The Next Island Over

Right—the point could be made: who am I to talk? After all, as a citizen of the United States, do I have the right to talk about anybody else’s mess of an immigration policy? Do we really do better?

In this case, yes. Because the supreme court of the Dominican Republic has just directed the authorities to examine birth certificates all the way back to 1929—and I seriously want to know how they chose that year—in order to find out who is of Haitian descent. Why? Because children born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents will no longer be considered citizens.

Both Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island—Hispaniola—but it sort of stops there. There’s the language difference—the Haitians speak Creole, Dominicans speak Spanish. There’s the cultural difference—the Haitians had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and are proud of their black heritage. The Dominicans?

Time to confess—I had thought they roughly followed our own history: Spanish up until the time of the Spanish-American War, and then independent. But no—they have a history that very much defines the animosity between them. Because seven years after the slave revolt of 1801, a group of people from Dominican Republic attempted to take over Haiti for the Spanish. In fact, the tables turned, and it was Haiti who, in 1822, took over the entire island. And when the Dominican Republic finally achieved independence in 1844, it was from Haiti, not Spain.

Then came the massacre. Haitians had been crossing the border for years, and worked in the sugar cane fields—which is a job you don’t want to have: it’s blazingly hot, and cane has spines that can cause serious injury. So the Dominicans had been happy to have someone else do the work. So what was the problem? For mostly political reasons, a scapegoat had to be found. And the Haitians, it was said, were taking jobs.

Sound familiar?

Right—so Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of Dominican Republic, decided in 1937 to send the boys over to the border and ask every dark skinned guy to say the word perejil (parsley). Easy for Spanish speakers—not so easy for Creole tongues. And the price for a badly spoken r? Well, the boys had machetes. Was it 10,000 or 25,000? We’ll never know.

The whole question of race is super charged in the Dominican Republic, so much so that Trujillo used to wear white makeup. And as a student once told me, to be rich and white in Santo Domingo is to live with absolute freedom to do as you like. Yes, you can get away with murder.

Or get away with denying about 200,000 people citizenship, which is what the supreme court decided to do. And that’s no mean thing—well, mean in the sense of small—because without citizenship, kids can’t go to school, people can’t work. So what’s the alternative? Go to Haiti, where they don’t speak the language, and where there’s no work?

I once argued that I believed in cities but not nations. Why? Well, consider this comment from an article in The Guardian:

“I am Anglo-American and my wife is Haitian. We have a daughter of five whose biological father was Haitian (died in earthquake in 2010), but whose registered father is a Dominican of Haitian descent. She has a Dominican passport, though whether she will now lose it, I don't know. I don't think the DR government is efficient enough to investigate everyone of Haitian descent to revoke their citizenship, carry out DNA testing, etc.

Our younger daughter was born in the DR and thus became a stateless person at birth. I was able to get a UK birth certificate for her and perhaps one day she will come to the UK. Thus I have a family in which four different nationalities are represented: Myself British and US, my wife Haitian, my daughter British, and my stepdaughter Dominican.”

Well, I hope that daughter manages to stay in the Dominican Republic, because if she gets sent to Haiti? According to one source, she has a 10% chance of becoming a slave.

The Caribbean is a strange region—an archipelago of islands very close and yet very far from each other. We typically know little of each other and care less. But here’s what P J Patterson, former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:

No one can be hoodwinked as to the reason and the purpose for this kind of discriminatory legislation. Within the region we have an obligation to speak and we cannot allow such inequities to go without our strongest condemnations.”

Sadly, our “strongest condemnations” may not be enough….