Asylum for Haitian Refugees—Stop the Deportations!

Haiti: U.S./UN Troops Out!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 821, 5 March 2004.

MARCH 2—As we go to press, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been whisked out of Haiti to the Central African Republic under U.S. military escort. U.S. Marines invaded to restore “law and order”—i.e., to repress the desperately poor Haitian masses—and a multinational “peacekeeping” force, spearheaded by the French, is in the works under the aegis of the United Nations. Haiti suffered a brutal U.S. military occupation for 19 years, from 1915-1934. The U.S. left only after it had trained a new gendarmerie, the killer National Guard. Propped up by the U.S., Haitian dictators “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc” killed an estimated 50,000 Haitians. The armed rebels rushing to rule Haiti today are bloodthirsty killers with ties to CIA-trained death squads and the hated Tontons Macoutes. We demand: All U.S./UN imperialist troops out of Haiti now!

Aristide claims that he was kidnapped by U.S. forces. The crazed neocons in the Bush administration who trained the death squad leaders returning to power in Haiti today no doubt considered the liberation theologist, Aristide, some kind of “communist.” Aristide rode a wave of popular support to power in 1990-91 and was toppled by U.S.-trained assassins and Duvalierists. He was then returned to power by a U.S. invasion force of 20,000 in 1994, only now to be removed from power by the U.S. in 2004. Aristide, as well as the butchers who preceded and have succeeded him, are puppets of Wall Street, Washington, Paris, the IMF and World Bank.

For weeks, Haiti has been wracked by the violent advance of a motley opposition comprised of former supporters and former opponents of Aristide. When Aristide was ousted in 1991 by Raoul Cédras (a graduate of the infamous U.S. military “School of the Americas” a/k/a “School of the Assassins”), some 70,000 desperate Haitians fled in rickety boats, while several thousand left behind were killed in the streets. The refugees were arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard, imprisoned for years at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo, Cuba and detention centers in the U.S., and then deported back to political repression and poverty in Haiti.

Clinton re-installed Aristide at the point of bayonets in 1994 in large part to stop the flow of Haitian refugees. Today’s invasion by the U.S. Marines is again mainly motivated by the domestic agenda, that is, racist anti-immigration policies. No huddled, desperate black masses yearning to be free will be permitted to come ashore Bush’s America. The prison camp in Guantánamo has been readied in anticipation of countless Haitians the U.S. will intercept on the high seas and throw in jail. The U.S. invasion of Haiti is also a danger to the Cuban deformed workers state, as well as to the militant proletariat of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. We demand: U.S. out of Guantánamo! Defend Cuba! Asylum for the Haitian refugees! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

While the White House hesitated, it was the Democrats of the Congressional Black Caucus who demanded that U.S. Marines be sent to Haiti. Thus, these black front men for U.S. imperialism prove themselves to be the enemy of the black masses—here in the U.S. and in Haiti—by fostering illusions that this government, which viciously oppresses labor, black people and immigrants, can act in the interests of the downtrodden anywhere. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party!

When Aristide took power in 1991, 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” (“Haiti: Election Avalanche for Radical Priest,” WV No. 517, 4 January 1991). Aristide did both.

Initially, Aristide irked the U.S. by resisting their economic diktats and establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Then, after he was toppled in 1991, Aristide proved his reliability to his U.S. overseers by agreeing in advance of his return to power to a drastic austerity program, privatization of state-owned industry, massive layoffs in the public sector and the virtual abolition of import tariffs. The latter induced the collapse of the indigenous economy as the market was flooded with, for example, American rice at prices cheaper than the Haitian-grown product. Having dissolved the army (a center of his opposition) in 1995, Aristide propped up his rule with a brutal police force and gang terror.

The Bush administration, citing election fraud in Haiti in 2000 (which takes chutzpah—remember the Florida “chads” of 2000?) drastically slashed foreign aid to Haiti, even blocking previously approved loans from the Inter-American Development Bank for improvements in education, roads, health care and the water supply. In short, the Bush administration plunged what was already the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and one of the most malnourished populations in the world into a living hell. Yet Aristide demonstrated to the workers and the poor that his loyalty was not to them but to the White House and IMF. One of the few benefits from the Aristide regime was that his diplomatic ties to Cuba meant that over 500 Cuban doctors and nurses have been working in Haiti. As a letter to the New York Times (2 March) points out, “In the provinces, where most Haitians reside, Cuban doctors and nurses outnumber the Haitian medical personnel.” These crucial medical teams will most likely be thrown out of the country by whoever the U.S. installs to run Haiti.

For 200 years, the Haitian masses have been paying in blood for the successful slave revolt and the defeat of Napoleon’s army. A perceptive article by Gary Younge, “Throttled by History,” (London Guardian, 23 February) notes:

“‘Men make their own history,’ wrote Karl Marx. ‘But they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.’ From the outset Haiti inherited the wrath of the colonial powers, which knew what a disastrous example a Haitian success story would be. In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘The freedom of the negroes, if recognised in St Domingue [as Haiti was then known] and legalised by France, would at all times be a rallying point for freedom-seekers of the New World’.”

In return for international recognition and to compensate France’s former slaveowners, Haiti was compelled to pay 150 million gold francs—approximately 18 billion dollars at today’s prices. By the end of the 19th century, 80 percent of Haiti’s national budget was going to pay off its former exploiters, and the country remains a hideously impoverished debtor nation today. The French imperialists, who first enslaved the Haitian people, gave asylum to the hated Duvaliers, and demanded the ouster of Aristide, have the gall to posture as “saviors” of Haiti today. Le Monde’s lead editorial on 1 March, headlined “Help Haiti,” concludes with a pious chastisement of failed American policy, and ominously intones, “What is necessary is a continuous presence under a renewed UN mandate.”

The bitter truth is that the desperate conditions of Haiti today cannot be adequately resolved within Haiti, where the economy is so destitute that there is barely a working class. Social power lies in the hands of the North American proletariat, including its important Haitian component in Miami, New York and Montreal, as well as their class brothers and sisters throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. To put an end to the cycle of puppet dictators in Haiti, it is necessary to defeat the imperialist puppet masters and sweep away capitalist rule from Port-au-Prince to Wall Street!