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ISLAND REVISITED:

A review of "Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola" by Michele Wucker

by Daniel Simidor

[Originally published in HAITI PROGRES, April 7 - 13, 1999]

Dominican and Haitian politicians often greet each other with hearty declarations of fraternity. "Siamese twin," they exclaim, "we are two wings of the same bird."

But author Michele Wucker, a North American journalist, does not buy such posturing. Instead of one bird, she characterizes the Dominican Republic and Haiti as "two roosters in a fighting arena," the metaphor used in the title and pervasively hroughout
the book.

Indeed, Why the Cocks Fight (Hill and Wang, New York, 1999) is hyped by its publishers as "an eye-opening report on two hostile neighbors," and author Madison Smartt Bell tells the reader, in a back cover plug, that this is a work "with a deep and thorough root in history."

But the Haitian reader may have a problem with both the book's metaphor and rendition of history. If Dominicans are deeply hostile toward Haitians ("In Santo Domingo, the mere mention of Haiti provokes passionate reactions," we read on page 1), does it follow that Haitians share the same gut reaction toward their neighbors to the east? And has Wucker really looked at the history of conflict between the two peoples from the perspective of Haiti, that of a besieged, embattled, embargoed, and isolated free republic of former slaves?

A Lopsided Account

A Haitian reader has problems beginning with the title. Haitians do not call the island Hispaniola. Ours has never been a struggle for a Spanish or European birthright. The name Hispaniola (Little Spain) is a terrible insult to the memory of the original
inhabitants of the island, wiped out in a mere thirty years by the Spanish conquistadores. Haitians prefer "the island of Haiti," although a better compromise might be the Taino name Kiskeya (or Quisqueya) which Dominicans also use.

Also, in spite of its title, this is primarily a book about the Dominican Republic, about the lives of Dominicans in their country and in New York City. Rich in anecdotes about the Dominican reality, the book is laconic with respect to Haiti. The narrative describes Haitian lives in the bateys (cane cutter camps) and in the slums of Santo Domingo, but mainly in discussions of Dominican events. Often, the Haitian detail appears as an afterthought or an aside.

The author's discussion of the culture of the cockfight, in comparison, is more textured, lively, and well documented, although prone to exaggeration.

     The rooster has come to represent all aspects of daily life
     in Hispaniola: politics, home, territory, courtship,
     healing, sustenance, the passage of time, and brotherhood...
     The cockfight is a symbol of both division and community,
     opposite sides of the same coin. Fascinated by the violence
     of the cockfight and the combat between men that it
     symbolizes, Dominicans and Haitians practicing the national
     sport of their countries also celebrate brotherhood by their
     unified devotion to the ritual and code of honor without
     which the sport and betting around it could not take place
     (p. 12).

In reality, cockfighting is not Haiti's national sport (it is actually a game, not a sport). Haiti's national sport is soccer. The same is true, one suspects, in the DR. But as the narrative progresses, the rooster becomes more than just a symbol:

     To enter politics on Hispaniola is, in effect, to enter a
     fighting ring... The leaders on both sides of the island
     have themselves taken the identity of the fighting cock so
     intimately that the rooster is man and the man rooster.
     Politics begin to imitate the cockfight instead of the other
     way around (p. 16).

The rooster, in fact, plays no such role in the politics, literature or folklore of Haiti. It is instructive that the author has to borrow her meager references to the rooster in
Haitian history from Martinique's celebrated intellectual, Aime Cesaire. Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide did not select the rooster as the symbol of his 1990 Lavalas electoral campaign movement because he was an avowed cockfighter or because of the rooster's intrinsic qualities. It was in opposition to the Duvalierist feathered symbol, the "pintade" or guinea hen. Ms. Wucker, stretching to create metaphors and parallels between the two sides of the island, tends toward inaccurate generalizations. In fact, the rooster metaphor seems to caricature Dominicans,
too.

The author's sources throughout the book are consistently Dominican. She acknowledges an impressive list of Dominican scholars and research groups, with hardly anybody worth mentioning on the Haitian side -- except perhaps a Creole tutor
in Milwaukee and the late Philippe Wilson Desir whose "sonorous voice on the radio" she found entertaining. The other Haiti sources are the usual suspects: foreign "experts", journalists and NGO types. Of the nearly 100 titles in her bibliography, 45
entries are written by Dominicans or published in the Dominican Republic, but only ten are by Haitian authors. Of the ten entries in question, only Jean Price-Mars's La Republique d'Haiti et la Republique Dominicaine deals at length with the history of the
two countries, and Wucker only seems to use his head count of Haitians wounded and killed in the 1937 massacre in the Dominican Republic.

We learn in the preface that the author speaks and writes Spanish fluently, that she has resided for extensive periods in the Dominican Republic, and has worked as a correspondent for Dominican publications. Indeed her only extended trip to Haiti,
in the aftermath of the 1991 military coup against Aristide's government, was as a foreign correspondent for the Dominican Listin Diario. The book is liberally peppered with odd expressions and phrases in Spanish, to the point that Spanish words like ingenios and yola are used to describe Haitian situations, whereas the Creole equivalents gildiv and kannte are perfectly available.

But the book's single most offensive passage suggests that the author's glossary of some thirty Creole words and expressions "taken together are an abridged linguistic sketch of life" on the Haitian side of the island. Key concept-words in this vital list
include blan, botpipel, konpa-direk, tontons-macoutes and vodou. The stereotyping could not be more insulting if it was intended.

Historical misconceptions

On another front, Wucker seems to have just gotten some important history wrong. On page 100, she asserts that the Haitian economy was imploding in the 1880s: "Haiti drifted from one dictatorship to another, and Haitians, despairing, took hope from word of the reviving Dominican sugar trade." But there is scant evidence that Haitians were looking for work in the Dominican sugar industry before the turn of the century. The Haitian economy was in fact relatively strong during the stable rule of Lysius Salomon (1879- 1888) and Florvil Hyppolite (1889-1896). And if most Haitian
governments of that period ended with a so-called revolution, the same situation prevailed next door.

For Haitian workers, the big push toward the Dominican sugar plantations did not come until 1910 with the infamous McDonald Contract which, in exchange for the construction of a railroad linking Port-au-Prince with Cap Haitien and Gros Morne, ceded 20 kilometers of land on either side of the rails to a U.S. company by that name for the production of bananas. The land belonged, of course, to thousands of small peasant families who were expropriated without due process. That trend intensified with the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, which institutionalized the Corvee (forced labor). It took the U.S. Marines, who sowed fear and violence on behalf of U.S. capital, to really uproot the Haitian peasant from his land.

On another point, Wucker seems to have difficulty grasping the defensive character of Haiti's early claims over the whole island. She seems to assume that the Dominican side of the island was a nation, when in fact it was not, for the greater part of the 19th century. Haitian national identity began to emerge as early as 1791, when Boukman and his fellow slaves at Bois Caiman declared the former French colony a black man's country and embarked on a war of extermination against all whites. Haiti won its independence in 1804 and spent the next fifty years strategizing against the very real threat of invasion and recolonization from France, England, Spain or the U.S. by way of Dominican territory. Meanwhile, Dominican slave-owners tried repeatedly to entice the U.S. and the European powers to claim it as a protectorate or as an outright colony. Dominican national consciousness did not coalesce even after the country's second independence in 1844.

Historians on both sides of the island have pointed out how Dominican national consciousness became obsessed with race and culture vis-a-vis Haiti, rather than genuine sovereignty. "The feeling of sovereignty which is one of the essential components of nation-building was alien to the Dominican ruling class," wrote Haitian historian Gerard Pierre-Charles. The "blancos de la tierra" (land-owners of mixed race who became "white" after a few generations), isolated on their "hatos" (cattle ranches) and clinging to their supposed Spanish identity, did not care which colonial power ruled over them, as long as their rulers were white. Thus the Bale Treaty of 1795, by which Spain ceded its territory in the east to France, was not a matter of concern until the black slave Toussaint-Louverture, who became Governor-General of the colony on behalf of the French, decided to extend his administrative authority eastward over the former Spanish dominion. Indeed, after Napoleon had Toussaint kidnaped to France in 1802, the Dominican ruling class heartily embraced French rule in order to keep the unruly Haitians at bay.

That happy arrangement came to an end in 1809 with Napoleon's usurpation of the Spanish crown on behalf of his brother Joseph. With help from Haiti and from British naval forces in the Caribbean, the so-called Seybo Rebellion threw the French out.
But although most of Latin and Central America was fighting for independence from Spain, the Dominican insurrectionists chose to revert to their former status as a Spanish colony. Some ten years later, inspired by the Bolivarian revolutions sweeping Latin America, Nunez Caceres brought Spanish rule to an end, but only to invoke a Colombian protectorate. In the confusion that followed, Jean-Pierre Boyer, president of a recently reunited Haiti, sought common cause with his counterparts next door. When his troops arrived in Santo Domingo in February 1822 to proclaim the "indivisibility" of the island, they were welcomed with enthusiasm.

The Dominicans reclaimed their independence from Haiti in 1844. But in 1861, Pedro Santana, the celebrated "Seybo Lion" and a hero of Dominican independence, claiming a fear of Haiti, once again turned his country over to Spain as a protectorate. The
black Dominican general Gregorio Luperon, with Haitian President Geffrard's assistance, fought a successful war of national liberation, and the Dominican Republic celebrated its third independence in 1865. Meanwhile Washington was waging an intense campaign of strong-arm diplomacy and trade advantages and in February 1870, Dominicans voted overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. annexation. Only the strength of the former abolitionist movement in the U.S. Senate spared the island the fate of becoming a colony as Puerto-Rico would some decades later. The anguish of a
national identity in constant search for itself is summed up in this Dominican jingle of a century ago:

A Spaniard I was born yesterday
In the afternoon I became French
And an Ethiopian during the night
Today they say I am British
What shall I be tomorrow?

How did Boyer rule over the Dominican territory? In accordance with the Haitian Constitution, he abolished slavery and barred the former white colonists from owning land. But as a feudal ruler, he also imposed the Corvee and stopped short of an
agrarian reform that would transfer the confiscated land to the masses of farm hands, sharecroppers and small farmers who actually tilled it. He favored the "blancos de la tierra," who were in fact of mixed race like himself, and in return enjoyed a measure of neutrality and support from them. But to keep control over the vast fertile new territories, Boyer had to entrust administrative control to his own corrupt henchmen. He harbored little tolerance for dissent, shut down the Catholic University of Santo Domingo, and raided the coffers of several wealthy Spanish monasteries to raise money toward payment of Haiti's infamous French indemnity of 1825, measures that did no go over well with the deeply Catholic Dominican population.

The last Haitian attempt at reunification of the island was orchestrated by Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque in 1855. President Santana had once again offered the Dominican Republic as a protectorate almost simultaneously to the French, the
British, and the United States. The superpowers of the day were outmaneuvering each other in an elaborate game of craps for control of the prosperous new republic while uniting in a coalition against the much maligned Soulouque whose slogan, "One Country, One Flag" for the whole island was a direct challenge to their hegemonic ambitions. Dominican warships had burned down the towns of Anse-a-Pitres and Saltrou on the southeast coast of Haiti. The U.S. government, according to the Weekly Herald was considering a full-scale invasion from the South, to annex the entire island. The last straw for Soulouque was a draft annexation treaty between the Santana government and the slave- owning United States. In December 1855, the Haitian head of state marched his army into Dominican territory, but was soundly
defeated by a smaller but more politically motivated Dominican force.

Soulouque is oddly missing from Ms. Wucker’s narrative. In fact, Haitian heads of state do not command much attention in this work, except for Aristide who almost gets a full chapter, devoted to the coup against him, and Henri Christophe who is singled out for ridicule. "At Sans Souci, near Milot, a whole court of black dukes and lords presided over the hamlets nearby, to which Christophe gave names like Marmelade and Limonade." (pp. 13-14). For Wucker, this must be quainter than white dukes and lords presiding over European hamlets. It must be almost as bizarre as
"niggers speaking French," as U.S. statesman William Jennings Bryant said.

Antihaitianismo, a One-Way Street

The author is quite aware of the deep hatred many Dominicans harbor toward Haitians in general. "The poor Haitians are like animals," explains a particularly helpful landlady. "Haiti would be better off if someone dropped a bomb on it," echoes a
publisher in Santo Domingo. "The Haitian who makes his way into our country carries all kinds of vices and is affected by the physiological deficiencies that are inherent to the dregs of that society," explains a 1946 Dominican history textbook.

This hatred of Haiti and of Haitians, sustained by the ruling class, has even filtered down to the lower strata of the population. As the veteran Dominican diplomat Lil Despradel wrote in 1970: "The Dominican worker or peasant, mulatto or black, who hears frequently about his Spanish and Indian ancestors and who is qualified as 'Indio' in official documents, slowly adopts the racial ideology of the dominant classes and considers himself of Indian origin." (In denial about their African ancestry, many
Dominican "Indios" are not even aware that they are abetting the cover-up of the Western Hemisphere's first genocide.) Vodou is condemned as a religion of savages, and Haitian culture is denigrated as "a disgusting mixture of French corruption and the
loose customs of the African slaves." It is ironic that in a country where the majority of the population has African lineage, civilization is equated with Europe and whiteness. The Dominican Republic is the only country during World War II that welcomed Nazis and Jews with equal enthusiasm.

The racist ideology summarized above is taught in Dominican schools and is a central element of Dominican nationalism and sense of identity. Nor is it fading away. Some had hoped that the new Dominican president, Leonel Fernandez, a man of color raised
in the land of racism and apple pie (the United States), would sing a different tune. They were quickly disillusioned. "At PLD rallies, fans waved giant stuffed lions in purple robes representing Leonel the lion dressed in the party color. They had also gone out to get black monkey dolls, which they held in the mouths of the lions. They told racist jokes..." Wucker tells us (p. 189). Pena Gomez, the dark-skinned candidate of Haitian parentage was publicly derided as an ape, while Balaguer conspired with the "revolutionary" Juan Bosch to insure that Fernandez would win. Anti-Haitianism is alive and well in the Dominican Republic.

But to what extent is this hatred mutual? Here the analogy of the two roosters in a fighting arena collapses for lack of evidence. The author tells us that political careers are made on both sides of the island by whipping up chauvinistic sentiments against the people next door. This is undeniably true in the DR, but not in Haiti. There is no evidence that Haitians have widespread feelings of hostility toward Dominicans, not even after the Dominican ruling class conspired with European colonial powers to
re-enslave Haiti. There is only one rooster in Ms. Wucker’s arena.

Perhaps in tacit recognition of this fact, the author writes something very curious. "In Santo Domingo," she writes, "much of the anti-Haitian rhetoric I heard came from one man, Joaqu¡n Balaguer." Anti-Haitianism, then, is not really a problem, only an old man's phantasm. Besides, "the reactions of Dominicans to Haitians closely resembled the way Texans spoke about Mexicans in that illegal immigration, jobs, and land were the real issues behind the racist slurs" (p. ix). In other words, Mexican and Haitian "illegals" represent unfair competition against native workers. In the final analysis, discrimination may be wrong, but illegal immigrants bring it upon themselves! The author goes on to explain that the jobs in question are seldom acceptable to the
native work force. But this liberal concession does not explain that it is capitalism's international division of labor that forces the migration of workers, nor why there is no similar backlash against the multitude of immigrants from Europe who pose a more direct threat today against U.S.-born or Dominican-born workers. What matters here is how Wucker, with her own anti- immigrant bias, tries to absolve Dominicans for their fear and hatred of Haitians and of their own African heritage.

A Primer for Kiskeyan-Americans

To end this review here would leave the impression that the book is without merit. This is hardly the case. The author tries her best to be objective with the material at hand. Her descriptions of conditions in the bateys and the Haitian slums of Santo
Domingo are memorable. Nor does she spare the two caudillos who have dominated Dominican politics for most of this century: Rafael Trujillo and Joaqu¡n Balaguer.

Ms. Wucker’s narrative also illuminates a number of facts about the 1937 massacre. The victims were not mainly seasonal workers. In 1929, during the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, the U.S. government forced tiny and densely populated Haiti to cede large portions of its territory to the Dominican Republic as part of a newly "negotiated" border agreement. Trujillo welcomed the increase in the size of his territory, but had no use for the thousands of black, Creole-speaking, Haitians who had lived for generations on that land. They had to be flushed out so that the
area could be converted to pasture. Meanwhile, the Great Depression of the 1930s had sent the price of sugar crashing, and the migrant Haitian cane cutters had to be gotten rid of. The massacre served several simultaneous purposes: it cleared the
newly acquired territory in the border region of its indigenous Haitian population; it dealt with the problem of unwanted migrant workers on the bateyes; it unified and rallied Dominican national sentiment against a much despised foe, and in one fell swoop cleansed Trujillo's and Dominican consciousness of a century-old feeling of inferiority toward Haitians.

The author's account of the Boyer unification regime is equally balanced. She finds that it was motivated and justified by the need to maintain and preserve Haiti's independence and the freedom of its people, and that for lack of a more perfect union
with Colombia, the Dominican elite welcomed the union with Haiti as the less painful form of separation from Spain; that Boyer's alleged plunder of the Dominican side was due primarily to the heavy burden of the 50-year indemnity imposed by France; that the Spanish "protectorate" of 1861, after 15 years of formal independence from Haiti, was far more humiliating and brutal than the union with Haiti; and that the Dominican Republic's second independence from Spain in 1865 was obtained with Haitian
assistance, granted in the spirit of preserving and strengthening Haiti's independence.

Ms. Wucker writes well. Her description of Balaguer's obsession in completing the Columbus Lighthouse begun by Trujillo and of the fucu (jinx) which dogged the project (which aimed at walling up all things African) makes for very entertaining reading. Her
portrait of Sister Boyer, a Haitian woman living in a Haitian quarter in Santo Domingo, and of Haitian madam sara (small merchants) in the DR is compassionate and respectful, showing that the author's heart is in the right place. She details how the heavy hand of the police and paramilitary groups like ORDEN keeps Haitians on their toes. She also portrays how the Dominican version of the Tonton Macoutes -- the Macuteros -- engage in corruption and extortion of Haitian workers. "We all have to make a living," the Dominican Macoutes tell the author.

Throughout this book, which is her first, Michele Wucker makes the point that the cockfight is high entertainment and the sublimation of war for those who watch and train roosters for the arena. But the book works better at showing effects than causes.
The author hints at a U.S. role that "has helped shape the conditions that have resulted in violence and under-development there," but falls short of an actual investigation of that role. Ultimately, the cockfight metaphor is too confining. Ours has
never been a fight against Dominicans, but against the colonial and imperial powers, the U.S., France, Britain and Spain, which all dreamed of re-enslaving the Haitian people. For more than 60 years, Haiti held those forces at bay, and for that
accomplishment we continue to pay even today.

The author strangely fails to acknowledge the many instances of solidarity that exist between the two peoples. On the island, we share a common history of oppression from feudal landlords and a comprador bourgeoisie, from neocolonialism and U.S. domination. In the United States, our two communities share an almost identical profile: racial discrimination, hard work, police brutality, remittances to and resentment from folks back home, alienation from hyphenated children with little appreciation for rice and beans, dual citizenship, and a devastating longing for
the country we left behind.

There are at least two other books on "Hispaniola" scheduled for publication this spring. In addition, The Farming of Bones, the new novel by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the Haitian-Dominican relationship. But among all these works, Why the Cocks Fight, despite some flaws, is a commendable study by a well-meaning observer. However, it seems ironic that we, Haitians and Dominicans, should have to refer to a book in English by a North American to learn more about each other. Wouldn't it be better if we just began to look across our borders?

 

1. Kethly Millet, Les Paysans haitiens et l'occupation americaine, 1915-1930, Collectif Paroles, 1978.

2.   Genese des nations haitienne et dominicaine, by Gerard Pierre-Charles, in Nouvelle OptiqueNo. 8 (Oct.-Dec. 1970).

3.   Cited by Pierre-Charles from Franklyn Franco, Los negros, los mulatos y la nacion dominicana, Santo Domingo, 1970.

4.   Manuel Pena Battle, Historia de la cuestion fronteriza dominicano-haitiana, Ciudad Trujillo, 1946.

5.   L'Anti-haitianisme en Republique Dominicaine, by Lil Despradel, in Nouvelle Optique No. 8 (Oct.-Dec. 1970).

6.   "Manifesto to an Impartial World," by Buenaventura Baez. Cited by Despradel from Emilio Demorizi, The Dominican-Haitian War, Santo Domingo, 1944.

7.  Ross Velton, Guide to Haiti & the Dominican Republic: the Island of Hispaniola, Old Saybrook, C T: Globe Pequot Press, (March 1999). Scott Doggett and Leah Gordon, Dominican Republic & Haiti, Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet Publications (June 1999).