I spent this past weekend in Detroit burying an uncle who just died of cancer. As I drove back to the airport Tuesday morning, amid the ruins of a willfully neglected and not forgotten city, I listened to the radio, where all anyone could talk about was an article posted on Anderson Cooper’s blog called, “Haiti is not our long-term priority. Detroit is.”
This article has a number of problems, but here I would like to focus on one in particular: its assertion that “Haiti’s not really our problem at all.” The most cursory look at the last 200 years of Haitian history tells a different story.
In 1804, more than 60 years before the Civil War put an end to slavery in the United States, the Haitian people gained their freedom in what journalist Kim Ives called, “the first and last slave revolution in history.” It was a revolution that established Haiti as “the first black republic in the world, the first independent nation of Latin America,” a revolution that became “the touchstone of all the other revolutions [in Latin America].”
The people of Haiti have been paying for it ever since.
Almost immediately, the U.S. and France, each motivated by their own interests, spearheaded an international embargo against Haiti. France demanded, and eventually received, reparations from Haiti to pay for its effort to crush the Haitian revolution. The U.S. sought to contain the example of a successful slave rebellion from spreading to its Southern slaveholding states. It was only during the Civil War, when the North could benefit from such a slave rebellion, that President Abraham Lincoln recognized Haiti as an independent nation.
The intervening 150 years of Haitian-U.S. relations have been little different.
Since 1915, the U.S. has invaded and occupied the country four separate times. From 1957 to 1986, it openly supported the repressive Duvalier dictatorship, until the Duvaliers were overthrown by Lavalas, or “the flood,” a grassroots movement out of which future Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide emerged as spokesperson. In the past 20 years, the U.S. has openly or tacitly supported Aristide’s overthrow twice! In 1991, it supported a military coup after Aristide became the country’s first democratically elected president, and in 2004, it essentially kidnapped him, forcing him onto a U.S.-chartered airplane and airlifting him to Central African Republic.
This cursory overview shows not only that the current crisis in Haiti is “our problem” but also, fundamentally, the result of 200 years of meddling in internal Haitian affairs by the United States.
Racist comments, like those by Pat Robertson, ever the scatological demagogue, have attributed the troubles the Haitian people have experienced over the last 200 years to an alleged pact they made with the devil in exchange for their freedom.
But whatever Robertson or anyone else says, the devil isn’t in the freedom business. The Lavalas movement demonstrates this. Based largely in the parishes of radical clergy members sympathetic to liberation theology, this movement turned Christianity into a weapon against oppression and not simply one of the oppressor’s tools. In the process, it showed that religious faith can be a powerful tool in a people’s self-liberation, not the cause of their suffering. As always, it is the content of an idea and the use to which we put it, that determines its value in the process of human liberation.
Given that the crisis in Haiti is largely the responsibility of our government’s long-term meddling in Haitian affairs, how should we respond?
Aristide’s role as leader and spokesperson of Lavalas—but also product of its dynamic movement—gives us a clue. In a 2007 interview, Aristide described the relationship between himself and that movement. “It isn’t a matter of struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance from the people,” he said, “it’s a matter of struggling with and in the midst of the people.”
Some, like Robertson, fight against the people, using whatever power and influence he has to stymie their self-liberation.
Others choose to fight for them and on their behalf, albeit from a distance.
These are the vast majority of non-governmental organizations now operating in Haiti or flocking to its aid. Selma James, longtime lefty political activist, once quipped that it’s ironic to call these groups “non-governmental” as they so often arrive alongside U.S. troops (see Iraq) and do their bidding. Many of these organizations limit their activity to packing lunches and donating money to approved institutions in Haiti. They are condescending saviors, struggling for the people, on their behalf, and from a distance.
Still others fight not for the people, but with them and in their midst. Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti is one of them, and this goes a long way toward explaining the controversy surrounding it recently. Jean’s organization, according to a Washington Post article paraphrasing its president, “does what others can’t, because Jean gives it unusual access to the country’s slums.” The racists and condescending saviors fear Haiti’s slums. They forget that the Haitian people, from the most skilled surgeons to the slum dwellers living 20 deep in shacks around Port-au-Prince, have proven time and again that they will fight and defeat racists and that they need no condescending saviors.
Donate not only to groups like Jean’s Yele Haiti, but grassroots organizations like Batay Ouvriye and the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund that seek not only to meet immediate needs, but lay the groundwork to fulfill the promise of Haiti’s long-deferred dreams.
Michael Stauch is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in history. His column runs every other Friday.
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