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  Haiti’s Instability: The Dominican Republic’s Unspoken Engine of Growth By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * The Dominican Republic sits beside one of the most severe humanitarian and security collapses in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, despite the proximity, despite the shared island, despite the daily flow of people and goods across the border, Santo Domingo has shown remarkably little interest in supporting a durable resolution to Haiti’s crisis. The reasons are not rooted in indifference alone. They are structural, economic, political — and, for Dominican leaders, brutally rational. A Crisis That Benefits the Dominican Economy The Dominican Republic’s economy has quietly adapted to Haiti’s collapse. As Haitian state capacity eroded, Dominican exports surged. In 2025 alone, $648.4 million in Dominican goods entered Haiti through just two crossings — Malpasse/Jimaní and Belladère/Elías Piña — corridors increasingly controlled by Haitian armed groups [1] . As the document not...

Haiti’s False Binary: Why Color Fetishism Distorts a Nation’s Past—and Blocks Its Future By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * PORT-AU-PRINCE — In “Face à l’Histoire… Duvaliérisme vs Aristidisme,” J.L.T. reprises a familiar drama in Haitian political discourse: a mythic clash between two so-called titanic ideologies—Duvaliérisme and Aristidisme—cast as the determinative poles of national history. It is a rhetorically charged narrative, seductively moral, almost theatrical. It is also a conceptual dead end [1]. The framing reduces Haiti’s political evolution to a chromatic psychodrama: black middle-class nationalism versus mulatto elite exclusion, followed later by a populist priest’s messianic rise. That interpretive habit—what we might call  colorist historiography —has become a fetish. It substitutes symbolic antagonisms for structural analysis, emotional archetypes for economic realities. And it persists not because it illuminates, but because it is narratively convenient. It f...