RePost & Commentary on CNN's 'Haiti Set Back for Decades' story....

In this blog, in the weeks ahead, I'll concentrate on the enormous challenge that looms: rebuilding Haiti.

Below is one of what will be many, many articles, analyses, and opinion pieces related to Haiti's uncertain future. This CNN.Com report highlights the negative impact of the earthquake on Haiti's development.

Other media articles are looking at the same event -- an extreme wrench thrown into Haiti's development and future -- and make a far more positive prognosis. They argue that Haiti has long been written off, as if the country's destiny was forever to be abject poverty, instability, and a failure to develop the great promise of its Haitian revolution -- its long-ago liberation from slavery. Even many Haitians had come to accept that Haiti would never, after all, shake the yoke of slavery that set it on such a difficult course from the start of its nationhood.

For that reason, I feel compelled here to introduce a bit of personal commentary about Haiti's past and future state....and a prediction. Call it a wish-prediction, if you will....

From the ashes rises the Phoenix.

That's my opinion -- my very long-term prediction.

I agree with those who justly note that if any people were prepared to survive nature's most catastrophic earthquake, who better than a population that has learned, as the price of daily survival, to live with almost nothing, to mix dirt with dirty water when food is absent? Who better prepared to endure days without food and water or light than people who have learned to do so, many from birth? A people who have forever endured a scale of deprivation, of suffering, unlike anywhere else in this hemisphere. And all of this, within visible sight of the glistening lights of Miami, just over the water.

It's clear from the many Phoenixes who keep rising from the rubble of the earthquake even today - over a week after being buried alive in slabs of concrete without any sustenance! -- that Haitians continue to demonstrate extraordinary strength and human spirit for survival against superhuman odds -- as individuals, as a people, as a nation.

What I find missing from the current media discussions is some reflection of this historic strength. There's also little acknowledgement of the outside forces --historic, myriad, too many to be named -- that have often conspired to keep Haiti back economically, to prevent democracy from taking hold, or national interests to triumph over foreign ones. Haiti and Haitians did not get set so far back in a day or by themselves, or simply by this earthquake. It's taken a long time, a steady effort by many different players to set it this far back. A long, often ugly parade of economic and geopolitical forces and actors and agendas -- starting with slavery and colonialism and more recent misguided economic programs of austerity and structural adjustment that have steadily rendered the great majority even more destitute. As many have said this week, Haiti appeared to be turning the ship around just before the earthquake hit. If it had or was, it was doing so after centuries, after decades, of effort, of often violent struggle to take charge of its destiny. It's important to look honestly at the ground that was laid all these many years, and by whom, to understand how and why Haiti was so extremely vulnerable on all levels to the catastrophe that has ensued.

All that said, many Haitians had survived up until the earthquake - against inhuman - and inhumane - odds. So while the pundits are right -- the losses are monumental, incalculable -- I'll place my bet on the Haitian people. With or without the world's help, no one should be surprised if they continue to defy insurmountable odds again. That, in fact, is Haiti's remarkable legacy.

That is why some this week have asked: Are there any people in the world stronger than Haitians?

Whether this strength, this capacity to survive, will allow Haitians to one day really take charge, to collectively control their nation's destiny and development, is quite another question.

Read on then, what the pundits think....

Quake sets Haiti back years, experts say
January 19, 2010 10:26 p.m. EST

Quake set back efforts to get Haiti back on its feet "by many, many years," analyst says

(CNN) -- Already hamstrung by generations of poverty, environmental catastrophe and strongman rule, Haiti will need years to recover from the devastation inflicted by last week's earthquake, according to U.S. and Canadian analysts.

Haiti's struggling democracy has survived on international aid and the muscle of a U.N. peacekeeping mission since a 2004 revolt that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck outside Port-au-Prince has set back efforts to get the country back on its feet "by many, many years," said Stephen Randall, a senior fellow at the Canadian International Council, a Toronto-based think tank.

"I don't think all of it is lost, but it's a very serious setback," Randall told CNN.

President Rene Preval's government regrouped at a police compound near the Port-au-Prince airport after nearly all of government ministries suffered heavy damage in the January 12 quake. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive put the confirmed death toll at 72,000 on Tuesday, but estimates of the total number of fatalities run more than twice that high.

Mark Schneider, who led the Caribbean division of the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration, said much has been done to build a non-corrupt police force and judiciary over the past six years.

"Of the administration and sort of on the institutional side, I think a lot can be salvaged," said Schneider, now senior vice president at the International Crisis Group. But he said efforts to redevelop Haiti's long-ravaged economy may have been set back by "decades."

See full story here.