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	Workers Vanguard No. 962	30 July 2010

Haiti: Mass Misery Under Imperialist Occupation

All U.S./UN Troops Out!

In the six months since the devastating earthquake struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, killing some 250,000 people and destroying 100,000 homes, the suffering of the Haitian masses has only deepened. A week after the quake, imperialist occupiers led by the U.S. signaled what they had in store for the Haitian masses when police in a joint UN-Haitian operation fired into crowded prison cells in the southern city of Les Cayes, killing at least 12.

While the last of the 20,000 U.S. troops that were dispatched to Haiti in the guise of a “relief effort” have been withdrawn, 500 American National Guardsmen are stationed there. The country remains under military occupation by the UN force known as MINUSTAH, which has run Haiti since 2004. Headed by the Brazilian military, more than 10,000 UN troops and police are imposing “order” on a starving, homeless population, brutally repressing social protest and rebuilding the machinery of repression on behalf of Haiti’s imperialist masters.

The earthquake’s death toll was itself a product of over a century of imperialist depredation that left the country totally exposed to the quake’s impact, as shoddily built buildings in the teeming city collapsed. Today, some 1.5 million people are still living in makeshift tents—often no more than four sticks and bedsheets—in camps in and around the capital. With virtually no means of transport, many of these people are hours from the city center. In this utterly impoverished country, where the unemployment rate reached as high as 80 percent before the quake, this means that few have even the hope of being able to find any work.

People who had sought refuge on golf courses, parks or other facilities were forcibly relocated to barren land where there are no basic services like water and sanitation, where the dust and heat are unbearable and where a strong wind could easily destroy their shelters. More than 1,200 families camped in the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium had their tents destroyed without warning by the Haitian National Police and were moved out at gunpoint. People are in deadly fear of the hurricane season, with many living precariously on eroded hillsides that could easily be wiped out by a mudslide. Only a few of the promised hurricane-resistant shelters have been built. Other people have fled to the abject poverty of the countryside.

Some elements associated with the occupation have swooped down like vultures to reap the spoils of “reconstruction.” In the town of Ganthier, 18 miles east of the capital, private developers have laid claim to state land that has been used to grow food for 80 years, driving peasants off with bulldozers. Those who resisted were beaten and arrested, along with the mayor.

The Haitian Parliament has officially ceded power over aid money and reconstruction to the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, headed by Bill Clinton, placing control of what exists of an economy in this shattered country in the hands of the IMF, World Bank and other imperialist agencies. These are the same forces that have repeatedly imposed drastic austerity measures on the Haitian population while enforcing privatization and other “free trade” policies that have ruined local agriculture and most of what little industrial production had existed. The “development” that Clinton & Co. talk about centers on expanding garment and other sweatshop production. Workers in those shops are paid starvation wages, often less than the official minimum salary of roughly $3 a day.

Half a year after the quake, only some 2 percent of pledged reconstruction aid has been delivered and less than 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. Aid was never the point of the U.S. intervention into Haiti. The International Executive Committee of the International Communist League issued an April 27 statement repudiating our initial position justifying the U.S. imperialist troop presence as essential to aid, a social-patriotic betrayal of Marxist principle. We wrote: “The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a ‘humanitarian’ face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean” (WV No. 958, 7 May).

U.S. military authorities who took command of the Port-au-Prince airport prevented the World Food Program from landing cargos of food, medicine and water for two days, diverting their flights “so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety” (New York Times, 17 January). At the same time, the Obama administration ordered a naval blockade to prevent Haitians from fleeing to the U.S., with Air Force flights broadcasting a Creole-language warning from Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S. that American forces would “intercept” anyone fleeing by boat and “send you back home.”

We demand an end to the UN occupation of Haiti and call for all imperialist troops and police forces out now! We call for full citizenship rights for all Haitians and other refugees and immigrants who have made it to the U.S. No deportations!

Neocolonial Haiti: Subjugation and Devastation

For 200 years, the Haitian masses have been paying in blood for the revolution carried out under Toussaint L’Ouverture against the French colonial slavocracy. Culminating in the creation of the first independent black state in the modern era, the Haitian Revolution inspired slave revolts across the Americas and met with a frenzy of racist hostility from both France and the then-slaveowning U.S. In return for recognition by France, Haiti was compelled to compensate the former slaveowners in an amount measuring $20 billion at today’s prices. The country remains hideously impoverished to this day.

The occupation this January was the fourth carried out by the U.S. in the past century. U.S. troops occupied Haiti from 1915-1934, drowning an anti-imperialist revolt in blood. The U.S. installed and then propped up a series of brutal, corrupt dictatorships, most infamously that of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier beginning in 1957. Duvalier organized the Tonton Macoutes paramilitary thugs and oversaw the killing of 50,000 of his opponents. The bloodletting continued under his son “Baby Doc,” who went on to face a popular revolt that caused him to flee the country in 1986, when others in his cabal took over.

The massive social discontent eventually led to the election of radical populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, champion of the Lavalas movement, by a two-thirds majority in 1990. Virtually the entire left internationally gave this bourgeois politician political support. In contrast, we warned: “Aristide will either play the role of groveling instrument of the Haitian bourgeoisie and the U.S. imperialist overlords or he will be swept away in a reactionary crackdown aimed at decisively disciplining the pitilessly oppressed population” (WV No. 517, 4 January 1991). In fact, both things happened.

While the Aristide government tried to carry out such reforms as raising the miserable minimum wage, as a bourgeois regime it served the class interests of the ruling elite of sweatshop owners and landowners and their imperialist patrons. Before his election Aristide often denounced U.S. imperialism’s role in Haiti. But once in office he welcomed USAID and IMF assistance, boasting that he would “restore the World Bank’s confidence in Haiti.”

Seven months after taking office, Aristide was overthrown by the man he appointed as military chief, Raoul Cedras, who established a regime of military terror and forced Aristide into exile. Some 2,000 people were killed in the immediate aftermath. Thousands fled to the U.S. in rickety boats only to be imprisoned in Guantánamo. In 1994, following a starvation embargo imposed by the U.S. under Clinton, American Marines invaded the country and reinstalled Aristide at bayonet point.

The condition for Aristide’s return was that he agree to a drastic austerity program, privatization of state-owned industry, massive layoffs in the public sector and the virtual abolition of import tariffs. All this he did, inducing the collapse of Haiti’s economy while setting the police, supplemented by gangs, against strikers and others. Nonetheless, his Washington overlords were not satisfied. After an interim regime under René Préval—the current nominal president—Aristide was re-elected in 2000 only to face a U.S.-led destabilization campaign. To Washington’s chagrin, Aristide developed ties with the Cuban deformed workers state, which has provided crucial medical personnel for Haiti, and with Venezuela under bourgeois populist Hugo Chávez. In 2004, “peacekeeping” troops led mainly by the U.S., Canada and France landed in Haiti and Aristide was whisked out on a U.S.-chartered jet to the Central African Republic. (He later moved to South Africa.)

Ever since the 2004 coup, the UN’s MINUSTAH troops have backed violent assaults by the Haitian police on poor communities and on demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return. UN forces have participated in a number of “anti-gang” raids on Cité Soleil, an Aristide bastion, and other slum neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. Attacks in December 2004 and December 2006, with hundreds of troops moving into Cité Soleil by land, sea and air, left scores of residents dead. During hunger riots in 2008, UN troops fired on crowds, killing several demonstrators.

The imperialist intervention undertaken by the Obama White House shored up this bloody occupation force while also demonstrating to the world that the U.S. continues to regard the Caribbean basin as an “American lake.” Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. has expanded its military presence in Colombia, where there are now seven U.S. bases. The government of Costa Rica this month authorized the entry of 46 U.S. warships and 7,000 Marines, while the U.S.-backed government in Honduras opened a new base for American use in April. The U.S. military buildup in the region is a particular threat to the Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers state. We defend Cuba unconditionally against U.S. imperialism while fighting for a proletarian political revolution against the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy. We demand: All U.S. military forces and bases out of the Caribbean! U.S. out of Guantánamo! U.S. imperialists: Hands off the world!

Anger at Occupation Grows

Thousands of Haitians fed up by foreign occupation and Préval’s puppet government have staged protests recently in the face of brutal repression. Demonstrations in May in Port-au-Prince brought out an estimated 30,000 people demanding free elections, a role in reconstruction efforts and the return of Aristide. Demonstrators have also called for ending the ban of his Fanmi Lavalas party, which is barred from running in the national elections scheduled for November. We defend the right of people to vote for whomever they want. We demand the right of Aristide to return to Haiti and oppose the ban on Fanmi Lavalas, despite our political opposition as Marxists to this populist party.

On May 4, after students at the State University Ethnology College in the capital held a series of protests against the occupation, MINUSTAH troops stormed the campus, firing tear gas and rubber bullets and arresting militant student leader Frantz Mathieu Junior. Faced with the growing unrest, the UN is sending 680 additional foreign policemen to augment the MINUSTAH force. The international workers movement must demand: Free all victims of military/police repression!

Unrest has spread to the countryside. On June 4, 10,000 peasants protested against the American agribusiness giant Monsanto, which had donated 475 tons of maize. They fear having to buy new seeds from Monsanto every year at prices they cannot afford. Haitian peasants have bitter memories of previous instances when the U.S. forced policies down their throats that ruined their livelihoods. After the Clinton White House compelled Haiti to drop tariffs on imports, subsidized U.S. rice flooded the Haitian market, bankrupting many peasants. Earlier, the U.S. had pressured the Haitian government to wipe out the Creole pigs indigenous to the country on the pretext that they might be infected with swine flu. The U.S. substituted its own pigs, which could not survive the Haitian climate.

The only way out of the misery imposed on neocolonial Haiti lies through proletarian socialist revolution throughout the Caribbean and, crucially, in the North American imperialist heartland. But the social base for workers revolution is exceedingly narrow in a country as destitute and ground down as Haiti. Struggles by the Haitian masses against imperialist depredation must be linked to class and social struggle in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where Haitians are a sizable component of the proletariat, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. It is especially crucial that workers in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast—and in Canada as well—wage class struggle against their “own” capitalist rulers.

Our perspective—for a workers and peasants government in Haiti as part of a socialist federation of the Caribbean—is inextricably linked to the fight for the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. imperialism. In diaspora, Haitians, Jamaicans and others can play a crucial role as a bridge to the rest of the American proletariat, particularly to other black workers. The key is to build revolutionary workers parties—sections of a reforged Fourth International—to lead the workers in this struggle.