Not California. Haiti. It's the culture, stupid.
You can try to rebuild buildings and ports, but buildings and ports are useless in what has become a feral, non-Western culture since the French abandoned it. In Haiti, guys with tire patches sit on the side of the road and throw nails onto the road to generate business. When people get a kid they don't want, they dump it off at the Catholic orphanages promising to return someday to pick the kid up if they get a bigger house. Many are oblivious to time and when they say next week they mean maybe next year. Haiti has two classes, the politicians and the rest. There are no oppressor Capitalists because there is no capital, so Socialism doesn't have a prayer.
Except that Haiti has tons of NGOs and GOs like AID with millions of dollars, and none of them make all that much difference. They seem to exist for purposes of moral vanity. The corrupt pols make deals with the NGOs. Foreign NGO administrators do stints there to earn their third-world stripes so they can earn a promotion while living in guarded NGO enclaves, then they get the heck out before they become clinically depressed or go postal from frustration. I've heard the stories from guys who have worked there for NGOs.
All you have to do is to compare the hell-hole of Haiti with the Dominican Republic on the other half of the island. The DR built itself and is now a major tourist, tobacco, and farming center. People in the DR work hard and worry like normal bourgeois people. Is that a good thing?
Culture is the ultimate infrastructure. You can quote me on that.
That's why it is so difficult to help Haiti get on a more solid footing, and why businesses are not eager to build plants there. Haiti's culture is dysfunctional from a Westerner's point of view but not necessarily from their point of view. They are fatalists ("Si Bondye testaman" is their key phrase), live day-to-day and there is lots of lying, cheating and stealing, bribery, and rape. That's why the NGOs so often fail in their efforts - except in providing the medical care which is entirely imported.
They are a happy, often amoral and hedonistic people, I am told, who don't bother with worrying the way we do. Go figure. OK, they are materially poor. They have a thriving black market in, I am told, extremely high-quality marijuana. The ports which receive donations are their cargo cults.
The Haitians will never become like New Hampshire Yankees, Germans, or Vietnamese no matter how much money people throw in there. If the West were truly multicultural, we would leave them alone to do their thing.
Just my amateur opinion. Debate, and better information, welcome.
