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What Does Haiti Actually Need?

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Society & Culture, Business, News

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The compounding crises in Haiti aren’t a product of bad luck. They are the result of hundreds of years of international interference and poorly-designed aid programs. 


Guest: Jonathan M. Katz, author of the forthcoming book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. Check out his Substack newsletter, The Long Version


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Here's one thing, Jonathan Katz knows.

0:07.7

A lot of people in Haiti right now, the ones who lived through that earthquake a couple weeks back, they're sleeping outdoors.

0:15.2

You know, I was in my house, the Associated Press House in Petionville when the earthquake struck in 2010.

0:21.6

And if you have been inside a building during a major earthquake, and that building has collapsed or fallen apart around you,

0:31.6

you are not eager to go indoors again anytime soon.

0:36.6

And so, yeah, so the first thing that I knew was going to happen

0:40.1

and that I heard about happening in this new quake zone

0:43.1

was that everybody was sleeping outside.

0:46.1

It took me three months to sleep indoors again.

0:50.4

And I'm guessing that a lot of people are going through the same thing.

0:55.2

Out of fear?

0:55.9

Or there just wasn't a place available?

0:58.6

Fear, concern, recognition of reality, I think, is how maybe I would describe it.

1:07.9

This summer, Jonathan watched as one tragedy after another unfolded in his old home base.

1:14.1

It is just misery upon misery upon misery.

1:17.2

First in July, there was the assassination of Haiti's president.

1:21.2

And then, in mid-August, that earthquake struck in a rural zone southwest of the capital.

1:27.1

A few days later, came flooding due to a tropical storm.

1:31.2

Jonathan says many of his old friends and colleagues, they've just had enough.

1:36.0

Anybody who can at this point is trying to leave.

1:40.1

Anybody who can try to find a way to go somewhere else is trying to do so, which really says

1:46.4

something, because Haitians are just on the whole, I mean, and this includes my friends,

...

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