Here's an example of that kind of thinking, from a blogger who goes by the sole name of "Helen" over at Caribpundit:

"Haiti needs to be a military governorate for about twenty years. Within that context, then, Haitians can dialogue with each other, acquire the skills of self-governance, and with a rebuilt infrastructure, go on to rule themselves. Right now, Haitian solutions only result in blood and death.

I know that you're not saying that, but I fear that your words can be used by those from the oligarchy nostalgia crowd to reinforce their message that Haiti can't, and therefore should not be allowed to, govern itself.

It's fair enough for you to say that big, resource rich, countries like Brazil and Venezuela have very different circumstances.

Taking your lead, perhaps a better comparison would come from looking at some of Haiti's Caribbean sister islands, such as Jamaica and Cuba.

These are two countries with historic and economic conditions more similar to those of Haiti that - favor or not their distinct styles of governing - have forged highly educated cultures in a context of great poverty and limited natural resources.

The problem is largely the paternalism of the so-called "developed world." On the one hand it rails against, with racial overtones, that Haitians cannot govern themselves. On the other hand, the entire thrust of U.S. policy, including in recent days, has been to treat Haiti paternally, to infantilize the nation, to infer that a plan must be airdropped from outside and from above, and to push Haiti to deviate from its own constitutional laws.

In today's Jamaica Observer, John Maxwell writes convincingly about Washington's schizophrenic policy toward the Aristide government in Haiti. On the one hand, it blames Aristide for not making progress on many expensive fronts, while on the other hand it has imposed an economic embargo, and even before that 2000 embargo, didn't contribute sufficiently to the reforms it now blames Aristide for not implementing. Maxwell writes:

In the OAS in Washington on Friday, US Ambassador John Maisto declared that Haiti's crisis "is due in large part to the failure of the Government of Haiti to act in a timely manner to address problems that it knew were growing". He said it hadn't fought police corruption, strengthened its judiciary or restored security. He did not choose to explain how Aristide could have done those things, given his circumstances.

Maxwell is one of those who has called on Caribbean nations to aid Haiti since 1994, but only one country responded with any significant resources:

Cuba has sent 700 medical personnel, including more than 300 doctors, to deal with the diseases that afflict Haitian peasants and to teach them and their children to read and write. About 1,000 Haitian children are at school in Cuba.

I don't know of anything useful done by the Caribbean hypocrites who are now so ready to praise democracy and pass resolutions. There are, of course, brigades of American missionaries - 5,000 of them, including a battalion of Mormons. It wasn't so long ago that the Mormons taught that black people were cursed by God.

Haiti needed then and needs now, teachers, doctors, nurses, public health workers, agricultural instructors, and the technical assistance and materials for building water supplies, roads, houses, electrical power distribution systems, telephones and the other infrastructure which permit nations to live a quasi-civilised life. The US, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union and all the other responsible adults refused to help unless Haiti conformed to their image of capitalist democracy, particularly by privatising the meagre assets still retained by the destitute Haitian state.

So the problem is not Haiti or Haitians. It's the big countries in the neighborhood that won't allow Haiti to solve its own problems, who are even intervening with an economic blockade.

The only country that has done squat for Haiti has been Cuba, and Aristide can list among his accomplishments that, finally, he's gotten concrete assistance to build the education and health of Haiti from at least one country. That Cuba is also a poor country that suffers a U.S. embargo raises interesting questions.

At minimum, while the extremists in charge of U.S.-Latin American policy are obsessed with Cuba, their policies are giving Haiti little choice but to move farther away from the neoliberal economic model and closer to the Cuban model. And then these same extremists, with their Miami oligarch base of support, then use Cuban "influence" as yet another pretext to condemn Haiti and Aristide. It's a vicious, self-perpetuating, circle.