Envisioning a new Haiti

"Business, after all, is the engine of prosperity," Carney says. "It has to be."

In a country where dictators and democratic presidents alike have been accused of pocketing huge amounts of public money, Mr. Luck says that the government should demonstrate international accounting standards.

But just as Haiti would benefit from an increase in outside business and a return of diaspora members, it would also do well if its people were allowed to leave. If Haitians could go to the US easily, they would not only relieve some of the population pressure on the country's environment, some say, but would also be able to get the sort of education and professional experience still unavailable in Haiti. And then they could return to Haiti with newfound skills.

"If I ruled the world, and I could do one thing for the country, I would give every Haitian a ticket to Miami," says Charles Kelly, an environmental disaster consultant who has worked there.

Although its story was long excluded from American history books, Haiti is the New World's second oldest republic, its first of free men, and the first black republic of the modern world. And since its inception, says Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar and foreign-policy activist, it has been impoverished and traumatized by the US and Europe.

If the developed world really wants to help Haiti – which Dr. Chomsky says he questions – then it should start off by paying the country massive reparations. This is what is owed a dignified nation with a proud history, he says, not the same imperial rhetoric of "helping" and "improving" that has been used to mask foreign exploitation of developing countries for generations.

There is a basis for reparations, which Aristide requested to no avail in 2004.

After a slave rebellion in 1804 succeeded in liberating the rich colony from France, Haiti was shunned by other countries – including by the newly independent, slave-holding US, which was terrified about the precedent Haiti set for its own black population. (For generations, the concept that a black country could have a similar revolution to that of a white country was simply unfathomable.)

Twenty years after Haiti's independence, France forced the young country to pay 90 million francs in return for recognizing the former colony – an amount estimated to be equal to about $21 billion today. The payment was devastating to the infant nation but necessary to end a more damaging embargo from Europe and the US. Throughout the next century, Chomsky says, racist, exploitative, and violent interventions from the US and elsewhere – from a Woodrow Wilson-ordered invasion of the country in 1915 to the support of the Duvalier regimes to harsh international economic policies that undermined farmers and encouraged corruption – repeatedly damaged the country and led to its current predicament.

"You ask what should be done," he says. "If we were honest, France and the US would be paying major reparations to Haiti. Massive reparations. Their countries have decimated Haiti. Now they are giving advice."

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