Haiti: When Holding On Will Cost More Than Letting Go

There is a Haitian ritual older than our constitutions and more stable than our governments. We might call it the permanent trial. Every generation appears before it, every sector takes its turn in the dock and on the bench, and the verdict is always the same: guilty, the other party. The merchant accuses the politician, the politician accuses the foreigner, the foreigner accuses corruption, corruption accuses no one because it has no spokesperson, and the country, meanwhile, goes on doing what it has done for a long time. It holds. It does not collapse, it does not recover. It holds.

I argued in an earlier column that the problem was not the elite but the machine that produces it, and in another that Haiti is not perishing, that it is being held in place, kept in a low position by a set of forces that find this immobility to their advantage. Those two pieces left a question open, and it is the one that occupies me today. Held in place by whom, exactly? And if we manage to answer, should we point fingers? Is that even where a turnaround begins?

The temptation is strong to answer with a list. The private business sector. The political class. Arms and drug traffickers. Foreign powers and their local intermediaries. Each of these suspects has a file: thick, documented, damning in places. And yet I am going to defend a position here that will displease prosecutors of every stripe: the question “who is guilty?” is badly posed, not because no one is, but because in a country like ours, guilt is a devalued currency. Everyone has some. It no longer buys anything.

EVERYONE’S FAULT IS NO ONE’S FAULT

Let us take the trial seriously, just long enough to show its limits.

The indictment against the formal private sector is well known. An economy of rents rather than production. Dominant positions in the import of essential goods. A long history of financing the political class, less out of conviction than as insurance, the way one pays a premium against the risk of ending up on the wrong side of a decision. A revealed preference for the weak state, the one that exercises no oversight, does not tax where it should, and does not enforce what would be inconvenient.

The indictment against the politicians is no kinder. A horizon reduced to the length of a term in office, often less. A view of public office as spoils rather than as a duty. A remarkable ability to turn every crisis into a bargaining position.

The one against the trafficking networks is the simplest: they are the only actors whose business explicitly requires disorder. A functioning state, controlled ports, courts that actually judge: all of that ruins them directly.

The one against the foreign actor, finally, is the oldest. Two centuries of interventions, embargoes, occupations, and tutelage disguised as assistance, and one remarkable constant: a preference for a facade of stability over real transformation, because a facade costs less and photographs better.

Four files, four plausible culprits. And that is precisely where the trial collapses. If everyone is guilty, the court can no longer set priorities, and if it cannot set priorities, it can no longer prescribe. We leave the courtroom with a sense of justice and no strategy. That is the trap of the pointed finger: it satisfies the moral need and sterilizes the political one.

But there is a deeper reason, and it deserves a closer look, because it changes the whole course of the argument that follows.

These four actors are not four independent wills that have each chosen evil. They are four players caught in the same game, and each plays the move that best protects him given what the others are playing. Look closely. The merchant finances the politician not out of taste, but because if his competitors do it and he does not, he finds himself alone and exposed. The politician shakes people down because the apparatus that should pay him and oversee him does neither. The trafficker thrives because every point of entry into the country has become a private negotiation. The foreigner goes along because, seen from afar, immobility looks like stability.

Each is a prisoner of the others’ behavior. Whoever changed course first, alone, would lose immediately, with no guarantee that anyone would follow. So no one moves. Economists have a learned name for this situation, but you do not need the name to grasp what it is: a circle in which every hand grips another’s wrist, and in which loosening your grip means falling. A low-level equilibrium, a shameful one, but an equilibrium in the full sense: a state that no one has an interest in being the first to leave.

Hence a consequence that our history confirms with monotonous cruelty: replace any player, and the game goes on. Generations of new figures have entered this circle with intentions we are willing to believe were sincere. The circle digested them. It is not that the men were weak. It is that the structure was stronger, and a structure is not impressed by biographies.

CHANGING THE QUESTION

If the trial leads nowhere, let us change the question. The right one, it seems to me, is not “who is most at fault?” but “who can move first at the lowest cost?” In the circle of gripping hands, not everyone holds on in the same way. Some would have a long way to fall if they let go. Others, in reality, are wearing themselves out holding on and would gain by opening their hand, if only they could be sure they would not be the only ones.

It is an uncomfortable shift. It amounts to saying that responsibility, in a deadlocked system, is measured not by past faults but by present room for maneuver. The peasant farmer in the Artibonite and the shipowner in the capital are prisoners of the same circle, but the price of their exit is not the same, and that difference in price allocates responsibility far better than any moral tribunal.

So let us run the four positions through this new filter.

The trafficker is ruled out from the start. In no scenario does he gain from change. He is not a candidate for the turnaround; he is its obstacle. His participation is not negotiated; it is either neutralized or endured.

The politician is poorly placed for a reason that has nothing to do with virtue: time. His survival is measured in months. The turnaround we are talking about pays off over decades. Asking the political class, as the system produces it and squeezes it, to carry such a long investment is like asking someone who does not know whether he will eat tomorrow to save for retirement. He can go along with a movement. He cannot start one.

The foreigner has the means but not the skin in the game. He does not live here, his children do not grow up here, and his choices are made elsewhere, according to logics in which Haiti weighs what it weighs, which is to say, little. History, long and recent alike, teaches the same thing: the outside actor can freeze a situation, worsen it, sometimes loosen it for a while. He has never transformed it. Waiting for him to take the initiative means repeating our oldest mistake: entrusting sovereignty to others in the hope of reaping its fruits.

That leaves the fourth defendant. And this is where the analysis becomes unsettling.

THE PARADOX OF CAPITAL

Haiti’s formal private sector combines three assets that no other player holds together. None of the three is a moral quality. They are properties of position, and that is precisely why they matter.

The first asset is numbers. Or rather, the lack of them. This country’s organized capital consists of a few dozen groups that know one another, cross paths, sometimes intermarry, and above all have been doing business together for generations and will go on doing so. Now, there is an old truth about collective action: the larger a group, the less it acts. A million citizens who all want the same thing achieve nothing, because each waits for the neighbor to start and no one can monitor anyone. Thirty families who meet on the same boards of directors, by contrast, can give one another their word and check that it is kept. A sociologist would say that small groups in lasting relationships are the only ones capable of organizing themselves without a referee. In a country without a referee, that capacity is the rarest resource there is.

The second asset is calculation. Of all those holding the circle together, the private sector is the only one that would gain more from the big game than from the small one. Do the exercise. A state governed by the rule of law, contracts that are enforced, open roads, a domestic market that grows because household incomes rise, a diaspora that invests instead of merely sending enough to survive on. In that scenario, Haitian capital prospers as it never has. Its current rents are real; no one denies it. But a rent extracted from a shrinking economy is wealth that eats itself up while mistaking itself for a patrimony. The trafficker loses everything in the high scenario. The spoils politician loses his trade. Productive capital gains. This asymmetry is the most important fact in this entire column, and the least discussed.

The third asset is the signal. In the circle of gripping hands, what is missing is almost never the desire to let go. What is missing is the certainty that if I let go, others will let go with me. Everyone is waiting for a sign, and not just any sign: a costly, verifiable one that proves its sender is not bluffing. So where would the most convincing sign come from? Precisely from the actor everyone suspects of profiting from the disorder. When the prime suspect visibly changes course, everyone revises what they thought possible. A political statement does not have this effect; we have heard too many. Nor does a donor conference. A costly commitment by organized capital does.

That is the paradox, and it must be stated bluntly: the most conveniently accused actor is also the only one structurally capable of initiating the exit. Not because it is better than the others (the idea would raise a smile), but because it alone combines small numbers, a long-term interest, and the power of the signal.

THE FAULT LINE THAT MATTERS

A serious objection arises here, and honesty requires giving it its full due. There is no such thing as the Haitian private sector. There are private sectors, in the plural, and the boundary between them may be the most important fault line in the country, deeper than the one that separates the elites from the masses.

There is capital that suffers from the disorder: capital that produces, processes, employs, exports when it still can, and for which every road cut, every container held to ransom, every manager kidnapped is a dead loss. And there is capital that needs the disorder: capital whose margins exist only because controls are absent, and whose position is protected not by the law but by its absence. For the first, the circle is a prison. For the second, it is a business model.

To say that the turnaround must begin with the private sector is therefore to say something more precise and more contentious: it must begin with an open split within capital. The moment when the fraction that produces stops covering for the fraction that extracts, as it has done out of solidarity with its own milieu, out of habit, or out of fear. As long as these two capitalisms speak with one voice in the chambers of commerce and fall silent as one in the face of predation, the signal stays scrambled and the circle holds. The day they publicly set themselves apart from each other, something irreversible begins.

That day has a cost, and it would be dishonest to minimize it. Moving first means exposure. To administrative reprisals, and to reprisals pure and simple. That is why the exit cannot be an individual gesture. It must be a pact: simultaneous, verifiable, concluded among the few. Exactly the kind of commitment that only a small group with lasting relationships can afford. The argument comes full circle on its own.

NEITHER FROM ONE PLACE NOR FROM NOWHERE

Should we then give up pointing fingers? Not entirely, but we must point differently. Point at positions, not people. At business models, not family names. Putting individuals on trial feeds the outrage machine, which is also, make no mistake, a diversion machine: every scandal with a name attached consumes the public energy that a critique of the system would demand. The system loves to see its agents judged. It spares the system from being judged itself.

And can the turnaround come from a single place? No. A circle of gripping hands does not open because one hand lets go; it closes over it. But the fact that it cannot come from a single place does not mean it can start everywhere at once. Every cascade has a first domino, and choosing the first domino is not a matter of justice; it is a matter of mechanics. The first domino is the one with the most room to move and the most to gain from the fall of the others.

I have no illusions about how this argument will be received. It will displease the left because it seems to absolve capital of its historical faults, which it does not: it records them and moves beyond them, because faults are not a program. It will displease the right because it assigns capital a responsibility that capital would rather keep passing on to the state, the gangs, the international community, anyone at all, as long as it lies elsewhere.

But economic history knows few countries that got out of the rut other than through this precise moment: the day a sufficient share of capital holders concluded that the protection of the law was worth more than protection from the law. This calculation is not moral. It is an accountant’s calculation. And it may be the only good news in this entire column: we do not need to wait for a conversion of hearts, which never comes. We need a sufficient sum of well-reckoned interests to conclude that disorder now costs more than it brings in.

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Haiti is being held in place. But a grip tires the one who maintains it as much as the one who endures it. The question of our time is not who will clench their fist the hardest. It is which hand, counting carefully, will be the first to understand that it is in its interest to open.

Réginald Surin, economist