The review is coming out in Rain Taxi in the next several weeks...keep watch for the commentary. This was a heart-wrenching and infuriating piece of writing...one that needs to be read to have a firm understanding of the horrors that are happening in Haiti.

“For two centuries Haiti has been a mirror of morality held up to the world. And we continue to fail the test. Analyzing US policy in Haiti means confronting the hypocrisy at the core of our own origin story”.

This quote from the prologue nicely sums up the premise of this book. The author, a researcher with years of experience on the ground, describes in painful detail the effects of decades of Western intervention in Haiti. While the core story focuses on the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, you can also learn a lot about the history of the region, the mechanics of U.S. government and diplomacy, and the perils of capitalism and neoliberalism. It was very insightful, my only complaint is that I was sometimes unnerved by a clear bias of the author - don't get me wrong, the book is well sourced and I don't blame him for his anger, but I prefer a more balanced, journalistic approach.

Thanks to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

***ARC received from Wednesday Books and NetGalley in exchange for honest review, opinions are all my own. Thank you!***

In 2010 a devesating earthquake struck Haiti following by multiple aftershocks in the days following. From miles away the world watched in distress, hearing reports on the ground about how the poorest nation in the world needed the help from communities. And communities turned out in waves, myself included, donated through a simple text messages to go directly to helping the Hatian people. Aid State takes a critical look at the outcome of that influx of aid and the history of how the US and the world has tried to “help” the people of Haiti.

Bringing it back to the earthuake what was the most frustrating thing about reading about the aid that poured into Haiti was that it came with good intentions, many of the people like myself really did think that what we were donating toward was helping the Haitian people not only recover but to begin to rebuilt after what happened to their country. But to many interests got in involved, too many with their own intentions. It wasn’t about setting the Haitian people up for a successful recovery, it was about making them continue to rely on foreign aid. Instead of purchasing food from local famers so they could buy seeds for their next harvest, food that would go to feed people that had been forced from their homes by the earthquake foreign aid food fed them. Outside companies said they would give the farmers seeds instead of the funds to purchase them themselves. Demonstrating how just a single year of changes can have a long lasting impact. Sure it makes the company offering look good but it is about them looking good, not about helping the people. The book does a good job of balancing the good of wanting to help and how it can go so bad.

There is a lot of focus on the Clintons and how they seem to treat Haiti as some project that is ultimately about making themselves look better. Maybe there come from a place of genuinely wanting to help the country but it seems to forget the people that live in it and that it is not about them. The Clintons and many other agencies want to do it for themselves, to be the ones to solve the problem in Haiti but it just creates a society reliant on outside aid. I never felt like the book was singling them out but it cannot be denied that they are large players in the aid game in Haiti

While the book starts with the Earthquake it covers the history of Haiti from its independence from the French up through present day followed the assassination of Jovenel Moise in 2021. How the dictatorship of the Duvaliers hangs heavy over the country as it is trying to recover. It also dives into the way their government is run, a fascinating look at how outside countries exert their will when it comes to candidates and how the election is run. Yes its a mess but its not a mess on its own, there are outside forces that are at play helping to to be an even bigger mess. The history presented in the book does a good job of casting a good picture that makes it easy to understand how Haiti ended up where it did.

One of the things that really stuck with me is the idea that Haiti is not a failed state, to be a failed state one has to be given the chance to fail. Haiti has always had someone interfering with them, long before the current state of basically holding the country hostage through aid in an attempt to help them. Even during the brutal rule of Duvalier aid has been used as a tool in order to control to the government of Haiti and the people.

Haiti deserves the right to pave their own path, without countries putting conditions on aid to do as they want or else, without the UN enforcing its will in the name of peacekeeping. If that results in their failure and having to rebuilt it will at least be on their own terms which is something every independent country, which is what Haiti is despite what people may want people to think, has a right to.

This enlightening book exposes the historical entanglement of Haitian interests with US and European capitalist powers. It reveals a pattern of exploitation dressed as aid, compounded by natural disasters. The book is fascinating and easy to read, but also heart-wrenching. It demonstrates the need to work at a grass-roots level to give the people of Haiti control over their own destiny.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

The Fractured Narrative of the Mismanagement of Disaster Relief After the Haitian Earthquakes

This blurb does not really directly specify what the “Prologue” opens with: “On August 14, 2021, about one hundred miles to the west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, the tectonic plates lurking beneath the earth’s surface slipped, producing a 7.2 magnitude earthquake – twice as powerful as the one that had hit in 2010…” This event was at the top of minds a couple of years ago, but as the years go by, it is necessary to specify that this is the disaster that this book explains the aftermath of.
After Hurricane Katrina, I was so shocked by this event that a few weeks later I drove from South Carolina there to look at the destruction to see if I could help with the reconstruction. I had imagined was taking place. However, to my surprise, there was nobody around that was actually reconstructing anything. When I offered to clean up a debris-littered yard, or questioned a homeless man if I could help, the men responded with requests of an inappropriate nature. I could not find any aids organizations to assist. And when I ate in a restaurant, the waitress and visitors seemed upset that I was eating up their food. I then visited a decade later, and found that shops had been redone with extreme luxury, but there were still remains of broken up buildings along highways and still people living in trailers that could not rebuild their homes. This book’s premise is that there is something unusual about the disfunction of Haiti’s inability to respond to 2 major earthquakes 10 years apart. But American cities are equally as incapable of responding to natural disasters. This perspective might help this author to gain a deeper understanding of these problems. Corruption eats up most of the relief funds both in New Orleans and in Haiti. Johnston does compare the “failed state” response to the Haiti earthquake with the failed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. American businessmen and politicians did corrupt both of these disasters. “In Afghanistan, the US spent billions in an effort to prop up unpopular presidents, from Hamid Karzai to Ashraf Ghani. As in Haiti, the only thing keeping these leaders in power had been foreign support.” The money sent in “foreign aid” to these countries were corruptly eaten up by the white-collar criminals at these “aid” organizations who take most of the money, while merely doing the minimum required to sell to the media the idea that they should receive continued funding. And the benevolent propaganda of America as a savior is so successful that, as this intro explains, many Haitians have traveled to Mexico and walk into Rio Grande only to be “charged” at by the border patrol agents there to block their attempt to enter the US.
The first chapter on “The ‘Compassionate Invasion’” begins with a description of Haitian President Rene Preval’s luxurious Palace. The tour he makes of the region after the earthquake is then presented. This is followed by perspectives of others across Haiti. “From the hillside perch, the city below appeared gone, hidden by a rapidly expanding cloud of dust. They could hear screams coming from the city’s densely packed neighborhoods in the distance and the collapsed Hotel Montana nearby…”
This book is a series of newspaper articles about different perspectives and times in the history between a couple of these earthquakes in Haiti. It could be improved if the author connected ideas more clearly, and spent fewer words on imagining what different actors were thinking. But it is a very useful account of these disasters and how the aid was mismanaged for historians, economists and others who are in the business of understanding the implications of such narratives.

I didn’t know anything like this was happening in Haiti until I read this book. It was well spoken and I thought the information was to the point. Jake Johnston has a great way of keeping the reader and sharing what needed to be said.