Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti

Haitian Railroads ca. 1925

Although it is difficult not to sympathize with the wise words of Delorme, who warned us of the need to have proper roads before thinking of railroads, Georges Michel's Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti is an excellent introduction to the history of trains in Haiti and what could have been. Although it is somewhat hard to think a truly national railway system would have been completed had it not been for the US Occupation (and its improvement of the roads and promotion of automobiles), Michel's text analyzes the development of industrial, freight, and passenger lines in Haiti since the late 19th century and gives a richly detailed breakdown on the speed, construction, and relationship with local economies of the various railroads on the island.

For example, the PCS line, stretching from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican border, with another extension to Leogane and the tramway system within Port-au-Prince, predated the US Occupation (founded with German capital). It was explicitly tied to the passenger needs for local markets, trade on the Dominican border (the company even built a wharf on Lake Azuey), and transporting sugar and other products produced on the Cul de Sac and Leogane plains. The PCS line was eventually purchased by HASCO, which ceased passenger service, solely focusing on transporting cane to their central mill near Port-au-Prince. Thus, the fate of the PCS railway was diverted away from the various economic and market interests of the populations living from Leogane to the Cul de Sac plain, to serve the needs of HASCO, which ruined small-scale sugar plantations or absorbed them, while also dominating the local rum market. Perhaps Michel was on to something when he criticized the US for disrupting the development of the Haitian railway.

Other railroads examined by Michel include a Gonaives to Ennery line, 33 km long, whose service was terminated under President Borno in the 1920s. By 1919, a Port-au-Prince to St. Marc line and Cap-Haitien to Grand Riviere du Nord (with extension to Bahon) were completed. These lines carried various tropical commodities to the major port cities, as well as passengers. Standard Fruit for the banana trade, SHADA, and other agro-industrial firms used these lines to transport their products, and these aforementioned lines fell under the purview of the national railway company. Unfortunately, it never developed into a national railway system, connecting Cap-Haitien to Port-au-Prince, nor Leogane to Cayes. Falling under the remit of the MacDonald Contract, which infamously triggered rural discontent in Haiti as a concession that would forcibly dispossess farmers off their land to allow MacDonald to develop banana plantations, the Compagnie Nationale des Chemins de Fer was eventually nationalized by  Estimé after refusing to raise wages of striking workers in the 1940s. It persisted for a few decades, but by the 1960s and 1970s, these trains were eventually discontinued, scrapped, or only used by a few industrial concerns. 

Michel's book contains a chapter on a few plans to reestablish and expand train lines in Haiti, including two involving French and Canadian capital, but nothing came to fruit under the Duvalier dictatorship. Despite the fond memories of older generations of Haitians and, as the chapter on the Dominican Republic reveals, Dominicans, the chances of a renewed railroad system in Haiti appear grim. However, Michel's study of the history of the train system does persuasively illustrate how US imperialism and Haitian political failure and corruption ruined the chances for Haiti to ever establish a truly national network. The main areas to receive a line were intimately tied to export commodities, and the HASCO takeover of the PCS line reinforce the region's dependence on sugar, to the detriment of a varied export economy. One expects the development of railroads to focus on cities and the transportation of goods, but the truncated nature of their development in Haiti is an excellent illustration of the numerous shortcomings of the Haitian economy, disarticulated, 'underdeveloped,' and in a state of dependency.

For those searching for additional information on Haitian railroads, Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin, digitized at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, provide rich details on the construction of trains, the tramway service, workers, and the social impact of a regular train service on the people of Haiti. Travelers accounts also provide some perspective, as they describe the tramway system in Port-au-Prince, the use of smaller railroads by some of the usines established in other regions of Haiti, or the various establishments that used the PCS railroad or national lines.