Just slightly tongue in cheek.
Isaac is a heretic.. the DR will never, ever join with Haiti. That is an Article of Faith according to the DR History and Culture.
It is sort of like Moses or Mohammed or the words of the Declaration of Independence. It will not, in our lifetime change, nor in or chilldren's.
I saw some good points above, such as the suggestion the Canada and France take over Haiti and try and bring it into the 19th or 20th century. After all, it was them (France) that raped the country, bled it dry and then left it abandoned. Then in the 20th Century the Quebequois and French "sex-tourists" found out that Haitian men, driven by the terrible poverty, would do "anything" for money, thereby creating a mind-numbing statistic of HIV infection that rivals any country in Aftica. Then they, too, left the country. Why was it that not one country in the world has really decided to help Haiti???Maybe they need to declare war on the United Nations and by losing, they can get education, health care and development assistence.
Years ago, when the US was going to invade Haiti, yet again, I was asked by CNN if I thought that this invasion was a good thing. I answered that I thought it was a very stupid move on the part of the US Government since there was a clear lack of knowledge about Haiti within the government and within the US population.
1) It seems that no one understands that in Haiti the words democracy and liberty have little of the same meaning that they possess in the US or England...Haiti has never known democracy. In the Haitian mind set, "liberty" is freedom from slavery , period.
2) There is an enormous HIV positive population in Haiti, and I cannot imagine any family in America being proud of the fact that their son was killed by AIDS helping to save democracy in Haiti.
3)Haiti is 94% illiterate. The US would have to create a school system equivelent to one the size of NYC. Snap! Like that! To educate the population, but I don't (I told CNN) think Congress would go along with that.
I don't remember the other points I made.
There is the idea that the DR should be helping the Haitians. We are!! 25% of the children born in many of the hospitals are Haitian!. They are using 30% of the medical facilities. Many thousands are being educated in Dominican schools. Trade, both legal and in contraband is huge.
One of the reasons that Balaguer as not a favorite of Clinton (or Bush Sr, for that matter) was that he refused to honor the blockade that they declared on Haiti. He figured that : "Why should the Dominican Republic shoulder the burden of helping Haiti?" When no other nation would accept Haitian boat people, the DR was still letting people across the border....
AND, to end this, it is not that Dominicans will not cut cane or dig ditches, which they did for years, but that they are trying to better themselves as motoconchistas or other jobs in resorts. There is a cultural, Dominican, aversion to cutting cane, since it is a "Haitian" job.....
There's one more thing. A reporter asked me this morning if I thought that there was going to be a new Haitian Invasion, like the ones in 1844. I told her, that no, it had already happened over the past ten years...
HB