World Cup Series: Haiti

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0:57David McWilliams: All coming up on the podcast. This is again part of the series on the World Cup. We are focusing today on the worst team, according to the seedings, which is going to be Haiti. They are one of the poorest countries in the world. They've had a terrible time. We're going to support them. They are the least likely team to succeed, and therefore on this podcast, they're the most likely team to get our attention. So it's all about the history, the economics, the politics, the future of Haiti. That's all coming up in a couple of minutes. Just before we start a massive, massive week for the podcast and the McWilliams family in general, because this is the Doki Book Festival weekend.

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2:10David McWilliams: How you doing there? Welcome to the World Cup series, the series that uses the World Cup to look at the economies, the politics, economic history, the prospects of certain countries that are performing on the global stage at the World Cup. Today, we are going to go to the poorest country in the Americas. That country is Haiti. It has a capital city, which has now been run by gang members. The authorities really have no control over the main city. Freedom levels, i.e. the indications of freedom are comparable with those of the West Bank. It is the second lowest life expectancy in the world outside Africa, and it has only had one free and fair election.

2:55David McWilliams: In its 222-year history, that country has no permanent leader right now, and that country is Haiti. About half of the country struggles to feed itself every day. It has no access to electricity. That's 50 % of the people have no access to electricity, phones, or the internet, and many live on less than three euros a day. Gang violence has killed over a thousand people in the first three months of this year, and it, of course, as it always does, has displaced millions of people. It is the country of Haiti. Just to give you one quick, quick statistic, the medium monthly income in Haiti is$45. That's about$540 odd a year.

3:46That means this country is 73 times poorer than Ireland. Just to give you a sense of what we are dealing with. and kind of measures of the overall economy are irrelevant in the sense

4:01David McWilliams: that it is characterized by political instability, mass migration of people trying to get out to wherever they can go. That country is Haiti, John. It is the largest country or one of the largest countries in the Caribbean. And it is the country we are going to focus on today. How are you, Ed? Especially you're glad you don't live in Port-au-Prince. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know a huge amount about Haiti, apart from when it was hit by that devastating earthquake in 2010. But given everything you've just said there about Haiti, it just begs the question, how can they put a football team together?

4:40How did they get to the World Cup?

4:42David McWilliams: Well, isn't this the amazing thing? Because Simon Cooper, on our very first show, said, look, there is correlation of World Cup success, or footballing success between social democratic, largely West European countries, and football achievement or football prowess. The Haitians beat the Nicaraguans in November of last year, 2025, to qualify for their first World Cup in 50 years. They are the lowest ranking team, but John, as you and I are always on the side of the underdog, this is why we're going to focus on them, right? Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be rooting for the Haitians. And again, you're right.

5:18David McWilliams: I mean, it's very, very difficult to put a team together when your country is that poor. John, I'll just give you one thing. The reason we're on the side of the Haitians is the United States has banned anyone from Haiti entering the country, right? The Americans have just got... I mean, you're thinking the poorest country in the world, what do you do to them? The one thing that they can celebrate if they get the money together to get to America, which most of them won't, is to support their team. And the Yanks have banned them, right? Give him a break for Jesus' sake. This means that obviously the only people that support the Haitians are these massive Haitian communities in North America.

5:57David McWilliams: There's a huge Haitian migration community. So what you will see is Haitians who live, exiles, expats, descendants of previous immigrants, they're going to go. The only Haitian player who is based in Haiti, a guy called Woodensky Pierre, John, has been granted permission by the Americans to actually attend the tournament. So that's a movement of great... So he got in. He's all right. Yeah. Just by way of contrast, John, with what we're talking about. So you've got the figures there about how poor Haiti is, how unbelievably difficult life is there. At the same time and in the same week, we have had SpaceX, which is Elon Musk's new$1.7 trillion company, right?

6:38David McWilliams: Yeah. Which is going to be trading at 90 times earnings. The most overvalued company ever is going to the market in the world's biggest IPO. The contrast between the exorbitant wealth of the United States and the unbelievably crushing poverty of one of their neighbors. One of their neighbors. It's a very, very close island to the United States can only be underscored by the contrast between the opulence of the tech bros in the United States who are gambling that the next big, big frontier, John, say it now, space the final frontier okay captain girk i am captain kirk to your spock johnny boy yeah live long and prosper now the interesting thing we're going to talk about haitian history what happened who ended up living there why they were living there but just so you know in the 17th and 18th century, but we're taking the 17th century, the countries that mastered navies, that mastered the seas, that mastered the trade routes, first Netherlands, then France, then Britain, and of course, prior to that, Spain and Portugal.

7:58Those countries that acquired the technology that was necessary to build large navies and therefore to spring out from Western Europe all around the world, owning the seas,

8:11David McWilliams: those countries became incredibly wealthy. The gamble now, and of course, one of the reasons they became incredibly wealthy is they set up colonies largely in the Caribbean to export things like sugar and tobacco back to the Europeans. They then, once they'd killed all the native Indians, they imported black slaves from Africa and you had this, what they call the triangular system of European goods, second-rate goods going to Africa, being traded for humans. Those Africans been sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, sent to plantations, and the product of the plantations, be it tobacco, cotton, or sugar, been sent back to Europe.

8:55David McWilliams: It was called the triangular Atlantic trade, a most despicable piece of commercial geometry. But it was the defining trade of Western Europe for a long, long time. And of course, right. And Haiti was at the core of that then, was it? It was at the epicenter of it. But my point is, it was masteries of the sea. The SpaceX idea, John, I mean, come back to it, but it's well worth kind of sharing this with listeners, is that mastery of space is going to be the brave new world, right? So if you think of what has been happening, even in Ukraine in the last couple of months, The Ukrainians have managed to turn the war around.

9:37Why? Because they have access to technology, SpaceX technology, which is allowing them run their drones from space, in effect. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same thing with the Straits of Hormuz. The American Navy just couldn't reopen it. Like in the old days, the American Navy would have gone in there and reopened the whole thing. But now those choke points, the early warning system of those choke points is coming from satellites in the air, right? And therefore, if you think about what is happening, right, it's the countries that are using satellite technologies. Like think about the Ukrainians are attacking Russian oil facilities deep within Russia.

10:23And the way they're doing that is they're using satellite technology to coordinate the drone attacks. so their access to starling is actually turning the war around yeah and one way of looking at this is that when columbus went out from spain and conquered the united states and discovered the united states or the americas right this was the geopolitics of the 16th 17th 18th century that was the dimension was navigable oceans was the territory where if you control them you are the top dog. The new dimension is what they call

11:02David McWilliams: low-Earth orbit space, right? I'll give you one statistic before we go back to Haiti, John. Yes, yeah, yeah. Okay. A decade ago, there were 1 ,000 satellites in what we call low-Earth orbit around the world. Today, there are 15 ,200. Starlink alone accounts for most of that difference. Wow. This is the new ocean, and the race to control it has already begun. So this is the reason why it's a 1.7 trillion IPO, because that just seems like stupid money. Well, it is stupid money. But the idea, John, is that what we're looking at is a final frontier, a new frontier. And the way we will link our discussion on Haiti today with Starlink isn't just throwing our hands up and saying, isn't inequality awful, as it's terrible, the Americans have so much money, and the Haitians don't.

11:55That's one problem. But I think a way of looking at it is think about controlling space and this low Earth orbit as being the same type of arms race as controlling the oceans in the 17th century. Because controlling the oceans made you unbelievably rich. And of course, Haiti was the country that was one of those unbelievably rich colonies in the very, very first place. But the interesting thing, though, about space and satellite launches is that that used to be the preserve of just NASA. Or the Soviets, yeah. Or the Soviets, exactly. But now China is a big player. India is a big player. They sent probes to the moon.

12:41Yeah. You know, everybody's involved. And then you have all the tech bros having their private rockets. Their private rockets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm taking Katy Perry up there. So think about, John, the old age of colonialism, imperialism. You had exactly the same combination. You had the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company. They were privateers that had the money to build the ships to go out and do the trade. The state, in the case of Britain, let's say, because we know it's closest to us, created the British Navy in order to protect the trade of the ships. So there was a symbiotic relationship between big business and the state in Holland and in Britain.

13:28That's exactly what you're seeing now. So you're seeing that now with the links between Starlink and the American government. It's exactly the same thing, right? The difference is slavery. So let's come back to the original sin of Haiti, which is the sin of slavery. Okay, explain that. So Haiti is one of the most tragic stories of any of the 193 countries of the United Nations, right? First of all, it's indigenous people, which are called the Tiano. Right, okay. Were wiped out by disease and overworked. They were overworked. So what the Spanish found, the French found, when they came to the Caribbean, is the Caribbean was an ideal climate for sugar cane.

14:09Yeah. Sugar was the obsessive drug of the middle classes in the 17th century in Europe because Europeans had always had this problem of rancid tasting food, right? And sugar made everything taste nice, right? Sugar on your fish and chips, love it.

14:27David McWilliams: Exactly, sugar on everything. Sugar on your frosties, John, in the morning, right? So sugar, that's the first thing. Yeah. Coffee, the second thing. Coffee was an absolutely new product. And of course, tobacco, another new product. Yeah. And Ganja. And Ganja, and loads of Ganja. But if you imagine Dublin City was full of these coffee houses in the 18th century. So people would basically have a smoke, have a cup of coffee, and have a chat, right? That's where you're Jonathan Swift of all these people. You used to hang out in these places, right? So it created the first consumer culture. And the consumer culture was largely sourced in the Caribbean.

15:08so then the question was how did you actually guess that stuff how did you grow that stuff, how did you harvest that stuff in the Caribbean now of course the problem with the Caribbean is that anybody who's ever been there is the climate is brutal it's far too hot it's far too wet it is unbelievably unprotected most of those islands, the Caribbean are so unprotected from the Atlantic it really is, I mean because the seas are so warm it's the source of all the hurricanes that hit both the Caribbean and the Americas. Yeah.

15:43David McWilliams: So this is a very unforgiving, brutal pace. I mean, it's marketed as kind of sun, sex, and all that sort of stuff for holidays, right? But in actual fact, the day-to-day life in the Caribbean is dominated, as you said, by a very unforgiving environment and an unforgiving set of climatic conditions, which is prompting hurricanes. That's the first thing. Second thing is the white Europeans killed all the slaves, the indigenous people. They then decided, oh, you know what we're going to do? We're going to get slaves from Africa. So Haiti, I'm going to bring you up to just the French revolutionary times, right?

16:19Haiti was the most profitable colony in the French commercial architecture all over the world. It had, think about this, in the 1870s, two-thirds of all France's overseed trade, two-thirds went through San Domingo, which was the capital of Haiti. Right. The number of stopovers every year exceeded 700. So 700 commercial ships were stopping over in Haiti. It was the wealthiest colony in the Americans. This was largely due to the fact that sugar was incredibly profitable, was harvested by over half a million enslaved Africans. They made up 90 % of the colony's population. Okay. Then the other... 10 % were mixed, half Europeans, half black slaves, and they were called afranchis, which means freed.

17:13They were on their way to being freed, right? And then, of course, you had a small amount of white Europeans, maybe 5 or 6 ,000, right? So what you had, therefore, was a very strange hierarchy. You had at the very bottom, you had black slaves from Africa with no rights, and they worked the plantations. Then you had a sliver in the middle of mixed race, I think they're called the mulattos, mixed race, African and European. And then you had European colonialists, plantations, artisan people, et cetera, all living in this incredibly thriving but deeply unstable country. Yeah. And unstable is because 90 % of the people had no rights.

17:53And of course, John, what does this coincide with in the late 18th century? The American and the French Revolution, right? And the American, the French Revolutions were based on, particularly the French one, liberté, fraternité, égalité. So these basic principles, which were at odds with the monarchist French view of slavery. And of course, all these ideas spread like wildfire through the colonies, because what they did was they gave the black folk,

18:27David McWilliams: particularly that middle sliver, well, that small, but sort of more educated sliver, a hope that at some stage they could actually have a slave revolt. And was there a slave revolution? Yes. So this is fascinating about Haiti. Haiti is the only country, the only colony that had a successful slave revolt in 1791. Right, okay. And the slave rebellion started, John, with a voodoo ceremony. So voodoo was completely and utterly practiced and still is in many parts of Africa. But back then it was particularly just in case listeners want to get a sense of slavery, I can recommend one amazing book by Marlon James and it's called The Book of Nightwomen and it's written about a slave plantation in Jamaica against the background of the slave plantation owners hearing about slave revolution in Haiti.

19:26So the slave revolution in Haiti was led by a former slave called Tucson L 'Avarture. And Tucson L 'Avarture became the governor general, the black governor general of Haiti in the late 1790s. But this completely terrified white people in the Caribbean because the slaves killed and burned all the whites. And of course, the reaction of the whites in other carabine plantation colonies was appalling and immediate. So the revolution kicked off in 1790s. What happened after that? Like who took over? Was the slaves that become a slave-run colony then or what? So it became a slave-run country. So the guy you were talking was Toussaint L 'Ouverture.

20:16David McWilliams: So Toussaint is the boss man, right? And you see photographs of him. He was like a black version of Napoleon. He loved the funny Napoleon. Yeah, brilliant. Exactly. And the braids and the whole thing, okay? But he basically said, we are going to run ourselves. We're going to make slaves equal. Yeah. But of course, what happened is he puts himself in the top job and he turns into a very nasty, nasty dictator. He was the governor general from January 1801, right? and they conquered the whole of the island or the half of the island because the other half is a place called the Dominican Republic. We'll talk about that in a second.

21:00David McWilliams: And of course, Napoleon reacts ferociously to this because he realizes that Haiti is the jewel in the crown of the French colonial overseas properties. And he can't have this. He can't have a domino effect. He can't have this domino effect. So what you have then is this series of revolutions, risings, counter-revolutions, risings, et cetera, between, ironically, the French Napoleonic forces who are supposed to be on the side of the slaves, intellectually and spiritually, and the reality that the money that was flowing to France from Haiti was just too valuable for them to give up. And yet the slaves won.

21:43David McWilliams: They faced down Napoleon and they won. And what happened to the white colonialists then and the landowners? They were all killed. Were they? They were wiped out as well. They were all killed. They were all killed. And of course, it was that very brutality that triggered the response in the other Caribbean slave colonies, irrespective of whether they were French or not, because what they realized now was, hold on a second. If we allow these slaves to look at Haiti as an example of what might happen, we'll all be killed too. And, you know, they're very, very far from home, these people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:25David McWilliams: So Haiti becomes independent, but it's completely and utterly destroyed by 10 years of war between Napoleon, between the French monarchy and the slaves, etc. And what was, apart from being furious, what was Napoleon's reaction? What could he do? Well, isn't it this very interesting thing. Maybe the best deal that was ever done in the whole world was Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans because of Haiti. It's called the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon thought, look, Louisiana, there's nothing going on there except farming. And you know what? France has lost the war in North America. The Brits have won the war in Canada against the French.

23:11They've won the war in a place called Arcadia against the French. And ironically, Napoleon just sold up Louisiana, which was in an amazingly huge territory. It wasn't just the pocket that we know of Louisiana now.

23:23David McWilliams: The Louisiana purchase was, if you go up from New Orleans, John, a little bit of geography, all the way up to Mississippi, and everything to the left of that was Louisiana, French Louisiana. Right, so the rest of America, basically. Yeah, more or less, until it came up against the Spanish in California. Yeah. They sold that all to the Americans and they kind of disembarked from the United States. Here's a quick question for you then. I take it that Napoleon never visited Louisiana or the Americas at all. No, I don't think he did. And I wonder if he had, would he have sold Louisiana? Did he not fully appreciate the size and the resource that it was?

24:06Well, I don't think he would have sold it. But I think that, do you remember a friend, we did a podcast on Talleyrand. Yeah, yeah. Talleyrand was the fucker who sold it. The guy in silk stockings. Filth in silk stockings, he was described as by Napoleon, right? Yeah. So what you have is the revolution and the rising in Haiti creates an earthquake in French colonial policy in the Caribbean. Yeah. There were two French colonies, one called Guadeloupe,

24:37David McWilliams: one called Martinique. They are still French. They're still what they call the overseas departments. There you get a doubling down of the violence against the slaves so that they will not be infected by this revolt, this successful slave revolution, because, of course, the Europeans don't want this repeated across, A, Europe, but also B, Americans. The new American republic was a slave-owning republic. So everybody was against the blacks, right? Everybody was against the Africans. And amazingly, the Africans managed to hold on to Haiti. Now, French did their best to make sure that the Haiti's colony wouldn't survive.

25:15David McWilliams: And how did they do that, John? The Haitians were looking for recognition of the new Haitian Republic. The French wouldn't give them recognition until the Haitians paid back all the deaths that the French said were owed to France because of the destruction of white people's properties in Haitian, right? Think about how perverted that is. And between 1824 and 1825, negotiations started between the French and the Haitians' representatives for the recognition. Now, it is an extraordinary thing, of course. What the French did was they surrounded Haiti with loads and loads of French gunships. 500 cannons trained on Port-au-Prince, which was called Saint-Domingo then.

26:00David McWilliams: And they basically said, this is like gunboat diplomacy. You better sign this or else we will bomb you guys back to Stone Ages, right? Sounds like America now, doesn't it? Well, this is kind of the Venezuela sort of model, right? Yeah. So the total indemnity, total debt that the Haitians had to pay in today's money was$860 million. Wow. In today's money, right? Right. It was about 280 % of GDP at the time, of the whole of the colony, right? Wow. They tried in vain, the Haitians tried in vain, to have the debt reduced, but they had to take out loans from France to keep paying back the debt. And I'm going to tell you, the last piece of debt paid off by Haiti to France was paid in 1947.

26:58So between 1824 and 1947, the Haitian government paid the French tens of millions of euros or dollars, whatever currency we want to do, in today's

27:13David McWilliams: money in order simply to be recognized. Why did they pay? Why wasn't there the burned bondholders kind of movement there? Exactly, because they couldn't figure out how they could get incorporated back into the global economy as long as there was a French blockade of Haiti. So this is, again, evidence of the extraordinary viciousness of people who look like us over people who look like Africans, right? Now, again, what happens is if you are an extractive island, you've got your coffee, your tobacco, your sugar, you're highly dependent on those prices. If there is a crisis in the sugar industry, tobacco industry, coffee, if another colony like Brazil emerges that is more productive, that has got more stable, and when I say stable, has got more subjugated slaves, which it had.

28:13David McWilliams: And a better football team. and a lot better football team, the price of coffee and sugar falls, then you're totally dependent. And this is, of course, one of the stories of these parts of the world. They're completely dependent on one crop. But be that as it may, Haiti remained, John, poor but independent for over 200 years. I mean, that's incredible. So how come it went from that to the basket case it is now? But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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30:22So Mike, in this brief history lesson on Haiti, we see that they were the first slave colony to have a successful revolution and gain their independence from France. And it was a one-stage, incredibly prosperous place. But now it is a basket case. And unbelievably, they have a team in the World Cup. But how did it get to the poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere? Okay, so it was a very, very rich extractive colony. That meant that the vast majority of people lived in abject poverty. and it was in effect a heist by Europeans using African labor to supply Europeans with things that Europeans were prepared to pay a lot for, which were like sugar and coffee and tobacco and all those sort of things, right?

31:12So that's the colonial model. It's the same model that you had in Barbados, the same model you had in Jamaica, it's the same model you had in Cuba. But three different national overlords, Spaniards in Cuba, the British in Jamaica, and of course the French in Haiti. There is a very interesting, and we're going to come on to this in a second, almost economic experiment because the island of Hispaniola is the big island, which is divided in half, with Haiti on the left-hand side, as you look at the map, and the Dominican Republic on the right-hand side. The Dominican Republic was a very, very different culture.

31:48It was Spanish-speaking. It was settled by European Spanish farmers in the main who had small holdings, whereas Haiti was black African slaves in the main. So very, very different cultural makeup. They have serious, serious border issues still between the Dominican Republic do not like the Haitians. Haitian migration is a big deal in Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic has become the most successful country in the Americas, bar none. All right. Bar none. And that means its growth rate is stronger than and has been stronger than the United States since the 1970s. Based on what? Tourism, finance, good governance, all these sort of things, right?

32:32Haiti has gone the other way. So that's a very, very brief potted history. Haiti is taken over by a variety of... So what happens in these sort of situations? This is the classic post-colonial dilemma, that your relationship with the Europeans is still the dominant one. You create a class that apes the Europeans, that apes the manners of the Europeans, that sends their children to European schools, that are in effect the kind of post-colonial nightmare. You have imposed European rule via these African-looking people who are Haitians. The great example of that is the Duvalier clan, Baby Doc and Papa Doc Duvalier.

33:13Yes, yeah, yeah. And they ran Haiti with an extraordinary militia called the Tonton Makut, very violent people. you might remember Sinead O 'Connor's first band was called

33:25David McWilliams: Yes, yes I do A little bit of South Southern trivia there just to keep you going in the late 70s and early 80s Now let's go back So the Duvaliers are classic tin pot dictators that you see all over the third world They're running the place, they're extracting wealth It was very much the vogue in the 70s wasn't it? Yeah and they were deeply anti-communist Yeah. This is the card they played. So the Americans gave them loads of loans, which they siphoned off, and most of them ended up in Swiss banks. Surprise, surprise. So basically what you had was two things. We spoke about the environmental disaster that is the Caribbean.

34:08In Haiti, because of the way in which the black Creole slaves owned small holdings, there was totally intensive farming. which destroyed a lot of the topsoil. They didn't give any of the soil a break. They didn't rotate it. So it's a man-made environmental catastrophe. Yeah, you just degrade the soil. And of course, as the population grew, they cleared more and more land. The fallow periods were shortened, as you say. There's always during heavy rain, there's none of the vegetation to hold the land. So during the last 100 years, soil erosion, depletion, it's all accelerated, worsening the economic conditions in the country.

34:49so you know they went from almost full forest cover pre-colonialization to about a third and to almost none right and of course you know from your environmental stuff this erodes it dries up the top soil totally yeah and it's such a common story nutrients get washed away and therefore the cropland more cropland is needed to produce the same amount of stuff so you continue to deforest and again you become unbelievably vulnerable to food price increases, right? To oil price increases, to droughts, to famines, all those sort of things. So that is in effect the sort of the ecological inheritance, which is disasters for the Haitians.

35:35And then what you get is you get Uncle Sam.

35:38David McWilliams: Uncle Sam typically gets involved supporting one side or the other. The Duvaliers are a vicious, vicious, vicious regime. They are deposed in the 1980s. Baby Doc is exiled in Cannes or in Nice in the south of France. Yeah, somewhere nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In a nice gaff in the south of France. And what you get is a series of, I mean, we're going very, very quickly through, but a series of terrible, terrible governments where governance has disappeared, where you have a combination of natural disasters. These are made catastrophically worse by decades of this ecological destruction. The state has no capacity.

36:23David McWilliams: You know, the state capacity, we speak about quite a lot about the West to respond. And the country is set back. And therefore, each crisis hits it even harder and harder. People can't compete. The peasants can't compete out in the land. So what do they do? They move into the cities. this creates the third world disaster that we see in third world cities and of course the more unemployed young men you have in the cities who've come from the countryside the more easy they are to get into gangs drug dealing gangs etc and now you're in a situation where endemic violence is just the norm you have gangs running the streets you have gangs running the capital and you know it becomes a in effect a former country and and is it because of the lack of institutions that haiti never had the development time as it were because they were always ruled by vicious dictators yeah i think i think this is very much the case so so the in development economics there's a lot a lot of written about the importance of as you say the institutions the rule of law the stability of the currency, the quality of the civil service, the levels of trust within the society, you know, basically does the state function as a functioning, efficient way of organizing.

37:49Now, what you see, the contrast between Dominican Republic and Haiti is really quite stark because the Dominican Republic has got richer and richer and richer and Haiti's got poor and poor and poor. And the problem with once you get poor, it's even harder to do the basic things right. You know, sewage, you know, you might see what's happening in Cuba at the moment, right? Cubans, because they have no energy, they have no oil, the whole of Havana is now becoming just one big rubbish tip. And after a while, that sets the tone for the place. Then you have no functioning institutions. What happens is the educated people, the middle class people, to the extent they were there, emigrate to the United States because they're like thinking, well, I'm not going to stand around here because there's absolutely no reason.

38:35So you get a massive brain drain at the same time. The cops are corrupt. The army are corrupt. Everybody's in for themselves because nobody can see a future. You can't say, look, if I do the right thing now, in 10 years time, my kids will go to university.

38:53David McWilliams: They can't see that future. It's this idea of poverty obliterating the future. So therefore, everything becomes a smash and grab exercise for today, for trying to get as much as you can out of the system today. And into that vacuum has come these gangs. And the gangs are a function of the drug culture, which is everywhere in the Caribbean, in Latin America. and even if Haiti isn't producing drugs, it's a stop-off point on the way to the United States. So it becomes, in the same way as we talked about Mexico, it becomes part of the turf war of the supply chain. Is it a narco state, officially? I don't think it's a narco state.

39:37I think it's even probably worse. I think it's a gang state. Right, okay. You know, but I think in the case of Haiti, it's actually, the poverty is so endemic, the problems are so large that it's difficult for the state even to know where to start. Well, I was going to say, so has it gone too far to hold elections now? We had the likes of Wycliffe Jean and all those kind of guys come through, and they were a great hope at one stage. But it's got worse since then. It's got worse. So are we past the point of no return? And if so, what happens now? and more to the point, how did they put a football team together?

40:19Well, this is the strange thing. So the White Left Gin, of course,

40:22David McWilliams: is a reference to the Fugees. White Left and Lauren Hill were the two main people, I think, of the Fugees and one other guy. I think the other guy and White Left were Haitian refugees. Thus the name of the Fugees. Again, White Left tried to get involved in the last 10 years, but the issue is that you have... African levels of corruption, of dysfunction, of state destruction. You have, of course, then these environmental disasters. They've had earthquakes. They've had famines. They've had these mudslides. Everything in the last couple of years, right? Yeah, and not only the annual hurricane season, but there was that earthquake back in 2010 that absolutely devastated the place.

41:10Yeah, and so this is a country that's just not catching a break, Joe. In contrast, you have the extraordinary positive development of the other side of the island.

41:20David McWilliams: So then you've got to ask yourself, okay, hold on a second. You've an island called Hispaniola. One side, you have the fastest growing economy and the most modern economy in the Americas are moving towards that, the Dominican Republic. On the other side, you have Haiti, which is going the other way. And then you look at the different institutions, the different infrastructure, the different culture, the different language, the different relationships they have with the United States. And what you see is that the Dominican Republic is today at least 10 times richer than Haiti, even though they are in effect the same ecological zone.

42:01Yes. Yeah. So what it has got to do with, of course, is the management. You can't absolve the Haitians, the various Haitian governments, the various Haitian elite, from the accusation that local mismanagement is part of the problem.

42:20David McWilliams: It's not all the environment. It's not all the Americans. It's not all the French problem from 200 years ago. What you have is a country that is so badly managed by people who really, really do not care about education. So for example, right? Dominican government encourages education strongly. You know, there's far less population engaged in subsistent farming because they're more educated. So for example, fewer Dominican kids need to work on the farms. They have a literacy rate of 98.8 % in the Dominican Republic versus 60 % of Haitians. So that means 40 % of Haitians are still illiterate. The infrastructure, the Dominican Republic's road network is three times as dense as Haiti's.

43:06They've laid far more phone lines. They export far more. Export 24 % of the GDP compared to 17 % of Haiti. You know, they are from a macroeconomic point of view. The Dominicans have taken control of their own situation in a way. And of course, a lot of it comes down to culture. If you are the descendants of people who have been so violently treated and have violently treated each other, which is because violence begets violence. If you are the descendants of people who are all descended from slaves, there is probably going to be a bigger, bigger mountain to climb than if you were descended from freed Spanish small holding farmers, right?

43:59Who arrive in the Dominican Republic and are given small little farms to work on. Yeah. Because you've got a much more cohesive population You have a population that can build a capital base. You have a population that can actually lean on government infrastructure, education system, banking system, tax system, etc. And the interesting thing, what you see in development economics, John, is that the returns to good behavior magnify very quickly. The returns to bad behavior also magnify very quickly, but in the wrong way. and then you get to a situation where it seems the Haitians are today where the state just doesn't work.

44:41And then, of course, you get in the final things, you get the NGO class. So you get the non-governmental agencies and organizations come in to try and fill the vacuum where the government used to be or should have been and therefore you get a parallel power structure within Haiti which is largely foreign, which are aid workers, charity workers, etc. And that again drives, on the one hand, it's a really nice idea and it's a really well-intentioned idea. You could argue it's one of those Christian ideas of Christian-based NGOs or people with the right heart. Yeah, yeah. But what it does do, it also drives a wedge between the local population who are now ruled by the NGOs and the rulers who are foreigners.

45:29And so that sliver of leadership that should be local becomes increasingly outsourced to the NGO class who are maybe three years there, four years there, then they leave. So again, what you see is the psychology of power is not ennobling the locals. It is, in effect, a recolonization in a different advertising or branding mechanism, because you still have the elite decisions being taken by people who are paid from the outside and who are reporting to people from the outside. And this, again, reinforces the disenfranchisement of the local population. All of this is happening at a time when the world is moving ahead rapidly.

46:19It's happening at a time of Starlink. It's happening at a time...

46:21David McWilliams: Yeah, as rockets are flying overhead. Yes, yes, yes. So I think we'll conclude there, John, by the outlook for Haiti isn't good, but we are going to support them. Absolutely. We're going to be our number one team, okay? Because again, you know, these things matter. They're cosmetic. I know it's silly. But, you know, in the same way as Italian 90 changed our summer, that summer so profoundly wouldn't it be lovely for the Haitians to have a run just a little run but it's not it's not even just that Mac but it actually gives Haiti a bit of attention on a world stage because Haiti for the last 10-15 years has been utterly forgotten about exactly so go the Haitians allez allez les chans ok we will talk to you on Tuesday

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