Haiti: Is there life after death?

Aside from the word 'earthquake' and many others associated with death and devastation in Port-au-Prince, another much more promising one that keeps coming up on the hours and hours of news is 'resilient'. It is an understatement describing the people of that unfortunate country, the first independent nation in Latin America and the first black-led republic in the world, the first to abolish slavery and the only nation born of a slave revolt.  Yet Haiti became a slave not only to its history but also to other more powerful interests.

Christopher Columbus landed at Môle Saint-Nicolas on 5 December 1492, and claimed the island for Spain. Nineteen days later, his flagship, the Santa María, ran aground near the present site of Cap-Haïtien; Columbus was forced to leave behind 39 men, founding the settlement of La Navidad. Following its destruction  by the local indigenous people, Columbus moved to the eastern side of the island and established La Isabela. One of the earliest leaders to fight off Spanish conquest was Queen Anacaona, a princess of Xaragua who married Caonabo, the chieftain of Maguana. The couple resisted Spanish rule in vain; she was captured by the Spanish and executed in front of her people. To this day, Anacaona is revered in Haiti as one of the country's founders.

As a gateway to the Caribbean, the island named Española by Columbus (Hispaniola in English)  became a haven for pirates. The western part of the island, what was to become Haiti, was settled by French buccaneers.

Are they building society?

In a lingustic twist I once heard -and one that would amuse my friends Prospero and Sancho- the Spanish caja de ahorros became in English a 'cage of horrors'. I mention it only because the English version in Spain is getting close to being the truth.
As I write, the news is full of more horrors of the financial variety. The Spanish government took over a relatively small building society, Caja Castilla La Mancha, during the weekend. Ministers of all kinds have been on the box reasssuring the public that 'everything's fine', 'the banking system is solid', 'stronger than ever', etc. etc. Caja Castilla La Mancha, CCM for short, has some 2.6 million depositors, many of whom have been withdrawing their money rather rapidly of late - the queues were around corners in the news. CCM had a 'temporary liquidity problem', according to one of those political heads. How temporary is temporary? How long is a piece of string?
Caja de ahorros transliterates to 'box of savings', or Savings & Loans in the US and Building Society in the UK. We know about those there. It's a different story in Spain; Spain is different, said a successful ad campaign for tourism years ago. It is.
The autonomous region of Castilla La Mancha is governed by the PSOE, so naturally the opposition PP is putting all the blame on the national government. They fail to mention that Caja Madrid (governed by the PP) is having its own internecine war among the factions headed by regional head Esperanza Aguirre and the capital's mayor, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón. But why? What has politics to do with a building society?
In Spain, every autonomous region has its own building society, often several, as in the cases of Madrid, Catalonia or Andalucía, for instance. The majority of their Board of Directors is appointed by the region's government, as is the Chairperson (hate that word!), in a form of apportionment that naturally favours the party in power. That's what's happening at Caja Madrid, for example.
Building societies in Spain, like everywhere else, were born to serve those who did not have access to the normal banking system and from the 18th to the mid-20th centuries were known as montes de piedad, or 'amounts of mercy', which is/was a euphemism for pawnshop (image). They were established in provincial capitals and obliged to open branches in rural population centres. Their services were pretty much restricted to mortgages and smaller loans and became powerful institutions. But banks provided all the services the building societies offered and a lot more.
The cajas de ahorros, which were run largely by management committees made up of their depositors, couldn't therefore compete for our money so they were 'democratized'. The cost was a loss of depositors' control and the opening up of the whole system, with the market presently divided about 50-50 between cajas and banks. In fact, you'd be hard put to know the difference unless you thought about it.
The difference is, of course, is at the top. A bank is run by a Board elected by shareholders and a caja is run by political appointees. It must be said, though, that these appointees are often no more than figureheads, and the actual business is run by professional bankers. Don't ask me what happens at a Board meeting when those political claws come into play, though.
In answer to the headline's question: they certainly have done in the past, especially in Spain, where the rural population took longer than most other countries' to move to the cities. Whether they will fall apart as so many others have, we shall see.

WELCOME TO MY NEW HOME

Here are links to previous posts, in case you missed them, starting with the most recent:

Gambling on the box
Terrorists create terror, that's their job
How rustic is your property?
Rotten apples of all colours
Shooting oneself in the foot
The need to be right
Crisis? What crisis? A bit of perspective, please
As drunk as a judge
It's a fine mess you didn't get us into, Dubya
A powerful message
'An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' - Mahatma Gandhi
Sex at Christmas
What's wrong with the euro, then?
Why would any body want to look like this?
It's the right thing to do
The right to know
Hispanic pride and the natives
Lies that come home to roost
Politics and priorities
Mental health, mental attitude, mental chaos
The age of greed

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