Saturday, December 31, 2022
Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti
Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti
The cuisine, a combination of African and European influences, also tells the story of this complex country’s revolutionary heritage
By Michael Deibert
Newlines Magazine
(Read the original article here)
On the first day of the year in 1804, at the Place d’Armes in the dusty city of Gonaïves, gazing out onto the turquoise waters of the Golfe de la Gonâve off Haiti, a 46-year-old military leader who had been born into slavery on a plantation near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord unveiled a text that still cries out from across the centuries.
“Citizens,” it began,
it is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty. … We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.
Independence or death… let these sacred words unite us and be the signal of battle and of our union.
With those words, Haiti declared its independence from France after a 13-year war of liberation and abolished slavery, the first nation to do so. The military leader who had overseen this victory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had taken up the torch of Haitian liberation after its after its most charismatic initial proponent, Toussaint Louverture, was kidnapped by the forces of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and died in a lonely prison cell in the Jura Mountains (a fate possibly abetted by Dessalines’ own political maneuvering). The formerly French colony of Saint-Domingue would heretofore be known as Haiti, its original Taíno name.
Hardly alone in his campaign against what was then one of the world’s great military powers — marked by victories such as the Battle of Vertières, outside of modern-day Cap-Haïtien (known then as Cap-Français), in November 1803 — Dessalines was aided by a now-mythic cast of characters. There was Henry (often-written Henri) Christophe, an English-speaking former slave, likely born in Grenada. There was Alexandre Pétion, son of a wealthy French father, and free women of mixed African and European heritage who narrowly avoided death as an infant during a 1770 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince. And, deceased on the long road to liberty, were patriots like Suzanne Bélair, better known as Sanité Bélair, an “affranchi” (free person of color) who took an active part in combat against Napoleon’s forces and became a lieutenant in Louverture’s army. When she was executed by the French she cried “Viv libète! Aba esclavaj!” (Long live freedom! Down with slavery!)
Tradition has it that in celebration of their victory, the victorious Haitian forces sat down to “soup joumou,” a fortifying soup hinting at the promise of abundance that the hideousness of slavery had denied Haiti’s people and which earlier this year was given the distinction of being part of “the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO. The soup itself — an enticing and filling mélange of squash, onions, peppers, beef and pasta — not only has historical resonance but also offers a tantalizing introduction to the rich and varied cuisine of Haiti, something I was able to experience firsthand during several years of living there and a quarter century of visiting the country.
“It is an ode to freedom, a ritual that we participate in saying we believe in a better tomorrow and coming together,” says Dominique Dupuy, Haiti’s delegate to UNESCO. “When you go through this cascade of traumas, resilience comes at a cost, but let’s recognize that we ourselves have the power to push through. We’ve had bad years, but we’re a great people.”
Beset by plotting from foreign powers and what the Haitian author Frédéric Marcelin would later characterize as “civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries … and idolatrous militarism,” Haiti would soon fall into violent political factionalism. After declaring himself emperor, Dessalines would be assassinated at present-day Pont-Rouge in Port-au-Prince in October 1806. Civil war would break out, with the country divided between Henry Christophe’s Kingdom of Haiti in the north (where Christophe declared himself King Henry I) and Alexandre Pétion’s Republic of Haiti in the south. Following the deaths of both Christophe and Pétion, the nation would finally be reunited under the rule of Pétion’s successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer.
“The revolution is often told in only a victorious narrative, but it involves a lot of bloodshed and intra-group fighting,” says Yveline Alexis, an associate professor of Africana studies at Oberlin College. “But this also not only tells us about how unity and disunity can exist while fighting oppressors but how, in the end, Haiti will be left standing.”
But the dream of Haiti and the singular heroism of its initial accomplishment — defeating a colonial power and eradicating an infernal system — never died, and as the heavy winds of the country’s political struggle blew forward, the people of Haiti — “les enfants des héros” (children of heroes) as the author Lyonel Trouillot called them — carried on that legacy with their food.
When I worked as a journalist in Haiti in the early 2000s, one of my favorite things to do at the end of the week was to leave my flat in the bougainvillea-draped neighborhood of Pacot and head to the Portail Léogâne, the outdoor transit hub used for traveling south out of the city.
There, one could easily find a tap-tap, as Haiti’s brightly colored shared passenger vans are called, heading for the neighborhoods of Martissant, Carrefour and Mariani (a journey that is now very perilous because of the nonstop fighting of politically aligned armed groups called “baz,” or base). After hopping on board, sensuous kompa music playing from the tap-tap’s sound system, one would sail past dilapidated hotels that hark back to the days when Haiti was a tourist destination with outdoor markets where vendors sold their wares under the open sky.
When the tap-tap pauses briefly at a crossroads before continuing south through mountains often fecund after rain and dotted by rainbows, market women run up to the vehicle’s sides, offering travelers tasty snacks such as “douce macoss,” an overpoweringly sweet tricolored candy that, along with Faustin Soulouque, who ran the country first as president and then as emperor from 1847 to 1859, is perhaps the most famous product of the nearby city of Petit-Goâve, a once-beautiful city devastated by Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake. Or they would offer “tablet pistach,” Haiti’s version of peanut brittle.
After an hour or so of the tap-tap’s negotiating serpentine mountain roads, the southern city of Jacmel, where South American liberation hero Simón Bolívar was given shelter by Haiti’s rebel leaders (no one else would take him), appears below, glittering like a jewel next to the tumbling surf.
Once in Jacmel, I would disembark and transfer to a moto taxi to travel the 10 or so miles to the beach cottage that I was renting. There, one could splash in the surf under the gaze of the brooding inland mountains and feast on exquisite “lambi creole” (conch with a uniquely spicy Haitian sauce) and “langouste” (lobster prepared with a distinct smoky flair). In Jacmel itself, on a weekend evening, citizens and stray foreigners would go to and fro between the restaurants and music clubs, the streets lit by the flickering orange glow of the kerosene lamps of the vendors as they offered “griot” (fried pork) to passersby. As the sun set, it was customary to pour a libation of Haiti’s exquisite rum, Barbancourt Cinq étoiles (still, for my money, the best rum in the world) or, for the more adventurous, to sample the various strains of “tafia,” the highly potent raw rum sold in jerrycans at roadside stands (though the best tafia is widely considered to be consumed in the temperate climes of the mountain town of Kenscoff, above Port-au-Prince).
Over the two-and-a-half decades I’ve spent visiting Haiti, the majesty and ebullient tale told by Haiti’s rich cuisine has accompanied me every step. Haiti’s food evokes its sophisticated and varied roots, from the Parisian-style boulangeries that one can find in the tree-draped squares of areas like the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville to the unpretentious “lalo,” a spinach stew served over white rice and often bought from large pots along the road. And if you have never bought some “marinade” (a seasoned batter patty) from a woman selling them roadside, have you ever lived? The same question could be posed if you’ve never enjoyed delicious “poulet boucané” (smoked chicken) on the terrace of Kay Foun, overlooking the busy street in Saint-Marc, accompanied by a Prestige beer so cold that ice still clings to the glass of the bottle, or eaten “pintade créole” (guinea hen in a spicy sauce served with fried plantains and beans and rice) on a (relatively) cool autumn evening.
Regional dishes also abound, from the unique use of coconut around Jacmel in the south to “poul an sòs ak nwa” (cashew chicken) in the north, where one can eat it during an evening of carousing along the Carenage Boulevard that abuts the ocean. In the morning one can take in the stirring sight of Sans-Souci and the Citadelle Laferrière, a palace and fort combination built by Christophe with views across the plains of northern Haiti. Popular in Jérémie, a lovely town on the northern shore of on the northern shore of the Grand’Anse department and known as “la cité des poètes” (the city of poets), one finds “tonmtonm,” a filling breadfruit-based dish.
Haiti continues to struggle with its demons, systemic and structural problems greater than any one politician or political party. When Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated last July — the fifth president from the country’s north to be killed since independence — and as gang wars and narrow political infighting continue to rack the capital, it’s easy, particularly for outsiders, to forget this culinary lineage, which in a real way has freedom and a revolutionary heritage in every morsel.
“The Haitian kitchen is a concentration of our Afro and European influences,” says Paul Toussaint, a Haitian chef and restaurateur whose restaurant in Montreal, Canada, Kamúy, mixes traditional Haitian cooking with international elements. “When I am cooking Haitian cuisine, I feel like I am combining those heritages. It’s a love story with our history, and there’s a lot of meaning in our food.”
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Note de Presse: La création d’une commission baptisée : Commission Protestante Contre la Dictature en Haïti (CPCDH).
Note de Presse
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads
December 21, 2020
Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads
As Haiti veers from its constitutional path and armed gangs compete for power, its civil society persists in spite of the odds
By Michael Deibert
Newlines Magazine
(Please read original article here)
At the end of November, a curious decree was published in Le Moniteur, the official journal of Haiti’s government. The edict announced the creation of a new security service, the Agence nationale d’intelligence (ANI). Answerable only to the president and immune from criminal charges without presidential approval, the ANI’s anonymous agents will be tasked with the “monitoring of individuals and groups liable to resort to violence and to undermine national security and social peace.”
A Caribbean nation of 11 million, sharing the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, Haiti has rarely known a period free of political tumult in its 217-year history. The country was forged in the fires of the world’s only successful slave revolt. Marginalized by outside nations aghast at the thought of a Black republic, bedeviled by internecine political wars and repeated outside meddling (including a 1915 to 1934 military occupation by the United States), this nation of what the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot called “the children of heroes” has not had an easy path.
Few periods, however, have been as tumultuous as the last year, as President Jovenel Moïse, in office since February 2017, has squared off against a fractious opposition that has thrown everything they have at him to drive him from power, without apparent effect.
From Haiti’s mist-shrouded mountains to its lush rice fields to its glistening tropical beaches, warring politicians now battle in a landscape of competing armed groups. The criminality and economic anguish they stalk are far from natural occurrences like the hurricanes that occasionally batter Haiti’s shores; they have been created by powerful people both within and beyond its borders.
Moïse, an agribusinessman known locally as Nèg Bannann (The Banana Man), won the presidency by gaining 55.60% of the vote in a crowded field in a November 2016 contest marked by feeble participation. The opposition’s earlier promise to wait for voters with “machetes and stones in hand” likely did not help turnout. With the vote overseen by an interim president and political rival — former senator Jocelerme Privert — it was the second attempt at holding a presidential ballot after the first attempt was shelved due to violence and allegations of fraud.
Running as the candidate for the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) developed by former president and carnival singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, Moïse promised an aggressive infrastructure program to help revive Haiti’s economy, still struggling from January 2010’s devastating earthquake.
Despite the construction of miles of roads and the beginnings of an effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy grid, the reality has turned out somewhat differently. Moïse has been dogged by allegations of corruption related to his business dealings before becoming president. A 600-page audit of the Venezuelan low-cost oil program known as PetroCaribe claimed that firms linked to Moïse took part in an embezzlement scheme. Since 2018, a civil society movement under the slogan Kot kòb PetroCaribe a? (“Where is the PetroCaribe money?”) has demanded accountability for the funds, an end to corruption, and other government abuses.
Moïse denied links to the scandal and called on the Organization of American States to investigate, while frequently assailing what he charges is the “state capture” of Haiti’s resources by corrupt business elites and their political allies. Earlier this year, a government anti-corruption task force published a report which concluded that, between March 2019 and May 2020 alone, private oil companies operating in Haiti made $94 million in undue profits at the expense of the state.
After all eight members of Haiti’s Conseil électoral provisoire (CEP) resigned last July, Moïse created a new electoral council and unilaterally named its members. Many have been tasked with organizing local and federal elections and overseeing a commission to re-write Haiti’s often-criticized 1987 constitution. The new document is slated to be approved by a plebiscite, a move that left many stunned.
The president’s actions are “totally, wholly, bluntly unlawful,” says Georges Michel, a Haitian historian and constitutional expert. “It is a move towards arbitrary rule and dictatorship.”
Reached for comment, Haiti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Claude Joseph said that the changes were needed, noting — correctly — that presidents have been left to govern by decree several times in recent years as legislative elections failed to occur on time. Joseph went on to say, “President Moïse has been absolutely clear that he will not stand for a second term. These reforms will serve no benefit to him but will pave the way for a functioning democratic government in Haiti.”
In fairness, Moïse’s aberrant actions have been equaled if not exceeded by those of his political opposition, a different breed entirely from his civil society opponents. They are a collection of men — for they are almost all men — who have developed reputations for themselves at home often at odds with how they wish to be perceived abroad.
Before the terms of most of its members expired in January, Haiti’s parliament was regularly unable to reach quorum because its members didn’t show up for work. In May 2019, rather than allow a vote on Moïse’s designate for interim prime minister, a group of opposition senators led by Antonio “Don Kato” Cheramy, a former rapper turned politician, destroyed the meeting room. After Moïse nominated a Ministry of Finance official for the same post four months later, opposition politicians, again led by Don Kato, once more vandalized the parliamentary meeting hall. One of the president’s fiercest critics, the former senator Moïse Jean-Charles, recently demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy — a favorite target of opposition ire — and vowed to “dismantle this political class to make room for a new dynamic carried by young people.” This promise might have sounded more convincing were it not coming from a 53-year-old man who has not had a job outside of politics since the mid-1990s. In late 2019, an opposition-led armed strike forced the country to a standstill for weeks, further wounding an already grievously ill economy and achieving virtually nothing.
Another of Moïse’s many recent decrees seeks to classify protest strategies such as reducing freedom of movement on public roads as “terrorist acts,” punishable by up to 50 years in prison.
With many of their own families living safely abroad, Haiti’s political operators appear to hold fast to Satan’s maxim in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: It is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
As all of this goes on, Haiti’s security situation has disintegrated. In the space of a few days, kidnappers seized a young doctor from the Hôpital de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, a well-known guitarist from the group Strings, and the wife of the head of the Unité de sécurité générale du palais national (USGPN), the police unit directly responsible for the president’s personal security. Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper recently ran an account of one kidnapping victim that detailed how kidnappers possessed “heavy weapons, dozens of vehicles and government license plates,” performed reconnaissance on potential targets’ social media accounts and were able to open the phones of their victims without asking for security codes. In August, Monferrier Dorval, head of the Port-au-Prince bar association and a well-known attorney, was slain returning home, one of several such assassinations in recent months.
This landscape is even more dolorous when one pauses to consider that, in just over 25 years, Haiti has been host to the Mission civile internationale en Haïti (MICIVIH), the Mission des Nations unies en Haïti (MINUAH), the U.S.-led “Operation Uphold Democracy” in 1994, and, from 2004 to 2017, the Mission des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), which eventually became the Bureau intégré des Nations unies en Haïti (BINUH), which is presiding over the current implosion.
As the political situation in Haiti has deteriorated, the role of the baz (base) — the armed groups in the country’s most impoverished quarters acting as a kind of netherworld of neighborhood protector, tax collector, muscle for political interests and freelance criminal — has grown to ever more powerful levels.
The baz are descendants of other irregular paramilitary forces in Haitian history — from the zinglin of the mid-1800s rule of Faustin Soulouque to l’armée souffrante of the renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau to the Tontons Macoutes of dictator François Duvalier. One can almost pinpoint when the baz, as a specific political modus operandi, overwhelmed Haiti’s democratic sector and began the slow, inexorable poisoning of its political system.
After returning in October 1994 from an exile during which hundreds (perhaps thousands) of his supporters were killed by the army and paramilitaries (some of whose leaders were on the payroll of the CIA), then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first order of business was to disband the military that had overthrown him. He dissolved the military in April 1995 (which was illegal without a constitutional amendment, as the army was still enshrined in Article 263 of the Haitian constitution). With the creation of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) the following month, many hoped for a more humane face of public security in Haiti.
The PNH faced a rough economic landscape, however. In 1995, as part of an IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment made with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s support, Haiti lowered tariffs on imported rice to 3% from 50%, quickly becoming the world’s fifth-largest importer of U.S. rice. The backbone of the Haitian economy, local rice could not compete with cheaper American imports, putting farmers out of work. Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for them, as the early-1990s U.S. embargo that helped drive the military regime that had ousted Aristide also wrecked Haiti’s manufacturing base.
At a January 1996 meeting between the PNH and a gang that referred to itself as Lame Wouj (The Red Army) in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a young policewoman named Marie Christine Jeune criticized what she viewed as the president’s attempts to co-opt the nascent police force by suggesting it join forces with pro-government thugs. Two months later, a month after Aristide left office, Jeune was found slain. It was the beginning of a pattern of the killing of police officers who would not turn a blind eye to illegal armed actors that continues to this day.
That same year, Aristide founded the Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family) party. In the years leading up to and beyond Aristide’s 2001 return to office, the party nurtured a network of armed supporters in marginalized communities. The network was referred to as chimere, after a mythical fire-breathing demon. Many of the leaders of these groups in Port-au-Prince had grown up in the orbit of Aristide’s Lafanmi Selavi home for street children. When I was living in Haiti between 2001 and 2004, a number of them became my friends. They would receive a little money for no-show jobs at state industries and, in return, were expected to enthusiastically demonstrate for the president and terrorize his opponents. They were in regular contact with the PNH. Almost none of these young men would make it out of their 20s alive.
Aristide was overthrown in February 2004 after months of massive street protests and an armed rebellion against his rule (a rebellion that began with the Lame Kanibal, a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of Gonaïves). After that, the young gunmen engaged in a brutal war of attrition against police, then under the command of Léon Charles (who would later be named as Haiti’s ambassador to the Organization of American States and was recently re-appointed by Moïse as head of the PNH), that became known as Operation Baghdad. Hundreds would die before some level of stability returned when an unelected interim government was replaced by René Préval, in his second turn at the helm of Haiti’s ship of state. Préval, between his inauguration in May 2006 and Haiti’s apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake, proved that he was Haiti’s wiliest and most able politician.
The only president in Haiti’s history who twice turned power over to a democratically elected successor, Préval – an agronomist by training – represented a figure in whom many sides of Haiti’s stratified nation, from the rich in their villas above Port-au-Prince to those in the slums, felt they had a representative. He managed to bring a measure of tranquility to the divided country, saying that Haiti was like a bottle that must rest on its broad base to be secure. If it rested on its narrow mouth (the presidency and the country’s elite), it would topple over and shatter.
When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, destroying much of the capital city and killing more than 300,000 people, Préval appeared at times paralyzed when faced with the massive task of rebuilding. After a fraught election during which the international community pressured him, and as with his 2006 win, street protests erupted when it looked like the leading candidate might be deprived of victory, Préval (who would die in March 2017) turned the presidency over to Michel Martelly in May 2011. Many among Martelly’s entourage, including some advisers, had either direct or family links to the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1971 until his overthrow in 1986.
Many foreign commentators on Haiti couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that a right-wing populist who had previously performed in drag and a diaper and had once released an album called “100% Kaka” could win a contest for the presidency. But the Haitian sociologist and former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Guy Alexandre, saw things much more clearly. He wrote that Martelly’s popularity was “explained by the frustration of the population and its rejection of Préval, who has not been able to manage the country after the earthquake… [Martelly] is backed by former Duvalierists and the youth of the popular classes for whom he represents a break with the traditional political system.”
A little over a year after his election, Martelly would form the PHTK, whose name — roughly translated as “Bald Headed Haitian Party” — referred to Martelly’s gleaming pate. Corruption and patronage flourished, and the PHTK would enthusiastically embrace the baz model, as had many other political parties as it metastasized throughout Haiti’s body politic.
In recent months, despite the revival of the Haitian army in 2017, two specific armed groups have risen to prominence as the government and its opponents prosecute their struggle for power.
Last year, while the government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s desire to form a union, a gang calling itself Fantôme 509 (the country code for Haiti) and claiming to be dissident police began appearing at demonstrations. Though certainly dominated by current and former officers, there is some evidence that Fantôme 509 also struck an alliance with a gang operating out of the Village de Dieu slum. Appearing masked and frequently shooting in the air and at vehicles, Fantôme 509 is viewed widely as a wing of the opposition, and the rank-and-file PNH perceives the group’s members as outlaws.
On the opposite side is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former officer in the PNH’s Unité Départementale pour le Maintien de l’Ordre (UDMO) who went rogue following a November 2017 PNH raid against a gang in the hillside slum of Grand Ravine during which at least two police officers and 10 civilians died. Part of a larger neighborhood called Martissant, Grand Ravine is a known opposition stronghold. About to be arrested amid an investigation of the civilian deaths, Chérizier instead retreated to his home base in the lower Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. He was subsequently linked to a 2018 massacre in the capital’s slum of La Saline that a United Nations report said left at least 26 people dead (a report by the Haitian human rights group Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, RNDDH, put the death toll at 71) and during which the U.N. alleged involvement by two then-government officials.
Chérizier held a press conference last June, dressed in a suit and carrying a machine gun, during which he announced the formation of the G9 an fanmi e alye, an alliance of armed groups around the city. A month later, G9-allied gunmen held a public demonstration in Port-au-Prince during which police did not intervene. Though Chérizier specifically stated that he was not “pro-government or pro-opposition,” many see the G9 as the government’s bludgeon to clear out potentially troublesome elements from opposition neighborhoods before as-yet-unscheduled elections are held. Speaking on Radio Métropole last month, Moïse said, “I have no connection with these bandits, I do not distribute money or weapons to them to maintain order in their neighborhood.”
On December 10, Cherizier and the two officials — Ministry of Interior functionary Fednel Monchery & former West Department delegate Joseph Pierre Richard Duplan — were sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the La Saline killings.
Many veteran observers feel the dynamic in Haiti with the armed groups has begun to shift in recent years, with the politicians no longer holding all the cards.
“Many of the gang leaders are very aware that they’re being used, and they want to start doing things for themselves, especially when it comes to the next elections,” says Louis-Henri Mars, the executive director of Lakou Lapè (“peaceful community” in Creole), a group that promotes non-violence and dialogue. Mars is the grandson of Haitian author Jean Price-Mars, one of the founders of the négritude movement of Black consciousness and has been involved working with the most marginalized communities in the capital for decades. “You’re not going to become mayor if the crew don’t say yes, you’re not going to become deputy.”
Earlier this month, the eminent Haitian jurist & homme politique Gérard Gourgue died at 95. Under the Duvalier dictatorship, he bravely created the Ligue haïtienne des droits humains, and was repeatedly beaten and harassed by the tyrannical security forces. He was briefly a member of the military-civilian junta after Duvalier’s fall in 1986, and his likely victory in 1987 presidential elections prompted the killing of voters in what became known as the Ruelle Vaillant massacre. Still opposed to tyranny into his 70s, Gourgue was a member of a wide-ranging opposition when Aristide began his drift toward dictatorship. He was briefly proclaimed “provisional president” in 2001, leading the school he ran to be attacked by Aristide partisans as students cowered inside.
Gourgue was one of the last of the all-but-vanished generation of democratic activists that I met during my first trips to Haiti in the 1990s, notable for their intellectual brilliance. There was the economist, author, and political militant Gérard Pierre-Charles. There was the former head of the Parti unifié des communistes haïtiens René Théodore. There was the ex-priest turned human rights champion Jean-Claude Bajeux, who had lost most of his family to Duvalierist terror. All have since gone to join to the ancestors
It is not easy to find these bright lights in Haiti’s political firmament anymore, but if one knows where to look, one can still find them in the country at large.
The impoverished Cité Soleil is often characterized as a place of violence, but it is a community where fishermen mend nets by the glittering Caribbean and delicately-dressed schoolchildren skip down dusty streets as residents struggle diligently to better their lives. In such communities, one finds groups like the Sant Kominote Altènatif Ak Lapè and the Konbit Solèy Leve, which have tasked themselves to provide residents with a world-class library, which is already half-built. Further afield, one finds groups like the Asosyasyon Orijinè Granplenn in the northern community of Gros-Morne, which advocates for the interests of Haiti’s long-suffering peasants. In Haiti, even those with the most impetus to give up soldier on, often against extraordinary odds, chèche lavi (looking for life).
In an open letter in Le Nouvelliste published a few months ago, an eminence who even predated Gérard Gourgue’s generation, the 103-year-old author Odette Roy Fombrun, confessed to her compatriots, “I am sad to leave my country in tatters.”
She then went on to implore them to:
Rise to the level of true citizens by agreeing to make personal sacrifices in favor of the country, of political and economic stability, of the return to the constitutional path, and the strengthening of institutions. It is imperative to stop this descent into hell with the humility of each of us to recognize that, alone, not in small, dispersed groups, we can do nothing. …Wisdom and love of country require us to work together.
As they stand, daggers drawn, one hopes that Haiti’s political actors hear her plea.
Monday, June 22, 2020
Dominican Republic: George Floyd protests spark reckoning with race as elections loom
Dominican Republic: George Floyd protests spark reckoning with race as elections loom
By Michael Deibert
The Guardian
(Read original article here)
As demonstrations were held around the world against racism and police brutality, a group of protesters arrived last week at Santo Domingo’s Parque Independencia to honor the memory of George Floyd, the African American man killed by Minneapolis police.
The vigil had been convened by Reconocido (Recognized), a local organization that describes itself as made up primarily of Dominicans of Haitian descent – a group that routinely faces racist discrimination.
But counter-protesters were waiting for them: an ultranationalist organization dubbing itself the Antigua Orden Dominicana (Old Dominican Order) had called on social networks for people to come out and “defend against the Haitian invasion”.
As Reconocido members tried to hold their event, the counter-protesters shouted invective at them. Police officers stood by, and when they eventually intervened, it was to bundle Reconocido’s leader, Ana María Belique, and another activist off to jail.
“What happened shows the levels of intolerance that exist here regarding the issue of race,” said Belique, who was released hours later without charges. “Perhaps if George Floyd was not black and if we were not an anti-racist collective, it might be different. Because everything black in this country evokes Haiti – as if it were an affront to this nation that turns its back on its black identity.”
The Dominican Republic shares both the island of Hispaniola and an uneasy history with Haiti – the country from which it gained its independence in 1844. It has traditionally provided an escape valve for Haitians fleeing political upheaval and economic desperation at home, even as they are sometimes viewed – often unfairly – as competing with poor Dominicans for low-wage jobs.
The global wave of Black Lives Matter protests reached the Dominican Republic as the country approaches 5 July presidential elections that some believe may put an end to 24 years of nearly uninterrupted governance by the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (the Dominican Liberation party, or PLD).
The PLD first took the presidency in 1996 through a Faustian bargain with the longtime caudillo Joaquín Balaguer, after a campaign marked by fraud and racist incitement that finally saw Leonel Fernández take the presidential sash.
With the PLD now beset by various scandals – and bitterly divided between wings loyal to current president Danilo Medina (in office since 2012 and running the former government minister Gonzalo Castillo as his successor) and Fernández (who is mounting his own presidential campaign at the head of the Fuerza del Pueblo coalition) – polls suggest the ballot may be won by Luis Abinader of the opposition Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM).
What this may mean for the discourse on race in the Dominican Republic remains to be seen. The country’s agriculture, tourism and construction sectors largely depend on immigrant Haitian labor, but over the last decade, generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent have seen a series of court rulings gradually strip them of their nationality.
“Even the political parties that have been seen as more friendly on these issues have been quiet,” said Amarilys Estrella, a visiting professor with the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University.
“All of this silence allows for the amplification of a small group of ultra-nationalists who are anti-Haitian and also anti-black. Even people who might not agree with what is happening might not speak out because they fear they might be a target.”
That fear is rooted in history: an October 1937 speech by the dictator Rafael Trujillo launched a pogrom against Haitians in the country which would eventually become known as “the Parsley Massacre” or el Corte (the Cutting). At least 10,000 and perhaps up to 20,000 Haitians die during a weeks-long paroxysm of genocidal rage.
Acts of public violence against Haitians in the Dominican Republic still happen from time to time, with one of the better-known recent cases being the lynching of a Haitian man in the northern city of Santiago in 2015.
However, protests against corruption and electoral meddling that shook the country earlier this year saw a multiracial and often quite youthful front taking to the streets in what many observers agreed was an unprecedented show of civic discontent that may be a harbinger of future change.
“The young people are in many ways attuned to transnational networks and conversations,” says Lorgia García Peña, an associate professor in the department of romance languages and literatures at Harvard University.
“The language that is being used right now is purposeful. There has been a more global contextualization of the intersection of race, class and economic exploitation that this young generation is much more aware of.”
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Donde las vidas de los negros importaban primero en las Américas
Monday, June 8, 2020
'Our heritage is abandoned': burning of Haitian church fuels anger at politicians
'Our heritage is abandoned': burning of Haitian church fuels anger at politicians
By Michael Deibert
Published on Fri 17 Apr 2020 12.45 BST
The Guardian
(Read original article here)
