Doug Casey on Haiti

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

Editor’s Note: Dear Readers, I wish you could have heard Doug when we spoke about Haiti. His words may seem cold-hearted – discussing adoption in terms of misallocated capital! – but he was passionate indeed in this conversation. When he spoke of the Haitians having nothing, not even shovels and crowbars to dig their loved ones out of the rubble, his feelings about the men who’ve made Haiti the place it is were very clear. Perhaps we should do one of these live at our next conference. L

L: So, a big thing on people’s minds is the earthquake disaster in Haiti. David Galland mentioned in a recent edition of our free Daily Dispatch that you have friends helping orphans in Haiti. Can you tell us more about that and the situation in Haiti in general? You’ve been there, you’ve studied the place, and now it’s been leveled. Let’s talk about Haiti.

Doug: Sure. I first went to Haiti in about 1970, back in the days of Papa Doc, before he shed this mortal coil, then again a few years later when his son, Baby Doc Duvalier, had taken over, and most recently, when I went down in 2003 with the friend David mentioned, Susie Krabacher. (There’s a write-up of my 2001 visit in the June 2001 issue of the International Speculator, for those who are subscribers.) Susie is the wife of my attorney. She runs the Mercy and Sharing Foundation in Haiti. I’ve visited the orphanages and everything she’s put together.

But I’ve got to say that Haiti now is not the same Haiti I first visited 40 years ago.

L: What’s the difference?

Doug: Well, there are many differences, actually. For one thing, while no one knows what the population of Haiti really is, it’s probably close to triple what it was in 1970. So, people are much more evident – that’s number one. Number two, people are much more centered in Port-au-Prince. It was a much more rural, as well as less populated, country back then. Three, there were actually trees on Haiti’s part of the Island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic.

L: There still are, on the Dominican side.

Doug: Yes. When you fly over, you can actually see the difference.

L: I’ve done that. It’s the only place in the world I’ve been to that actually looks like a map: where I was, it was green on the Dominican side of the border and brown on the Haitian side.

Doug: Yes, it’s incredible. It was actually rather nice, back in the old days. I drove all around the country in the 1970s, even though you had to get special permission from the police – which took most of a morning – and there were army checkpoints along the way.  Last time, I just went to Port-au-Prince. And that’s where you see a really big difference. Port-au-Prince was a much smaller, mellower city in those days that seemed to be totally crime-free. By that I mean that you could wander back to your hotel in the middle of Port-au-Prince, totally inebriated, with hundred-dollar-bills hanging out of your pockets, and no one would touch you. I’m convinced they wouldn’t even dream of it – or if they did dream of it, it would turn into a nightmare.

I suppose, if you’re so inclined, you could think of this as one of the advantages of having a dictatorship with secret police. In the days of Doc Duvalier, they were known as the Tontons Macoutes. But they weren’t so secret; they were all basically thugs who affected dark glasses. At any rate, one thing Papa Doc knew, and Baby Doc understood as well, was that tourists were of major importance to the economy. There’s no question that if anyone touched a tourist…

L: It didn’t go well for them.

Doug: No. He’d live just long enough to sincerely regret it. So there just wasn’t much street crime. It was a little like Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union. A tourist was very safe there as well, because the place was full of secret police who made everyone afraid to do anything bad to them.

L: I’ve seen that in Belarus, which still has a KGB (and it’s called that). A college co-ed is not free to start whatever business she wants, but she will walk down a dark street in some forgotten part of Minsk with no fear at all. And there are uniforms everywhere…  olive drab or midnight black.

Doug: My opinion has long been that the number of sociopaths in a society follows a bell-shaped curve. Most Haitians, Russians, Americans, what-have-you, are basically decent human beings. But following Pareto’s Law, if 80% of them are decent, then 20% of them are, let’s say, “problematical.” Take 20% of that 20%, and now you’re dealing with the real Bad Boys. Those people were kept at bay back in the days of Papa and Baby Doc, if only by recruiting them to the Tontons Macoutes, where their depredations were focused on the people other than casual tourists. But now they’ve come out of the woodwork.

So now the whole bell curve has shifted higher on the sociopath scale. Port-au-Prince is not a nice place anymore. When I was down there last, there were four foreigners kidnapped in separate incidents, just in that week, just in that city. That’s really an incredible number, when you think about it – it’s just not the sort of place many tourists go, so there are hardly any foreigners there.

L: So where does that leave Haiti now, earthquakes aside?

Doug: Haiti, I’m sorry to say, is a total basket-case country. There is just no hope for it.