Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [220]
That’s the worst-case scenario. Others of my Dominican friends responded that they have seen governments come and go over the last 40 years. Yes, they said, the current government is especially weak and corrupt, but it will surely lose the next election, and all of the candidates to become the next president seem preferable to the current president. (In fact, the government did lose the election a few months after that conversation.) Fundamental facts about the Dominican Republic brightening its prospects are that it is a small country in which environmental problems become readily visible to everybody. It is also a “face-to-face society” where concerned and knowledgeable private individuals outside the government have ready access to government ministers, unlike the situation in the United States. Perhaps most important of all, one has to remember that the Dominican Republic is a resilient country that has survived a history of problems far more daunting than its present ones. It survived 22 years of Haitian occupation, then an almost uninterrupted succession of weak or corrupt presidents from 1844 until 1916 and again from 1924 to 1930, and American military occupations from 1916 to 1924 and from 1965 to 1966. It succeeded in rebuilding itself after 31 years under Rafael Trujillo, one of the most evil and destructive dictators in the world’s recent history. From the years 1900 to 2000, the Dominican Republic underwent more dramatic socioeconomic change than did almost any other country in the New World.
Because of globalization, what happens to the Dominican Republic affects not only Dominicans but also the rest of the world. It especially affects the United States lying only 600 miles away, and already home to a million Dominicans. New York City now supports the second largest Dominican population of any city in the world, second only to the Republic’s own capital of Santo Domingo. There are also large overseas Dominican populations in Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Venezuela. The U.S. has already experienced how events in the Caribbean country immediately west of Hispaniola, namely, Cuba, threatened our survival in 1962. Hence the U.S. has a lot at stake in whether the Dominican Republic succeeds in solving its problems.
What about the future of Haiti? Already the poorest and one of the most overcrowded countries in the New World, Haiti is nevertheless continuing to become even poorer and more crowded, with a population growth rate of nearly 3% per year. Haiti is so poor, and so deficient in natural resources and in trained or educated human resources, that it really is difficult to see what might bring about improvement. If one instead looks to the outside world to help through government foreign aid, NGO initiatives, or private efforts, Haiti even lacks the capacity to utilize outside assistance effectively. For instance, the USAID program has put money into Haiti at seven times the rate at which it has put money into the Dominican Republic, but the results in Haiti have still been much more meager, because of the country’s deficiency in people and organizations of its own that could utilize the aid. Everyone familiar with Haiti whom I asked about its prospects used the words “no hope” in their answer. Most of them answered simply that they saw no hope. Those who did see hope began by acknowledging that they were in a minority and that most people saw no hope, but they themselves then went on to name some reason why they clung to hope, such as the possibilities of reforestation spreading out from Haiti’s existing small forest reserves, the existence of two agricultural areas in Haiti that do produce surplus food for internal