continued on and on and on. We can only wonder if that money had not been siphoned out of Haiti whether or not we would be in this situation today.

Brigid Bergin: Then flashing forward even more so the US occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934. Professor, why was that, and how did the occupation affect the country at that point?

Professor Daut: This is again another parallel because President Sam who was president of the country in 1915 only for a few months actually, he was wildly unpopular. He was accused of many crimes. The Haitian people sought his resignation, and he fled to a foreign embassy to the French embassy. He was dragged out of the embassy, and he was murdered. Some people call it an assassination. There's a little bit of quibbling about whether or not he was actually still President of Haiti at the time of his death.

This assassination became the pretext for the United States to occupy the country for 19 years, an occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934 that was couched as being for Haiti's own good since there was mayhem according to the US government. What happened during the occupation was what has happened during subsequent occupations. There's been protests against it. There were deaths during the opposition of Charlemagne Péralte in 1919, not only his death but that of 3,000 other Haitians who opposed the opposition or opposed the occupation rather.

We see that even though there is this history of unrest and presidential assassinations or deaths while in office, that the response of the international community to those issues has not necessarily made things better. The occupation is seen as the watershed event in Haitian history because once again, Haitians largely interpreted that as bringing colonialism back, the colonialism that they fought and died for in previous generations.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring one of our callers into this conversation. Jay in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Welcome to WNYC, Jay.

Jay: Hey, good morning, thanks for taking my call.

Brigid Bergin: Tell us, what's your reaction to what's been happening? What's your perspective on this story?

Jay: Haiti has been a mess for a really long time. I'm a Haitian-American. I just wonder why Haiti hasn't done better. I feel like when a western powers want a nation to succeed, it usually does. I think of places like Japan, they were also destroyed, and yet, they were able to rebuild. They're one of the most prosperous countries in the world. I think about a lot of the European countries that were destroyed during war, and all of them, not all of them, but a lot of them have rebuilt, and they're very prosperous countries now. I wonder if there's something else with Haiti that a lot of these western countries just don't want us to succeed. I know you spoke about the debt that was placed on the country by France. Excuse me, I'm getting nervous. [chuckles]

Brigid Bergin: You're doing great.

Jay: If you could just maybe talk about that and tell me what you guys think about that because I'd love to hear your thoughts, thank you.

Brigid Bergin: Jay, thanks so much. Professor Daut, what is your response?

Professor Daut: I think the caller essentially answered his own question that it is very true that what it seems like is that the rest of the west because Haiti is actually an integral part of the west, not just geographically but geopolitically, and hasn't seemed to want Haiti to succeed. President Boyer, he agreed to this "indemnity" because he thought that not only would France then recognize Haitian independence but that the US and Great Britain, Haiti's trading partners would as well. That's not what happened.

In fact, Great Britain didn't recognize Haitian independence until 1838 after slavery was fully abolished in the British Caribbean colonies. The United States waited until after the civil war had started in 1862 to recognize Haitian independence. Very quickly, we see that the world was not on Haiti's side because they were the first ones to abolish slavery. England and the United States wanted to keep slavery, as did the Netherlands and Spain, and Portugal. Of course, they were not on Haiti's side, and they continue to this day to largely exhibit evidence that they are not in Haiti's corner.

Brigid Bergin: Catherine, what's your response to the caller?

Catherine Porter: I have to say it is really telling that not only did-- Haiti was a real threat to the world. This is a free Black republic at the height of slavery. Also, not just a free Black republic, it had been the richest colony in the world that produced more than half of the world's sugar that was at least exported and coffee at the time. It was considered basically a gold rush so it was a huge blow for France, but it was also a symbol that was very terrifying to western powers. What is interesting to me today is that he mentioned Japan. Japan is a member of the G7.

We would think of them the same way but Haiti, the influence of foreign actors today in Haiti is huge. You will see that when the prime minister does his press conference and this one of the Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, he signals really early on, he'll say at the very beginning, "I got off the phone with our friends, the Americans, and they sent their sympathy. I got off the phone with our friend the Canadians."

He's signaling that the international community is behind him because the international community which in Haiti it's known as The Core Group of Ambassadors, they're incredibly powerful on who gets to stay in power. You have to remember when the end of Duvalier, he was whisked off in a plane to France. Then you had Aristide was taken twice. The second time he said he was kidnapped.

Préval who's a much more recent president and who was a real exception in that he died in the country peacefully, he also said that after the earthquake, the powers that be came to him one night and said, "You need to leave the country. We need to get you out." He refused. There is a real bigfoot influence of international players here. The big question that I always ask is why? Why is that today?

Brigid Bergin: We will continue to explore that question and take more of your calls after this short break. You're listening to the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

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It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian today. I'm speaking to UVA Professor Marlene Daut and Catherine Porter from the New York Times about the crisis in Haiti. I want to go back. We've gone through some of the historical challenges the nation has faced, but we cannot overlook one of the most pivotal recent changes, and that's obviously the 2010 earthquake. Catherine, you were among the journalists who arrived in Port-au-Prince shortly after it struck. What do you remember about that time?

Catherine Porter: Oh, well, I don't think you could talk to anyone who was here, particularly not a Haitian but even the foreigner who came in that wouldn't get teary at the memory. The damage was so overwhelming. I remember I flew in at night, it was dark, there was no electricity. We were driving and a lot of the roads were full of rebels. People were sleeping on the roads because they were fearful of aftershocks, very rightly so. They were lined with bodies, as some of the people are right on the road and other people had moved their whole neighborhood onto the road.

The destruction was just unimaginable, like incomprehensible in a way to take in. The horror that was many people who died, died because help couldn't get there, neighbors were digging. I've met many heroes in their neighborhoods who were masons and they went out with sledgehammers to try and break the walls. Haiti at some time, historically a lot of these homes were made of wood but because of hurricanes they'd shifted to concrete and there's too much sand in the concrete. A lot of the concrete just basically, it spills like sugar off of rebar and tumbled down.

It wasn't only the neighbors and the poor upon the mountains, but the rich, the fanciest hotel in Port-au-Prince pancaked, it's called the Montana. More than 100 people died there. The destruction was just enormous. In the first days, there wasn't enough help coming in terms of medical help, many of the hospitals were badly damaged or there wasn't electricity, and doctors had been hurt. When many of those doctors that were performing surgeries were doing civil war era surgery without large amounts of anesthetic. I came in and one of the first stories I did was at this little makeshift clinic near the airport, it was basically just inside a sweatshop area, and people were stitching up kids without anesthetic, people were sleeping in tents. It was a very emotional time.

Interviewer: Professor Daut, there has been an alleged $13 billion in foreign aid in its aftermath that has gone to the country that has allegedly gone missing. What do we know about what happened to that funding?

Professor Daut: So many things went wrong with the international aid response. There's the question of missing funds that happened at multiple levels. Even for example, the Red Cross, there were questions about what exactly they did with all of this money that they were given. A lot of the aid groups did things like bring rice and bring water bottles and flood the market with products from the United States, which made it pretty impossible for Haitian farmers to sell their products, things like shoes also, for example. What looked like helping really actually created a lot of harm. There are a lot of scholars who talk about Haiti as the land of 10,000 NGOs because of this, and anyone who visited the country between, I would say, 2010 and 2018 when the PetroCaribe protests happen, and then when [unintelligible 00:24:03] happened.

In between that time, the vast majority of travelers on the planes were actually religious organizations or aid workers. You saw this huge disaster tourist industry crop up that had always been there to a certain extent. The biggest things that you can see that happened in Haiti if you want to talk about where money actually you saw exhibits of it being used, was in hotels. I get a Hilton Hotel or Marriott Hotel, and the Best Western. This is not exactly going to help the majority of the Haitian people, is having these big US hotel chains come to the country.

Interviewer: I want to bring in another one of our callers. Howard from Brooklyn, welcome to WNYC.

Howard: Thank you for taking my call. I just want to say what happened to Haiti, it should be concerned lot of people. Without Haiti’s fight, all Black around the world will not have a better chance, all women will not have a better chance, all Latinos will not have a better chance. Remember, Haiti fought against English, French, and Spanish in order to break the chain of slavery for everyone to have a better life. Before Haiti fought, Black people in many places, used to live only for seven years. There's a little group in Haiti, came from the Middle East, it's just a little group. They don't want the country to go nowhere except from them. They have corrupted the government, everything. I’m sorry to interrupt. They own almost everything in the country. If anyone tries to invest, they send somebody to kill you.

Interviewer: Howard, thank you so much for calling with that perspective, the challenges that people are facing there on the ground. I know Catherine Porter, we are going to lose you soon. You need to go and continue reporting on the ground, but before you go, can you tell us, we know you are in Port-au-Prince now where your reporting is headed. What will you be following up on today and going forward?

Catherine Porter: I can't necessarily scoop myself on national radio.

Interviewer: Without scooping yourself, of course.

Catherine Porter: Well, look, obviously there's many things here, there's big questions, who are these guys that came? Where were they staying? What were they supposed to be doing here? We'll be following that story, trying to track that down. The power struggle that's going on, we haven't mentioned, but there's-- When the president was shot, a couple of days before he was assassinated, he had announced a new interim prime minister. I think it was his sixth. That guy was a neurosurgeon. He was supposed to take power that week. There's a real power struggle between him and the guy that was there before, who was called Joseph, who was a foreign minister at the time and the head of the Senate.

There is no parliament here. There are 10 sitting senators, less than the legislator. There's no lower body. That's only 10 out of 30. 8 of those 10 have come together and they believe that the head of the Senate, the president of the Senate, he's the one who should be in charge. There's a power struggle happening right now. That's also why you hear each of those people talking about the support of the United States. They're all jockeying for who will support them. We're going to have to follow that story.

It's interesting what the caller just said about this bourgeoisie, this is something you hear in Haiti all the time but it does pose a bigger question, which is who is going to benefit from this? Who had the most to gain? Or at least, who had the least to lose if this president was gone? That's another question that I'm asking myself, and I hope that my reporting can help contribute to find the answers

Interviewer: Well, Catherine, we will certainly be following your reporting. Thank you so much for joining us. Professor Daut, you still have a few minutes with us and we have some more callers who will join us, but we want to thank Catherine for her time and let her go to start some of that great reporting. I'm going to have another caller join us. Let's have Eddie from Nassau County. Eddie, welcome to WNYC.

Eddie: Good morning. Thank you for having me. I would say, first of all, thank you to the professors, who are interviewing on the case. I think that they have a great idea of what had happened in Haiti and what is happening now. Literally, I would say, and that what happened this time, is this assassination just reminds us what happened at the beginning with this. I'm not trying to compare President Moïse to Dessalines, no, but what I'm saying is that the same tragedy that Haiti is going through, it has been going through forever. It's like [unintelligible 00:30:09]. I think that the callers before me, I think they also explained clearly our situation. We are like the nation that other nations, let's say, the superpowers usually, they seem-- Not they seem, they don't like us because if they did, they would really help us. Imagine right now really you have the United Nation over there. What they did, they have [unintelligible 00:30:56] and gangs pushing-- [crosstalk] in the state, you have gangs running really the country.

Brigid Bergin: Eddie, thank you so much for your call your lines a little hard for us here and we want to get in one more caller. James from East Orange, New Jersey, welcome to WNYC.

James: Hi, how are you doing today, Brigid?

Brigid Bergin: Great. You have a question for Professor Daut.

James: Yes, I do. Actually, it's more of just a point of view. I'm Haitian American first-generation, so I really come to the country and everything. I left Haiti when I was five years old during the Aristide, well, as he says, kidnapping. One of the most interesting now going through the education system, I majored in history in college. My goal was to learn about my country. It's the only reason I really did it. There is a double narrative to Haiti. Most of what we see is concentrated in the south, around the capital. Towards the north is pretty much more prosperous. I love my grandfather, he owned land out there, a farm cultivated it, and so good, and everything.

There are Haitian oligarchs there, as we call the bourgeoisie, and there are big companies such as the BG-- I believe they're the BG Group who have even offices operating in the United States that it's a major contributor to the economy. My thing is, it gets a little frustrating when I just hear about the economic disadvantages of Haiti, and personally, knowing that there is-- How should I say? There is an economic advantage there is that it can be cultivated. If it is cultivated, it can assess the damages like the indemnity that we have to pay, and everything else. That's just what I wanted to bring across.

Brigid Bergin: James, thank you so much. Professor Daut, what do you make of that delving into the complexity that is the country's economic history?

Professor Daut: Yes. Well, thank you, to the caller. One of the frustrating things is to see Haiti, this term used when really people mean a lot of times what's happening in the capital in Port-au-Prince. I often say that Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince, there are other parts of the country where other things are going on, that don't necessarily revolve around gang violence and the economic disruptions that we've been seeing in the last few months.

I will say that what has been very interesting about the protests that started around the PetroCaribe funds, where are the PetroCaribe funds that could take on PetroCaribe campaign that when pay-lock, the lockdown of the country started. This was grassroots Haitians saying, "No, we're not going to contribute to the economy. We're not going to keep things running unless we have some answers." Then, we started to see that what happened in the capital actually did end up happening elsewhere in the north, for example, in Cap-Haïtien.

The other thing I would say is something about what Catherine Porter was talking about with the power struggle between Ariel Henry, Claude Joseph, and Joseph Lambert. The other part of that power struggle is with the Haitian people because again, another frustration of mine is to see headlines about Haiti asks the US for assistance. Well, no, that's not exactly true. There are reports that Claude Joseph asked the United States for assistance, but the vast majority of Haitian people if you take a look at social media or involved in any WhatsApp chat rooms, Haitians are largely Haitian civil society groups are saying, "No, we do not want UN troops. We do not want US intervention."

If that US and UN delegation is to have any meaningful effect on changing the future and the narrative of Haiti, they need to have at the table Haitian civil society groups, people who represent the members of the Haitian populace, not the Haitian elite, because the three men vying for power, again want the power for themselves. It's just more elite men as both callers just spoke about wanting to keep the power for themselves for their own interests.

How would things happen and come out differently if the Haitian people are really the ones driving the conversation about what needs to happen next? Well, who needs to be in charge? Maybe that means that multiple people, a different way of organizing society needs to happen, when will the Haitian people have a voice that is not revolving around an election and the ballot box?

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much. We're going to have to leave it there for now. My guests have been Marlene Daut, Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Caribbean US African American and French colonial literary and historical studies. Earlier Catherine Porter, Toronto Bureau Chief for the New York Times and author of A Girl Named Lovely. Thank you so much for being here, Professor Daut, just really, really helpful and fascinating context for what we will continue to follow is happening on the ground in Haiti.

Professor Daut: Thank you so much for having me and for doing this report.

Brigid Bergin: I'm Brigid Bergen from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer. Coming up next, how more frequent heavy rainstorms which are connected to climate change are affecting our infrastructure and the water quality in our local waterways. Stay with us.

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