The Uses of Haiti (3rd Edition)

The Uses of Haiti tells the truth about uncomfortable matters-uncomfortable, that is, for the structures of power and the doctrinal framework that protects them from scrutiny. It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the US role in its bitter fate.-Noam Chomsky, from the introduction

In this third edition of the classic The Uses of Haiti, Paul Farmer looks at what has happened to the health of the poor in Haiti since the coup.

Winner of a McArthur Genius Award, Paul Farmer is a physician and anthropologist who has worked for 25 years in Haiti, where he serves as medical director of a hospital serving the rural poor. He is the subject of the Tracy Kidder biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

This book is a very important read for anyone who is interested in US foreign policy or Latin America. As Farmer says, Haiti is usually not thought of as part of Latin America (indeed, it's usually not thought of at all) but it should be. Like all of Farmer's books, it is extremely well written: it is a fairly quick read that is chock full of information, but it is never overly technical. Someone who is not familiar with the subject or the region (like me, before I read this book) would have no problem reading it.

In fact, I suggest that you keep 2 or 3 copies on you at all times. That way when someone makes an ignorant comment about Voodoo (no matter how multi-cultural and intelligent they're trying to sound) you can hand them a copy and tell them to learn a bit more about Haiti.

EDIT - There seems to be something of a smear campaign going on against this book. The book was originaly published in 1994, and this edition came out in 2003. Therefore, the current happenings in Haiti are not mentioned in the book. One reviewer mentioned that Farmer is so rich because Aristide is lining his pockets. This reviewer is overlooking the fact that Farmer is one of the head doctors at one of the largest hospitals in the US (a post that pays a pretty penny), and teaches at Harvard (ditto), and does frequent speaking tours, is a published author, and much more. Farmer is also quite open about the fact that he lives in a tiny appartment in a very bleak area of Boston, and puts his tremendous earnings right back into Partners in Health.


Uses of Haiti, Or what happens when we wage war on the poor   January 30, 2004
Akenji (Port-Au-Prince, Haiti)
51 out of 55 found this review helpful

Dr. Paul Farmer has had incredible amounts of experience, close to 20 years, living and working for the poor people of Haiti. The key word here is poor, because regardless of what detractors like a fellow reviewer on this page might say, the plight of the poor people of Haiti has forever been slighted and undermined by subtle but draconian US policies. What Dr. Farmer exposes in Uses of Haiti, is the true nature of the war being waged against the poor of Haiti (and similar situations occur worldwide), and he uses meticulously researched details that are not very well known to the general public. I would rather take the word of a medical anthropologist who for close to two decades has been treating the poor people of rural Haiti for free over the word of someone who claims to have "been there" and endorses the right of a military junta to overtrhow a popularly elected president. Uses of Haiti is a riveting read from top to bottom and comes from someone 99.9% of people would agree has his heart in the right place i.e. alleviating the plight of the Haitian poor.


Essential, if uncomfortable reading   October 14, 2003
sarah (Boston, USA)
44 out of 46 found this review helpful

This is not an easy book for an American to read. Page after page confronts us with the links between U.S. policies and the horrible suffering of poor Haitians, which continues to this day. It exposes the lies we have told ourselves to justify this treatment- demonizing Haitians who seek a more just international order (from the leaders of the Haitian revolution through the opposition to the U.S. occupation to the current pro-democracy movement), distorting or misrepresenting facts about Haiti, and so on.

But a reader who disables his or her defense mechanisms will find a coherent explanation for Haiti's current misery, and clear directives for how we can help end it. But the book says almost as much about America as it does about Haiti: how we justify doing things abroad that we would never tolerate at home, with the willing collaboration of the press we trust to keep government honest.

Uses of Haiti is a combination of emotion and academic rigor, which is unsettling to most readers used to one or the other. But the emotion (a normal and human response to 20 years of treating Haiti's sick), and rigor (the author is an MD and a PhD in anthropology)complement each other, if the coexistence is sometimes awkward.


Full of inaccuracies and lack of information   January 7, 2004
31 out of 112 found this review helpful

I was in Haiti at the time that a lot of this was going on, knew a lot of people who were principally involved, and have studied Haiti's past and present quite a bit. This book is missing a lot and inaccurately portrays a lot more. It seems that Paul Farmer, like a lot of others at the time, bought into a lot of Aristide's propaganda. From afar, he looks like a great man and a great thing for Haiti, but up close, from those paying attention within the country, he was exactly the opposite. He hasn't done anything at all for the Haitian people. His speeches are full of veiled threats and have incited his Lavalas supporters to riots, decoutage, and public murder of his opponents.

He also left out some things such as: the American Ambassador was also key in helping Aristide to escape the country with his life. General Cedras' men were the ones who began the coup, but he did not know what had happened until it had already begun. Claims that the interim government, whether good or bad, committed mass murders of crowds of Aristide's supporters were all investigated thoroughly and no evidence was ever found. The mass graves that would have undoubtedly resulted have never been found - even after all these years. Aristide was overthrown in part because of some questionable instances that occured in the short time leading up to it, including some killings. Aristide did nothing at all for his country before he was overthrown. He was no angel, as the academics seem to want him to be.

Farmer wrote this book with a biased slant and without fully checking his information. Take it from someone who was there in the almost year before Aristide was overthrown, and years afterwards. I wish that Aristide had turned out to be what he campaigned to be - but unfortunetly reality shows quite a different story.


A way to evaluate Farmer's credibility   November 1, 2004
An Amazonian (Massachusetts, USA)
27 out of 36 found this review helpful

Tracy Kidder's recent book Mountains Beyond Mountains was written entirely about Farmer and his life of unswerving, almost overwhelming devotion to the sick of Haiti in particular and of the third world in general. While Farmer comes across as a bit naive (while at the same time incredibly intelligent and quite cynical) or excessively saintly, the chance that he is simply a mouthpiece for Aristide who wants to line his own pockets seems to me to be less than zero.