Haiti on our minds

Taken from a Jan. 17 audio column at www.prisonradio.org.

The recent natural disaster in Haiti has once again thrown Haiti into the eyes of the world and once again brought out the best and the worst of us. The sheer scale of human suffering has evoked massive compassion as governments far and wide mobilize to assist those unable to assist themselves.

Haiti, once the colonial era “pearl of the Antilles,” then the mother of revolutions, has suffered for nearly two centuries for daring to fight for and win its freedom from European colonialism and plunder.

Haiti, we are informed by the corporate media, is the poorest nation in the West. We are never told, however, how it got that way. How many of us know that the U.S. brutally occupied Haiti and stayed there for more than 20 years! Or that Haiti, which had the temerity to defeat not one, not two, but three colonial armies — the French, the British and the Spanish — was forced to pay French reparations for nearly 200 years. The first and only time that a victor in war had to pay back the nation it defeated.

Haiti isn’t just poor. It has been impoverished by a global system of exploitation and a plantation capitalist economy that was designed as a sanction for Black liberation.

C.L.R. James, the great revolutionary scholar-activist, has argued that the Haitian revolution was a singular event in human history of more significance than either the French or the American revolutions. In part that is because the Haitian revolution spelled the end to French imperialism in America. Napoleon, having lost his Haitian cash cow, sold vast lands to the U.S. for a song, doubling the size of the U.S. in one day.

That an American preacher could today liken the event to the devil gives us some idea of its continuing power. Interestingly, neither of these other revolutions could spell the end of that truly demonic institution, slavery. Indeed, the reverse is true. For George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners. And Napoleon Bonaparte sent his army to Haiti to defend slavery.

Decades and decades of U.S.-supported dictators, the legacy of plantation capitalism and exploitation, U.S.-supported coups like the Bush-era removal of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and corporate strangulation of the poor workers in Haiti have left it severely underdeveloped and thus less able to cope with natural disasters when they strike.

Several years ago when a hurricane hit a city in the world’s wealthiest nation, the wealthy and middle classes had the resources to flee just before the worst struck the town. In Haiti those resources were even more rare. But an earthquake isn’t a hurricane. It strikes suddenly, without warning. But many nations like Japan have constructed buildings which resist the bumps and whirls of earthquakes. Such techniques if applied to Haitian schools, homes and offices could have greatly reduced loss of life and suffering.

If it hadn’t been bled and exploited for centuries, Haiti would have had the resources available to protect its people as much as possible.

Let us hope that Haiti’s future will be brighter than its postcolonial past.