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Books on the Caribbean
Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
C.L.R. James.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938)
Edourad Gissant.
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Cesaire
(1990)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman. Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry (2001)
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Jean-Bertand Aristide.
Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a
Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization
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Suffocating the poor: a modern parable
By Johann Hari
They democratically
elected a president to stand up to the rich and
multinational corporations—so our governments have him
kidnapped.
Today, I want to tell you the story of how our
governments have been torturing and tormenting an island
in the Caribbean—but it is a much bigger story than
that. It's a parable explaining one of the main reasons
how and why, across the world, the poor are kept poor,
so the rich can be kept rich. If you grasp this
situation, you will see some of the ugliest forces in
the world laid out before you—so we can figure out how
to stop them.
The rubble-strewn island of Haiti is now in the middle
of an election campaign that will climax this November.
So far, the world has noticed it solely because the
Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean wanted to run for
President, only to be blocked because he hasn't lived in
the country since he was a kid. But there is a much
bigger hole in the election: the most popular politician
in Haiti by far, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He's not there
because, after winning a landslide election, he followed
the will of the Haitian people who demanded he take on
the multinational corporations and redistribute enough
money that their children wouldn't starve—so our
governments had him kidnapped him at gunpoint and refuse
to let him back.
But we have to start a little earlier if this is going
to make sense. For over two centuries, Haiti has been
effectively controlled from outside. The French enslaved
the entire island in the eighteenth century and worked
much of the population to death, turning it into the
sugar and coffee plantation for the world. By this
century, Western governments were arming, funding and
fuelling the psychopathic dictatorship of the Duvalier
family—who slaughtered 50,000 people—supposedly because
they were "our friends" in the fight against communism.
All this left Haiti the most unequal country in the
world. A tiny elite lives in vast villas in the hills,
while below and all around them, the overwhelming
majority of the population live in tiny tin shacks with
no water or electricity, crammed six-to-a-room. Just 1
per cent own 50 per cent of the wealth and 75 per cent
of the arable land. Once the Haitian people were finally
able to rise up in 1986 to demand democracy, they
obviously wanted the
country's wealth to be shared more fairly. They began to
organize into a political movement called Lavalas—the
flood—to demand higher wages and higher taxes on the
rich to build schools and hospitals and subsidies for
the half-starved poor. This panicked the elite.
And nobody panicked them more than a thin,
softly-spoken, intellectual slum-priest named Aristide
who found himself at the crest of this wave. He was born
into a bitingly poor family and became a brilliant
student. As a priest he soon became one of the leading
exponents of Liberation Theology, the left-wing
Catholicism that says people shouldn't wait passively
for justice in the Kingdom of Heaven, but must demand it
here and now. (The current Pope tried desperately to
stamp out this "heresy".) Aristide explained: "The rich
of my country, a tiny percentage, sit at a vast table
overflowing with good food,
while the rest of my countrymen are crowded under that
table, hunched in the dirt and starving. One day the
people under the table will rise up in righteousness."
On this platform, he was elected in 1990 in a landslide
in the country's first free and fair election, taking 64
per cent of the vote. He kept his promise to the Haitian
people: he increased the minimum wage from 38 cents a
day to $1, demanding the multinational corporations pay
a less insulting wage. He trebled the number of free
secondary schools. He disbanded the murderous national
army that had terrorized the population. Even the
International Monetary Fund had to admit that over the
Aristide period and just after, Haiti's Human Poverty
Indicator—a measure of how likely your kids are to die,
starve or go uneducated—dropped dramatically from 46.2
per cent to 31.8 per cent.
But why would foreign governments care about a small
country, the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with
only ten million inhabitants? Ira Kurzban, an American
lawyer based in Haiti, explains: "Aristide represented a
threat to [foreign powers] because he spoke for the 85
per cent of his population who had never been heard. If
that can happen in Haiti, it can happen anywhere,
including in countries where the [US and Europe] have
huge economic interests and extract natural resources.
They don't want real popular democracies to spread
because they know it will confront US economic
interests." Oxfam called this phenomenon "the threat of
a good example."
So after Haiti had experienced seven months of
democracy, the US toppled Aristide. Ordinary Haitians
surrounded his home, calling for his return—and they
were fired on so indiscriminately that more ammo had to
be sent from Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. Their bodies were
left in the streets to be eaten by dogs as the advances
were repealed one by one.
In 1994, the Clinton administration agreed to return
Aristide to power—provided he castrate his own
political program and ignore the demands of his people.
They made him agree to privatize almost everything,
freeze wages, and sack half the civil service. Through
gritted teeth, he agreed, and for the remainder of his
time in office tried to smuggle through what little
progress he could. He was re-elected in an even bigger
landslide in 2000—but even his tiny shuffles towards
redistribution were too much. The US and French
governments had Aristide kidnapped at gunpoint and
dumped him in the Central African Republic. They said he
was a "dictator", even though the last Gallup
poll in a free Haiti found 60 per cent supported him,
compared to just 3 per cent backing the alternative
imposed on the country by the US.
The human rights situation in Haiti then dramatically
deteriorated, with a massive campaign of terror and
repression. The Lavalas Party was banned from running
again, with most of the country's democracy activists
jailed. There were huge military assaults on the slums
which demanded Aristide's return. A US Army
Psychological Operations official explained the mission
was to ensure Haitians "don't get the idea they can do
whatever they want."
The next President, Rene Preval, learned his lesson: he
has done everything he was told to by corporations and
governments, privatizing the last remaining scraps owned
by the state, and using tear gas to break up strikes for
higher wages. The Haitian people rejected the whole
rigged electoral process, with turn-out falling to just
11 per cent. Today, Aristide is a broken man, living in
exile in South Africa, studying for a PhD in
linguistics, banned from going home.
This is part of a plain pattern. When poor countries get
uppity and tried to ask for basic justice, our
governments have toppled them, from Iran wanting to
control its own oil in 1953 to Honduras wanting its
workers to be treated decently in 2009. You don't have
to overthrow many to terrify the rest.
It doesn't have to be this way. This is not the will of
the people, in the US or Europe: on the contrary,
ordinary citizens are horrified when the propaganda is
stripped away and they see the truth. It only happens
because a tiny wealthy elite dominates our foreign
policy, and uses it to serve their purposes—low wages
and control of other people's economies and resources.
The people of Haiti, who have nothing, were bold and
brave enough to campaign and organize to take power back
from their undemocratic elites. Are we?
Source:
Independent
posted 23 October 2010
Johann Hari
(born 21 January 1979) is a British journalist and
writer. He is a columnist for
The Independent and the
Huffington Post, and has won awards for his war
reporting. His work has also appeared in the
New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times,
The New Republic,
The Nation,
Le Monde,
El Pais, the
Sydney Morning Herald and
Ha'aretz. Hari describes himself as a
"European social democrat", who believes that markets
are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be
matched by strong democratic governments and strong
trade unions or they become "disastrous." He appears
regularly as an arts critic on the
BBC Two programme
Newsnight Review, and he is a book critic
for
Slate. He has been named by the Daily Telegraph as
one of the most influential people on the left in
Britain, and by the Dutch magazine
Winq as one of the twenty most influential gay
people in the world.—Wikipedia
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Haitian Refugee Camps
Model Future Society
We’ve used what
resources we have. We don’t wait for millions to arrive, we
just create. There’s lots of creativity. We’ve done
extraordinary things with the means we have at hand. That’s
how we established a children’s space, for example. There
are Canadian military who were building an orphanage behind
us, and another woman and I went and asked them for
materials for the children. They gave materials, some tools,
and a case of blue plastic tarps. CARE gave us tarps to
create a children’s space, too, and a podium. We used cement
blocks from the collapsed houses to build that space. We use
that space for dancing and theater, too.
We borrowed a drum from a vodou priest. We had people
dancing with the drum, like an old lady who lost her son.
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You know in Haiti, folklore is a
big deal. The drum is the sign of music and the sign of happiness; it
allows people to recreate. The drum makes everybody dance; even if you
have problems, you dance. We started the folkloric group dancing like
this in the ancient way, everybody dancing and singing like crazy with
no control. We had kids who went down to dance for May Day by the sea;
we even signed a contract with a team from Canada for one of the little
girls to go to participate in a cultural event in Canada in August.We
had people living in misery under little sheets. You know the world was
seeing Haiti’s image through little sheets. And it kept raining. People
from elsewhere asked me, “Elizabeth, how can they survive like this?” I
said, “It’s all because of the drum.”—OtherWorldsArePossible
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Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the
Politics of Containment
By Peter Hallward
A
riveting exposé of the US-led destruction of
democratic government in Haiti. Once the
most lucrative European colony in the
Caribbean, Haiti has long been one of the
most divided and impoverished countries in
the world. In the late 1980s a remarkable
popular mobilization known as Lavalas, or
“the flood,” sought to liberate the island
from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule.
After winning a landslide election victory,
in 1991 the Lavalas government led by
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was
overthrown by a bloody military coup.
Damming the Flood analyzes how and
why Aristide’s enemies in Haiti, the US and
France made sure that his second government,
elected with another verwhelming majority in
2000, was toppled by a further coup in 2004.
The elaborate international campaign to
contain, discredit and then overthrow
Lavalas at the start of the twenty-first
century was perhaps the most successful act
of imperial sabotage since the end of the
Cold War. Its execution and its impact have
much to teach anyone interested in the
development of today's political struggles
in Latin America and the rest of the
post-colonial world.—Verso,
2007 |
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Not
just "gang leaders" in Haiti fought for Aristide to finish his
five-year term. The demonstrators are lifting up their hands to
indicate, five years, five years, five years—senk an, senk an, senk
an. No Bush regime change in Haiti! Most of the Haitian mothers you
see in this video, who were lucky enough to have survived the
2004-2006 Lavalas witch-hunt and US/UN guns from the 2004 Bush
regime change in Haiti, are suffering unbearable, some from grief,
humiliation, Clorox hunger, or worst, some on top of all this, from
traumatic rape and sexual abuse by the "peacekeepers," US/NGO/IFI
"saviors," and their Haitian mercenary arms, or as a direct result
of the opportunistic anarchy that landed in Haiti after this video
was taken. |
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Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America—and much of the West—into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. |
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Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam
By Fred A. Wilcox and Introduction by Noam Chomsky
Scorched Earth is the first book to chronicle the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people and their environment, where, even today, more than 3 million people—including 500,000 children—are sick and dying from birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses that can be directly traced to Agent Orange/dioxin exposure. Weaving first-person accounts with original research, Vietnam War scholar Fred A. Wilcox examines long-term consequences for future generations, laying bare the ongoing monumental tragedy in Vietnam, and calls for the United States government to finally admit its role in chemical warfare in Vietnam. Wilcox also warns readers that unless we stop poisoning our air, food, and water supplies, the cancer epidemic in the United States and other countries will only worsen, and he urgently demands the chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange to compensate the victims of their greed and to stop using the Earth’s rivers, lakes, and oceans as toxic waste dumps. Vietnam has chosen August 10—the day that the US began spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam—as Agent Orange Day, to commemorate all its citizens who were affected by the deadly chemical. Scorched Earth will be released upon the third anniversary of this day, in honor of all those whose families have suffered, and continue to suffer, from this tragedy. Noam Chomsky & Fred Wilcox Book-TV |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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