Under the Boot of U.S. Imperialism

Haiti: Mass Revolt and State Terror

For a Workers and Peasants Government! For Socialist Federation(s) of the Caribbean!

Haiti has been in upheaval against the notoriously corrupt regime of President Jovenel Moïse for nearly a year and a half. Moïse, Washington’s man in Port-au-Prince, has unleashed his cops and paramilitary gangs against protesters, killing scores and wounding hundreds. Underlying the revolt is a simple fact: Life for most Haitians has become ever more unbearable in this deeply impoverished country amid food and fuel shortages, power outages, mass unemployment and rampant inflation. Such inhuman conditions are a direct result of neocolonial domination by the U.S. imperialists, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, and their partners-in-crime, especially in Canada and France.

The protests began in July 2018, when Moïse sharply raised prices for gasoline and other fuel in response to edicts by the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund. The imperialist vultures had demanded an end to fuel subsidies as part of conforming to the 2016 Paris climate agreement. While the gas hike was shelved, the protests flared up again. In November, paramilitary thugs, with the aid of top government officials, carried out a particularly hideous massacre in La Saline, an impoverished neighborhood of Port-au-Prince where many protesters lived. Some 73 men, women and children were tortured, hacked with machetes and set on fire.

The revolt intensified in February, as schools, small businesses and public transportation were shut down in what became known as peyi lòk (country lockdown). Thousands blocked roads, stoned officials, burned vehicles and ransacked businesses. Since mid September, demonstrations have taken place almost daily. Workers have joined the protests, from health care workers to textile workers in the free trade zone sweatshops.

Some protesters have directed their fury against the imperialist powers that stand behind the president, as well as the United Nations, under whose auspices Haiti had been militarily occupied for the last 15 years. Demonstrators threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the French and Canadian embassies in Port-au-Prince last month, and a U.S. flag was burned in Cap-Haïtien. On October 24, a Radio Canada reporter noted: “The walls of Port-au-Prince are covered with graffiti against the UN and also against what everyone here knows as the ‘Core Group,’ a group of donor countries including Canada, the U.S., European Union and Organization of American States, without whose support no Haitian president can long remain in office.”

A particular focus of anger is the disappearance of billions of dollars from the PetroCaribe development fund established by Venezuela, which Haiti signed on to in 2006 under then president René Préval. Under its terms, Venezuela supplied cheap oil at low interest rates to free up resources to shore up Haiti’s grossly inadequate infrastructure, agriculture, education, sanitation and health care systems. But the money was siphoned off by government officials and business owners, or simply squandered.

Haiti’s involvement in PetroCaribe effectively ended two years ago, after Washington’s ever-tightening sanctions against Venezuela made it impossible for that country to continue its oil exports or for Haiti to send payments to Caracas. Haiti was forced to buy oil from U.S. companies at world market prices, which quickly led to spiraling debt, blackouts and gas shortages. Schools and hospitals have been forced to close for lack of electricity.

The U.S. has long sought to overthrow the bourgeois-populist Venezuelan government, today led by Nicolás Maduro, and install a subservient regime. Moïse’s puppet regime was the only Caribbean government to endorse a U.S.-engineered resolution at the Organization of American States (OAS) that labeled Maduro’s rule “illegitimate,” further enraging the Haitian masses. The OAS vote was part of Washington’s preparations for the failed coup in Caracas this past April (see “Venezuela: Down With U.S. Sanctions, Military Threats!” WV No. 1155, 17 May).

The U.S. ruling class sees the Caribbean basin as an American lake, a private preserve for profiteering and exploitation. Its ravaging of neocolonies like Haiti and current drive to overthrow the Venezuelan regime have been accompanied by stepped-up attacks on Cuba, the one country in the hemisphere that was wrested from the grip of imperialism through a social revolution nearly 60 years ago. Though deformed by the rule of a nationalist bureaucratic caste and strangled by the ongoing U.S. embargo, the Cuban Revolution has brought huge gains to the Cuban people, notably in education and health care. The contrast to Haiti could not be starker. We stand for Cuba’s unconditional military defense against imperialism and counterrevolution, while advocating a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and install a revolutionary internationalist regime based on workers councils.

A History of Neocolonial Dispossession

Haiti was born of a great slave rebellion against the French colonial overlords from 1791 to 1804, out of which emerged the first black nation-state of the modern era. To this day, the language of the former slave masters, French, is imposed by a tiny elite upon the vast majority of Haitians, who speak only Creole, a language that is treated as second-class at best. For over two centuries, the vengeful U.S. rulers, initially including the slavocracy, and other capitalist powers have never forgiven the Haitian masses for having overthrown racist colonial rule. Haiti was forced to pay “compensation” to France until 1947 for having ended the slave order.

Over the last 100 years, the country has been subjected to repeated imperialist military occupations. The first lasted from 1915 to 1934, during which U.S. troops drowned an anti-imperialist revolt in blood. Washington subsequently installed and backed a series of ruthless dictators, including “Papa Doc” Duvalier. His son, “Baby Doc,” was driven from the country by a mass uprising in 1986, and others in his cabal took over. The social discontent led to the election of the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1990. Seven months later, he was overthrown by the military in a U.S.-backed coup.

In 1994, following a starvation embargo imposed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, U.S. Marines invaded to quell growing turmoil. The U.S. returned Aristide to power on the condition that he agree to a drastic austerity program. But Washington wasn’t satisfied. In 2004, “peacekeeping” troops, led mainly by the U.S., Canada and France, landed in Haiti, and Aristide was whisked out of the country. This latest UN occupation force was reinforced after the devastating 2010 earthquake, only finally leaving last month. The U.S. seized on the natural disaster to send over 20,000 additional troops. The UN occupation brought cholera to the country, infecting Haitians en masse and killing over 9,000. UN troops were accused of multiple rapes of women and children and repeatedly backed violent assaults on protesters and poor communities.

Almost all of the U.S. military operations in Haiti have been carried out by Democratic Party administrations, with “progressive” Bernie Sanders endorsing the 1994 invasion. The UN “interim reconstruction commission” headed by Bill Clinton after the 2010 earthquake is a prime example of how the imperialists have plundered Haiti to line their pockets. A huge majority of contracts to rebuild the country went to U.S. firms, which proceeded to vastly inflate costs, including for “danger pay,” and throw money at luxury hotels and the like. Meanwhile, nearly a half billion dollars of Washington’s “relief aid” for Haiti went to the U.S. Department of Defense to pay for combat troops. The result of the U.S.-run “reconstruction” is that Haiti is worse off than ever.

Washington has attempted to develop low-wage garment factories in Haiti as a source of cheap labor for U.S. and other capitalists, a course notably pursued by the “philanthropic” Clinton Foundation. As president, Clinton forced the country to all but abolish import tariffs, deepening existing U.S. policy. Haiti was flooded with cheap American-grown rice, and masses of ruined farmers and their families were pushed out of the fields and into sweatshops (or unemployment). Haiti, once self-sufficient in production of rice, must now import up to 90 percent of this staple food. All of this shows how the imperialist system is rooted in the subjugation, oppression and exploitation of the peoples of the world.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Some protesters are calling on “progressive associations” in the U.S., Canada and France to put pressure on Washington to force Moïse’s removal. Others seek support from the UN, that imperialist den of thieves and their victims, even after the recent brutal occupation. Such calls promote deadly illusions in the very imperialist powers responsible for the neocolonial rape of Haiti.

Worried about the depth of the current revolt, some Haitian bourgeois figures have broken with Moïse, trying to come up with an alternative acceptable to the imperialists. One of the main “opposition fronts” counts in its leadership two former close Moïse allies infamous for their own corruption. For their part, several dozen Haitian trade unions recently cosigned a “Joint Declaration for a Government of National Salvation” with prominent bourgeois groups, including local Chambers of Commerce.

Haiti’s history shows that for the workers and poor to ally with one or another imperialist agency or capitalist politician means disaster. If Washington decides to pull the plug on Moïse, it will only be to install someone less overtly tainted to do its bidding. The workers must pursue a class perspective, leading the peasant toilers, urban slum dwellers and other oppressed in the struggle to sweep away capitalist rule. That requires forging a revolutionary leadership: a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party that intervenes into social protest to direct it toward a fight for a workers and peasants government.

The U.S. and other imperialists would seek to strangle a socialist revolution in Haiti from birth. It is essential to fight for the extension of workers revolution throughout the region, resulting in one or more socialist federations of the Caribbean, and crucially for workers rule in the North American imperialist heartland. A workers government in the U.S. would provide resources to address the burning needs of the Haitian masses.

Haitians in the neighboring Dominican Republic make up a sizable component of the proletariat, while enduring racist abuse. Haitian workers in the U.S., Canada and Quebec, many of whom are organized in the unions, can serve as a human bridge linking the struggles in Haiti for social emancipation and an end to neocolonial pillage with the fight for workers revolution in the imperialist centers. The working class in the U.S., Canada and Quebec must defend Haitian immigrants who face police terror, and oppose deportations under both the overtly racist Trump administration and the fake-progressive Trudeau government in Canada. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

The goal of the International Communist League is the building of vanguard parties around the globe, part of reforging the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. To shatter the imperialist order, such a party would work to rally the workers of the world around a revolutionary, internationalist program and perspective.