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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: Why is Haiti considered the poorest country in the Americas?
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. If you are coming to Doki, we'll see you there. John and I are doing a live podcast on Thursday. And if there's something that tickles your fancy, have a look at dokibookfestival.org. We have something for everyone.
I think it's probably our best lineup yet. That's all at dokibookfestival.org. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. 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. 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. 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 dollars. That's about 540 odd dollars a year. That 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 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? I'm sure 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? How did they get to the World Cup?
Well, isn't this the amazing thing? Because Simon Cooper on our very first show said, look, there is a correlation of World Cup success or football 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.
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Chapter 3: What historical events led to Haiti's current economic struggles?
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 Kirk. 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, particularly 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. Those 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,
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 being sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, sent to plantations, and the product of the plantations, be it tobacco, cotton, or sugar, being sent back to Europe.
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. Why?
Because they have access to technology, SpaceX technology, which is allowing them run their from space, in effect, right? Yeah, 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.
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Chapter 4: How did Haiti achieve independence from France?
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. You know, everybody's involved. And then you have all the tech bros having 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, that'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... 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, its indigenous people, which are called the Tiano, were wiped out by disease and overworked. They were overworked.
So what the Spanish found, the French found when they came to the Caribbean, was the Caribbean was an ideal climate for sugarcane. 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.
Exactly. Sugar on everything. Sugar on your frosties, John, in the morning, right? So sugar, that's the first thing.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What role did the United States play in Haiti's political landscape?
And the consumer culture was largely sourced in the Caribbean. So 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. Because the seas are so warm, it's the source of all the hurricanes that hit both the Caribbean and the Americas.
Yeah, 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? Haiti 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 overseas 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 expensive. profitable was harvested by over half a million enslaved Africans. They made up 90% of the colony's population. Then the other
10% were mixed, half Europeans, half black slaves, and they were called affranchis, which means freed. They 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.
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Chapter 6: How does the ecological collapse impact Haiti's economy?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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... 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. They'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.
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.
And they stole 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?
Well, I don't think he would have sold it. But I think that... Do you remember our 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...
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Chapter 7: What are the social implications of gang violence in Haiti?
So between 1824 and 1947, the Haitian government paid the French tens of millions of euros or dollars, whatever currency you want to do, in today's money in order simply to be recognized.
But 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're
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. 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. So, 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, at one stage, an 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? Mm-hmm. So that's the colonial model.
It's the same model that you had in Barbados. It's 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,
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Chapter 8: How does Haiti's situation compare to the Dominican Republic?
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 no 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.
So, 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 topsoil. Totally, yeah, and it's such a common story. Yeah, nutrients get washed away, and therefore the cropland, more cropland is needed to produce the same amount of stuff. Exactly.
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 disastrous for the Haitians. And then what you get is you get Uncle Sam. 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 in Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In a nice gaffe 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. You know, the state capacity we speak about quite a lot, but 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, in effect, a former country.
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