Journal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 13

Journal - Essay Example Its own history has combined these factors to produce the present generation of poverty, nonexistent infrastructure and an inefficient state that cannot handle natural disasters in the most basic ways. From these points, I believe the Haitian people are falsely portrayed by the media as the world’s most resilient. They are poor, but we are told they do not complain. They are directly in the path of the region’s earthquakes and hurricanes, but we are told they survive. The truth is that the people of Haiti are suffering from the lack of vision, policy and strategy by its political leaders. Under the 18th century French rule, Haiti was among the French empire’s richest islands, exporting over 60 and 40 percent of the coffee and sugar, respectively, which Europe consumed. It does not matter that the close to one million African slaves that worked to produce the wealth did not have a share in it, but it remains that the wealth was there. I see the downfall of Haiti starting from the revolution that earned it independence. They were free, but the leaders destroyed its plantations and infrastructure. Their former French colonists contributed to the calamities of the new nation by demanding 150 million francs in order to grant them diplomatic recognition. That was already too costly for the country, even without considering half of it that was later demanded in 1830. The present-day Haitians are in difficult times, but I concur that they are only victims of historical circumstances. France has been wringing reparations for more than a century from the country until 1 947, forcing it to take loans from foreign banks at inflated interests. To finance the loans, 80 percent of Haiti’s national budget was being paid out to the foreign banks by 1900. From then, the modern breed of leaders started giving up on servicing the repatriations or solving the problems in Haiti, and instead shifted their focus to looting for personal