Why Haiti Must Be Crushed

by Ed Kinane

Let’s begin with 1492. In that year Columbus landed on the

The author (far right) and friends demonstrate in front of the US Embassy in Port-Au-Prince in April. Photo: Vladimir

Caribbean island he called Hispaniola and which now is comprised of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Since then, no country in the Caribbean has suffered more pain per capita than Haiti.

In the 15th century, according to Columbus, Haiti was an island paradise. Now it is an ecological disaster. In the 18th century Haiti was the richest colony in the New World. Now it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Within decades Haiti’s indigenous people, the Taino, were rendered extinct. Alien disease took its inevitable toll. But it was the Spanish obsession with gold and Columbus’ brutal ways of extracting and extorting what little gold there was that sealed their fate.

Thousands of West Africans were imported to fill the labor vacuum. Africans, under the lash, were put to work raising indigo and then cane sugar.

So savage was the slave regime, at first under the Spanish and then under the French, that a slave’s life expectancy in Haiti was only several years. Slaves didn’t live long enough to assimilate “Western civilization.” To this day Haiti remains essentially an African country – ransacked, and displaced to another hemisphere.

Haiti’s Original Sin

In the 1790s, inspired by the 1789 French Revolution, the Afro-Haitians revolted against their French masters. Led by the slave Toussaint L’Ouverture the Africans succeeded, in 1804, in whupping Napolean’s army and driving it off the island.

This was the world’s first successful slave revolt. Ignored in our history books, it was an event and an accomplishment as significant and as liberatory as the American or French revolutions.

Western civilization – France and the other white colonial slave-holding powers – have yet to forgive the Afro-Haitians. Like Sandinista Nicaragua and like Castro’s Cuba, liberating itself was Haiti’s original sin. Two centuries later the forces of counter-liberation are still being relentlessly applied against it.

For years few would recognize Haiti’s independence. The United States, despite the lofty sentiments of its founding documents, did not recognize Haiti until our own slave regime crumbled in the 1860s. France, despite the ideals of its revolution, would not recognize Haiti until it paid a crushing multi-million dollar indemnity.

In effect the former Haitian slaves, perpetuating their bankrupcy, had to buy their already hard won freedom and pay for the land their captors had stolen from indigenous people.

This enormous debt was not unlike the invidious debt many countries owe the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for loans the people themselves never contracted – debt which, unless expunged, will surely keep many nations in thrall for the indefinite future. Haiti didn’t finish paying the indemnity until well into the twentieth century.

President Aristide’s Mortal Sins

Lavalas rally, Aristide Foundation, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Lavalas is Aristide’s political party. Photo: Ann Tiffany

In the Catholic theology of my youth, we are all born – like Haiti – with original sin. And many of us go on to commit grievous sins of our own. These are called mortal sins.

In the last dozen or so years unrepentant Haiti and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom it keeps electing, has committed a number of these. This is why the so-called “international community” – especially the US, France and Canada – are determined to keep Haiti in hell.

In Haiti’s 1990 presidential election the US-financed candidate, Marc Bazin, was pre-ordained to win. At the last minute, however, a Catholic priest preaching liberation theology entered the race. Fr. Aristide won the election by a 67% landslide. (Has any US president been backed by so many of the voters?)

Within eight months Fr. Aristide was toppled by a US-sponsored coup. The next time Aristide stood for election – in 2000 – he won by an even greater share of the vote. And this was an election internationally certified as fair. Aristide was, and continues to be, the choice of the vast majority of Haiti’s people.

But on February 29, 2004 Aristide, now no longer a priest, was again overthrown. The US military abducted Aristide at gunpoint. This time, instead of his returning to exile in the US (Mrs. Aristide is a US citizen), he was flown to the Central African Republic, one of the most isolated countries on the planet.

Why does the US government hate Aristide so? What mortal sins did he commit? Space here isn’t sufficient to catalog them all. I’ll only mention some of the most prominent.

Upon first becoming president, Aristide sought to raise Haiti’s miserable minimum wage. A major no-no. US corporate interests aren’t all that great in Haiti; a doubling or tripling of the minimum wage would barely impact US consumer prices.

However, such an attack on corporate interests would set a dangerous precedent. Just as Haiti’s bid for freedom two centuries ago risked infecting US slaves with wayward ideas, raising the minimum wage on this economically-insignificant island might inspire workers in the US and elsewhere to also keep agitating for fair wages.

For five centuries the imperial powers have only seen Haiti as nothing more than a dark, placid pool of super-cheap labor. That typecasting was not to be tampered with. Haiti must know its place. The Emancipation Proclamation was never meant to apply to wage-slavery.

Aristide further alienated business interests by aggressively collecting taxes and utility bills. Before Aristide, taxes were collected from peasants but not from large landowners or urban businessmen. (At the same time, almost no money went to providing rural services or developing rural infrastructure.) Taxing the rich won no points from the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Aristide kept up his offensive behavior. In 1994 when he returned from exile in the US and resumed his presidency, Aristide abolished Haiti’s brutish military. Only its marching band was kept intact and its headquarters were given over to Aristide’s newly-established ministry of women. Talk about a dangerous precedent!

As in many Latin American countries under gringo influence, the Haitian military’s only function had been to topple one president or another and to bully and exploit its own people.

The US had trained and armed the Haitian military, in its modern form, when the marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1933. It was during that era that the US rewrote the Haitian constitution to permit foreign investment. Also during that era the US re- introduced forced labor and jim crow segregation to Haiti and killed thousands of Haitians who resisted the occupation.

I don’t recall who won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1994, but Aristide would have been a worthy candidate.

Further proof of Aristide’s baseness is that he recognized his next door neighbor, Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Cuba, it seems, provides many desperately needed medical doctors to Haiti. Last year when the US Marines converted the medical school in Port-au-Prince into its military base, Fidel brought the displaced students to Cuba to finish their training.

And, finally, consider this brazen deed. During his second term Aristide sued France for reimbursement of the aforementioned indemnity. Aristide presented France with a meticulously documented bill – corrected for inflation and with 5% interest compounded.

The bill totals $21 billion. France, in its grandeur, was not amused. It reportedly told the US that if the US did not remove Aristide, France would….

For the time being President and Mildred Aristide live in South Africa. Aristide’s party, Lavalas (“flash flood”), has once again been forced underground. Even so, it insists there can be no elections in Haiti without the return of its President and the democratic Constitutional order he embodies.

In April when several of us demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince, my sign read, “Restore Democracy. Restore Aristide.”

Key Reading:

•Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, Orbis, 1990, 112pp

•Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance, Cornell University, 2001, 258pp

•Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Amy Goodman, Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup, Common Courage, 2004, 180pp

•Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (introduction by Noam Chomsky), Common Courage, 1994, 432pp

•Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti, Soft Skull Press, 2000, 499pp

•C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage 1963, 2nd edition rev (originally 1938), 426pp

Ed is a Syracuse Peace Council activist. He had worked with Peace Brigades International in Haiti in the nineties. Contact him at edkinane@a-znet.com.