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Haiti: Cheap Labor, Racism, and Militarism
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Anne Winkler-Morey, W A M M
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Was Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide kidnapped by the U.S.? Who was lying: President Aristide or U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell?
On March 4, 2004, I asked my students to gather evidence and weigh in on this question. Most decided Aristide was lying because it was illogical for the United States to kidnap the Haitian leader. If one is not familiar with the 200-year history of U.S. policy toward Haiti, it does indeed seem like an absurd move for the most powerful nation in the world to kidnap the leader of the weakest nation in the hemisphere. However, a historical review illustrates the “logic” of this latest crime against Haitian sovereignty.
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Ruben Joanem addressed protesters at the March 20, 2004, anti-war rally at the Minnesota State Capitol. Joanem is a Haitian graduate student at the University of Minnesota and helped to found the Haiti Justice Committee.
–Photo by Lisa Ann Pierce
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From 1804 through the 1860s, the United States joined European nations in what may be the longest period of global economic sanctions in world history in order to punish Haitians for overthrowing the French slave colony and creating the first black republic of the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian revolution was a profound defeat for both European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade.
The U.S. decision to join in this imperial boycott was prophetic. It meant that despite the fact that the United States had just overcome British colonialism, the new nation would not support self-determination in the global sphere, but instead would follow its European forebears down the path of empire, justified by racism. In fact, U.S. policy toward the Caribbean region during the 19th century can be summed up in the phrase “Not another Haiti.”
From 1900 to 1915, U.S. efforts to establish hegemony over agriculture and banking in Haiti were thwarted by European rivals and the Haitians themselves. Using internal unrest as an excuse, the U.S. invaded Haiti in 1915.
From 1915 to 1934, U.S. Marines occupied Haiti. Promising to modernize and “civilize” the nation, the occupiers took control of Haitian agriculture and banks. Small subsistence farmers became day laborers on large, predominantly U.S.-owned sugar plantations. Promises of new roads and schools went unfulfilled. Adding insult to injury, when the occupation ended the U.S handed the Haitians a bill for services rendered. It was not unlike the reparations France demanded of Haiti a century earlier for lost revenue from their slave plantations.
From 1934 to 1990, the United States provided aid and training for Haitian dictators willing to toe the U.S. line. The Duvalier family dictatorship (1957-1986) was notoriously brutal. Like the Somozas in Nicaragua and Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, these surrogate dictators waged war on their own people to satisfy the needs of U.S. banana, sugar, and coffee companies, as well as the manufacturers of baseballs, brassieres, and small mechanical devices.
In 1990, Haiti held its first democratic election. The liberation theologian Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas party won. In 1991, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled money to the right wing paramilitary group FRAPH to overthrow Aristide. The CIA-supported military dictatorship was responsible for the deaths of 5,000 Haitians from 1991 to 1993.
Reacting to global pressure in 1994, the U.S. used military intervention to reinstate Aristide to the presidency. Some members of the murderous FRAPH government were escorted to the Dominican Republic by U.S. forces. Others were granted exile in U.S. cities.
Meanwhile, Aristide and his Lavalas successor were left to govern with so many strings attached to their administrations that they were unable (if they were willing) to institute any of the economic promises of the Lavalas revolution. The Haitian liberation movement had been kidnapped by International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies (see sidebar on page 7 for a related resource). By 1996 unemployment in Haiti reached 60 to 70 percent and 40 percent of the population faced starvation conditions. USAID money was used to aid U.S. contractors.
As a result, the Haiti of 2000, like the Haiti of 1934, was still a country without roads and schools, despite the input of millions of U.S. government dollars. Still, in 2001 Aristide again won the presidency. Aristide disarmed the hated national police forces, but since then armed thugs rule the streets. The same year Aristide was reelected, the Bush Administration withheld essential aid from Haiti and began funding FRAPH forces still gathered safely in the Dominican Republic. This opposition called for a new election claiming fraud in local races. Aristide agreed, but the opposition then claimed it was “not the right time.”
In 2003, FRAPH forces entered the country, joined by many disaffected Haitians, and began the process of destabilizing Aristide’s government. On February 29, 2004, Aristide left Haiti in a Pentagon plane. Ten days later an “American-backed council of eminent Haitians” assembled and picked a wealthy “business consultant” and fifteen-year resident of Boca Raton, Florida, to replace Aristide (New York Times, March 10, 2004).
Recently, I read that in the days after Aristide’s removal, armed forces that helped overthrow the president were hired by a manufacturer to attack 600 striking workers at a garment factory. This incident is indicative of the real motivation for U.S. policy toward Haiti: labor. Cheap labor. Haiti is at the bottom of the reserve-army-of-labor ladder in the Western Hemisphere. Haitians migrate to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere in the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations. Unemployed Haitians are shipped in whenever workers try to organize in the Caribbean region, creating resentment among local workers that divides workers along socially constructed ethnic and racial lines.
At the top of this spiral is the United States with an economy completely dependent on cheap labor. Workers from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico provide the low-wage workforce for the U.S. service economy, while workers in the Caribbean region provide low-cost produce and goods that profit multinational corporations. This is true today as it was at the turn of the 20th century, when the Jamaican race leader Marcus Garvey tried to combat anti-Haitian sentiment among Caribbean workers. Garvey argued that the answer to these strike-breaking tactics by employers was not nationalist bigotry, but Caribbean racial solidarity. Today, the need for transnational labor solidarity has never been greater—or more frightening to multinational corporations.
The U.S. press has been loath to provide the historical background of U.S. involvement and quick to declare Haiti’s situation hopeless. The March 14, 2004, New York Times article, “Life is Hard and Short in Haiti’s Bleak Villages,” began, “Diplomats call Haiti ‘a failed state,’ a nation done in by dictators and disasters.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune reprinted the article with its own headline: “Haiti at Point of No Return.”
Point of no return? It is one (very important) thing to alert the world that Haitians face starvation conditions in every sphere, from food to education to jobs to political freedom. It is quite another to declare a nation of eight million people “done in.” This strikes me as highly immoral, especially coming from the mainstream press of a nation that has for 200 years been engaged in policies that put the interest of U.S. business in direct opposition to the interests of the Haitian people.
Instead of lamenting Haiti’s hopeless conditions, what do we do? Obviously, we must call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, the reinstatement of President Aristide, and an end to the discriminatory U.S. immigration policy that bars Haitian boat people but opens doors to Cubans who leave their country by similar means. But that is not enough.
We need to demand reparations for Haiti—reparations for 60 years of economic embargoes, nineteen years of occupation, 55 years of supporting dictators, and fourteen years of economic and military sabotage of the liberation movement in Haiti. Reparations are not aid, loans, or charity. Haiti has been a prime recipient of church and community charities in the U.S. and around the world. But Haiti does not need to be the world’s charity case or the world’s basket case.
Instead, Haiti should be the starting point for a global movement to repair the damages of colonialism and neocolonialism, slavery and racism. The United States, along with France, are the right nations to begin a global movement to recount the crimes against Haiti and figure out how to repair the damages. Haiti needs fair trade, union representation, reforestation, and rural education. Haiti has a labor movement, an environmental movement, an education movement. They need our solidarity, not our charity.
The March 14 New York Times article lamented that in Haiti “there is no protection from 200 years of bad government, going back to slavery days.” Certainly Haiti, like every other nation on earth, has a long history of leaders who put the interests of a tiny elite above those of the masses. Yet to understand the current crisis, we must review the history of Haiti’s relationship with the United States and other great powers. If we focus on undoing this history of using racism to justify the relegation of Haitians to the bottom of the exploited labor spiral, then we can begin to uncurl that lethal coil. |
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Caribbean Justice Resources
Life and Debt
Video available from W A M M!
Many W A M M members have found the video Life and Debt helpful in understanding what is happening in Haiti, the Caribbean, and throughout the world.
“Utilizing excerpts from the award-winning nonfiction text, A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid, Life and Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas.
“By combining traditional documentary technique with a stylized narrative framework, the complexity of international lending, structural adjustment policies, and free trade will be understood in the context of the day-to-day realities of the people whose lives they impact.”
To purchase your copy of Life and Debt, contact the W A M M office
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© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete May 2004 Index - click here
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