Briefing

Haiti

Clear and present danger

From Socialist Review, No. 179, October 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The island of Santo Domingo was colonised by Spain in 1492 and ceded to France in 1697. Rich in sugar, which grew on plantations worked by slaves, this was France’s richest American colony.
On the eve of the French Revolution some 20,000 Europeans oversaw 60,000 mulattos and free blacks, and some 480,000 slaves. An original anti-colonial movement of mulattos and poor whites collapsed when the mulattos supported the principles of the French Revolution. The new liberation movement, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, consisted of mulattos and slaves.
In 1814 the eastern part of the island, the most fertile and prosperous, was ceded to Spain. In 1843 it became independent and the new Dominican Republic occupied nearly two thirds of the original island – as it still does today.
Haiti was occupied by American marines in 1916 – it was one in a chain of strategic colonies occupied by the US under the pretext of protecting American lives, but actually guaranteeing direct military control of the Caribbean and the South American continent. The US withdrew in 1934, but from then until now continues to control the country economically.
The population in 1990 was 6.5 million of which 28 percent is urban. Only 36 percent of the population has access to safe water.
‘Beyond urban areas facilities are non-existent; agricultural storage facilities, electricity and telecommunications cannot be found in the interior. Sanitation is inadequate’, (UNCTAD Report). Haiti is among the 25 poorest countries in the world today.
Between 1980 and 1989 agricultural and food production fell.
Exports from Haiti include: garments 20 percent; toys/sports goods 10 percent; electrical goods 9 percent; coffee 8 percent.
One in four Haitians live outside the country. A total of 1.5 million live in the United States.
Papa Doc, François Duvalier, was ruler of Haiti from 1957 to 1971. Trade union organisation was crushed and the bestial Tontons Macoutes secret police controlled the population by torture and fear.
The majority of Haiti’s population are descendants of slaves, but power lies in the hands of the mixed race mulattos or the few Haitian white Creoles. While Haiti was a French colony the black slaves maintained their ancestral religion in secret. It survived as a language of rebellion and resistance – voudou.
By the end of the 1970s more and more Haitians took to Florida in makeshift rafts. When (and if) they reached the US they found not jobs but virulent racism and exploitation.
Within Haiti a peasant movement (MPP) was formed in 1970 under the influence of a growing network of Christian base communities (Ti Legliz), through which the rural and urban poor began to organise resistance. The Ti Legliz produced the priest Father Aristide.
Sham elections in 1984 induced only 39 percent of Haitians to vote – but protests were mounting. Despite the murder of 40,000 people in 1985 alone, resistance continued to grow. In 1986 Baby Doc fled and the people launched a campaign of popular revenge.
A new organisation, Lavalas, emerged to lead the popular movement headed by Father Aristide. When elections were finally held under the new constitution in December 1990 Aristide was elected with 67 percent of the total votes. He entered the presidency in February 1991. His programme for social justice, economic reform and redistribution was modest enough but it echoed the demands of the masses. But the old Duvalier regime was still powerful, and the bourgeois elements of Lavalas were not disposed to let Aristide dismantle the apparatus they wanted to control. When Aristide was forced out by Cedras in September 1991 there was some quiet satisfaction.
The US announced an economic embargo honoured mainly in the breach – goods crossed constantly from the newly tarmaced road from the Dominican Republic (the other half of the island) – and luxury goods were abundant.
US concerns with democracy were less pressing than its desire to break the mass movement and restore order in the island. They drove a wedge between Aristide and the movement he symbolised. When a delegation went to Haiti in October 1992 to explore the state of Haiti’s democracy, Aristide and his supporters, including the French ambassador, were excluded from discussions with Cedras.
By February 1993 a pathetic Aristide, surrounded by his new middle class friends, signed a protocol agreeing to an amnesty for all those who had committed crimes under Cedras. Yet not even his return to the presidency was guaranteed in exchange!
In March 1993 a UN Civilian Mission went to Haiti and in April Clinton announced the dispatch of a 5,000–6,000 strong ‘multi-national police force’.
The US government promised that Aristide would return under United Nations supervision in October 1993. When the first 700 UN troops arrived in October, however, they were met by a gun-toting mob of ex-Tontons, and the ship turned back. The promised return would clearly never materialise.
The US government imposed a new embargo, a naval blockade, and began for the first time to speak of invasion ‘to restore democracy’.
Aristide may return as president but his intended prime minister, Robert Malwal, is a representative of the business sector committed to free market economics. His advisors are the ‘modernising middle class’ and they will form his government.

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