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Haiti: A “War Budget” in an electoral year with no teeth

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  Haiti: A “War Budget” in an electoral year with no teeth By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Haiti’s transitional government has approved a 2025–26 national budget it says will fund a “war” on gangs and deliver long-delayed national elections. But spending plans and financing choices in the 345.5 billion gourde package suggest the security push may be underpowered, even as interest costs surge and foreign aid ebbs, according to the budget documents. Figure 1. Budget envelope rises 6.8% from 2024–25 rectificatif The plan, adopted Oct. 9 in the Council of Ministers, lifts total outlays by 6.8 percent from the rectified 2024–25 budget. Current expenditures climb to 213.6 billion gourdes, or nearly 62 percent of the total, while capital spending — often the backbone of mobility, equipment and infrastructure for security and services — falls by 4.9 percent. Officials say the blueprint channels money toward three goals: restoring public se...
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La Rançon : le développement arrêté d’Haïti

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  The Ransom: Haiti’s Arrested Development  (Le Français suit) Subhead: How a 19th-century indemnity drained a new nation — and still shapes its economy. By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson *    On a hot summer in 1825, a French flotilla appeared off Haiti’s coast with an ultimatum. Recognize Haiti’s hard-won independence, Paris said, but only if the Black republic — born from the only successful slave revolution in history — agreed to pay a colossal “indemnity” to its former enslavers. Guns backed the demand. Haiti signed. For more than six decades, the young nation poured money out: principal, interest, late fees, and new loans taken to pay the old ones. It is hard to overstate the absurdity: a nation of formerly enslaved people paying “compensation” for the loss of their own bodies and labor. Yet the flow of francs was very real. So were the consequences. Two centuries on, the bill is still coming due — not in line items on a budget, but in pauperized infras...
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DESSALINES, CE GÉANT AUX PIEDS D’ARGILE

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  DESSALINES, THE GIANT WITH FEET OF CLAY By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Francais suit) PORT-AU-PRINCE — He was the storm that tore through the colonial order, the man who made Napoleon bend, the architect of a sovereign Black state in a world arrayed against it. Jean‑Jacques Dessalines, Emperor Jacques I, remains a summit of world history. And yet, like so many colossi, his grandeur rests on a fragile base: an economy to be rebuilt in urgency, a country fractured by competing loyalties, and an international diplomacy poised to suffocate it. A giant, yes — with feet of clay. The strategist of an impossible independence Dessalines grasped the geography of power: hold the ports, feed the plains, secure the roads, deter any reconquest. On January 1, 1804, the irrevocable abolition of slavery was not only a political act; it was an anthropological revolution. The 1805 Constitution asserted a radical sovereignty — the prohibition of white property, proclaimed legal equality...
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