Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
In the Caribbean, two nations share a single island, yet their histories, languages, economies, and political systems developed along dramatically different paths.
Their border is more than a line on a map. It can actually be seen from space.
It reflects centuries of colonization, revolution, foreign intervention, and competing national identities that shaped both sides in very different ways.
Learn more about the island of Hispaniola and how it became divided on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to conduct long-term experiments on large groups of human beings. Not only would it be unethical, but it would also be extremely challenging to organize.
However, sometimes, experiments occur naturally. Two peoples who are culturally or ethnically similar, with similar geography, might have radically different systems of government. Such natural experiments have occurred in North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, and East and West Germany.
The same is true of the island of Hispaniola and the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the island of Hispaniola was governed by the Taino confederacy, consisting of five sovereign chiefdoms.
Other smaller communities existed on the island, but the Taino occupied most of the land, and their five states reflected the region’s geographic diversity.
After Christopher Columbus and the Spanish arrived, the island would never be the same. Columbus and his men easily took control of the island, boasting in his journal, They would make fine servants. With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
The Spanish made good on their promise as they enslaved the Taino and used them to exhaust the island’s limited gold reserves by 1520, decimating the population in the process.
Hispaniola was important in early Spanish exploration, as the city of Santo Domingo was the first city established in the Americas in 1496, just four years after Columbus’ first voyage.
As reports of Spanish exploration reached European heads of state, the Dutch, French, and English began to pay more attention to the Americas. To control trade in this hemisphere, the Spanish instituted the Flota system.
Under the Flota system, the Spanish allowed only two voyages per year to specified ports in South America, Mexico, and Cuba, largely bypassing Hispaniola.
At the height of the religious wars in Europe, Spain had largely ignored Hispaniola, opening the door for settlers to trade with any European nation that came to the island. These communities gradually began trading with Spain’s Protestant adversaries.
The Spanish king, Phillip III, who was a religious zealot, believed that these Protestants were spreading anti-Catholic teachings throughout the island. In an effort to stop the perceived proselytizing, Phillip ordered the island’s governor to burn every coastal region, denying the Protestants access to the island’s resources.
This scorched-earth policy did slow down Protestant engagement on the island but it had catastrophic impacts for the Spanish, as they destroyed valuable agricultural lands, killed hundreds of thousands of cattle, and opened the door for French, English, and Dutch settlement in the region.
As tensions increased in Europe and Spain’s position diminished through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain gradually lost control of the island. In a unique arrangement outlined in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, at the end of the Nine Years’ War, Spain ceded control of roughly one-third of the island’s western side to the French.
Under this new arrangement, the western third was dubbed Saint-Domingue, while the eastern two-thirds remained the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.
It was at this point the two sections of the island began to evolve very different personalities,
In Saint-Domingue, the island focused on sugar production, becoming an plantation state fueled by slave labor. By the close of the 18th century, Saint-Domingue had grown into what was likely the world’s most prosperous colony, leading global sugar production. However, it was a hellscape for the enslaved people who worked its fields.
The population of Saint-Domingue was more than 90% slaves, governed by a small minority of white landowners who oversaw a reign of terror that saw a life expectancy of only 7 years for the enslaved people upon reaching the island.
While the French side received significant colonial attention because of its profitability, Santo Domingo on the eastern side was a totally different world on the same island.
Santo Domingo was much larger, had a much smaller population, and the residents were largely free, with an enslaved population of roughly 20%. The free population of Santo Domingo focused on ranching and subsistence farming, drawing very little attention from Spain.
In 1791, the slaves in Saint-Domingue launched the Haitian Slave Revolt, which I have covered in a previous episode. Led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the revolutionaries defeated French forces already devastated by yellow fever, rugged terrain, and the tropical climate.
In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the creation of the new state of Haiti. It was the first republic to liberate itself from European slavery, but it was, unfortunately, short-lived.
Haiti struggled to transition to independence, particularly as it tried to maintain its lucrative sugar trade. Global isolation swiftly compounded Haiti’s economic distress.
Terrified that a slave revolt would spread to their own shores, the United States, Britain, and Spain imposed a crippling diplomatic quarantine, with the U.S. refusing to recognize Haiti until 1862. The freed population, which had lived under French slavery, refused to work under a system of gang labor, creating challenges for a nation that needed to establish an economic and political infrastructure.
Desperate for revenue, Haiti’s early rulers enacted coercive state labor codes that resembled slavery, promoting the idea of work gangs who were connected to particular plantations. By 1806, Dessalines reinstituted forced labor to get exports to return to their earlier levels. Haiti was learning the tragic truth: a strictly monoculture, cash-crop-based economy was not compatible with the high ideals of their revolution.
In 1821, Spanish Santo Domingo declared independence from Spain, planning to join Simón Bolívar’s Gran Colombia experiment. Haiti saw a golden opportunity and marched forces in to fill the void.
Haitian forces gambled that Spain was too busy with dozens of revolutions happening simultaneously to care what happened on Hispaniola.
Fortunately for Santo-Domingo, it avoided the financial ruin that was about to be unleashed on Haiti. The French King Charles X forever changed Haiti’s fortunes in 1825, when France sent 14 warships to Port-au-Prince and demanded an outrageous payment of 150 million gold Francs, later renegotiated down to a slightly less absurd 90 million gold francs.
The audacity of the King was backed by the belief that the French were owed for the loss of slaves and property from the Haitian Revolution more than twenty years earlier. To put this in perspective, the sum demanded by France was greater than what the United States paid for the Louisiana Purchase.
France threatened a naval blockade and withheld diplomatic recognition until Haiti paid the debt. The sum was impossible for Haiti to pay, and France knew it, as it was ten times Haiti’s total budget. To pay the debt, Haiti had to agree to high-interest loans from French banks that nearly doubled the balance.
Sometimes referred to as “the double debt” or even “the ransom,” this indemnity devastated the Haitian economy for decades. In 2022, the New York Times published an investigation into the Hatian debt and noted: Two decades after declaring independence, the French forced formerly enslaved Haitians at gunpoint to pay reparations to the people who had enslaved them… It was the first and only time a formerly enslaved people paid reparations to their former enslavers.
Haiti paid 112 million French francs in principal, loan costs, and interest associated with the independence indemnity by the time the debt was paid of in 1947. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to roughly $560 million 2022 U.S. dollars. When the broader effects on Haiti’s economic development are included, the estimated loss rises to as much as $115 billion.
The debt had dramatic consequences on the other side of the island as well. The need to quickly finance the first debt payment to the French prompted extraordinary taxes and forced labor on the people of Santo Domingo.
The Dominicans were forced to speak French and in opposition, La Trinitaria, a political resistance movement, emerged and succeeded in ending Haitian rule.
The Dominican Republic was founded in 1844, although periodic battles continued with Haiti until 1856. The new republic faced significant economic challenges of its own, but it was not saddled with the enormous foreign debt that Haiti faced.
In the late 19th century, foreign investment and a mass migration from Cuba facilitated the expansion of sugar cultivation in the Dominican Republic. This openness to outside investment has been one of the major differences between the two economies.
One area both sides had in common was a brief United States occupation in the early 20th century.
The United States occupied Haiti from 1915–1934. During the occupation, U.S. Marines disbanded the Haitian army, introduced forced labor to build roads, rewrote the constitution to allow foreign land ownership, and transferred state finances to U.S. banks.
In the Dominican Republic, the U.S. imposed direct military rule from 1916 to 1924.
As the Island entered the 20th century, both sides faced profound challenges. Those challenges were compounded by conflicts between the two sides, including the Parsley Massacre of 1937.
The Parsley Massacre was orchestrated by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ordered the systematic slaughter of ethnic Haitians living in the northwestern border region, creating an intense Anti-Haitian environment in the Dominican Republic.
For much of the 20th century, the two nations had nearly identical populations, yet economic conditions have radically diverged.
Both nations had a similar GDP throughout the pre-WWII period. today’s numbers, however, show a stark different, with the Dominican Republic’s economy approximately four times that of Haiti’s, in both gross and per capita terms.
The statistical divide doesn’t stop there: Dominicans live, on average, ten years longer, enjoy near-universal electricity access compared to under 50% in Haiti, and hold a 30-point edge in literacy rates. All told, Haiti ranks near the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index, 86 places below its next-door neighbor.
While the Haitian debt is a huge part of the difference between the two countries, we cannot discount each countries experience with dictators in the 20th century.
Haiti, under thirty years of Duvalier rule, saw François Duvalier (aka “Papa Doc”) and Jean-Claude Duvalier (aka “Baby Doc”). They siphoned off much of the Haitian economy for personal enrichment.
Meanwhile, the Trujillo government, in the Dominican republic, while very authoritarian, emphasized infrastructure, technology, and education. The Dominican Republic was one of the first nations in the Western Hemisphere to establish Free Trade Zones as part of its globalization campaign.
Strong storms in the Caribbean have always impacted Hispaniola. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are common, but Haiti’s casualty numbers and pace of recovery have been much worse than the Dominican Republic’s.
The levels of deforestation can be seen in satellite images. The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is clearly visible, even though there is no natural barrier between the two countries.
Today, many international observers classify Haiti as a failed state. Over the past decade, severe gang violence and institutional collapse have paralyzed the country. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic enjoys high levels of development and is now classified as an upper-middle-income economy with a representative democracy, ranked between Brazil and Albania.
On a personal note, several years ago I crossed the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The difference in the levels of development on either side was stunningly obvious the moment you crossed over. There are very few border crossings in the world where development levels differ so dramatically.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic are linked by geography, but they have followed very different paths and ended up in very different places.