[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hey, man, where's your 200 words on the Revo, for the CrashList Poll?
Mark
I may have missed that one on my lightening browses. Send me the guidance on my home
address, and I'll try to make time to respond.
Meanwhile, here's a draft I submit to you all for critique of an article I'm working
on. Bear in mind, that I have a few facts to double check, but this is the gist of it
in the early stages.
Here goes:
FEAR AND LOATHING IN HAITI
Stan Goff
In Port-au-Prince I spend three days at Hotel Ife. If I believed in zombies�that
favored American obsession about Haiti�I will have found them here in the doddering,
light-skinned matriarch and her stunned-looking, slow-motion staff. Like every place
in the Caribbean, but especially here, there seems to be a perpetual stalemate in the
battle with decay. Water damage stains the ceilings. The wiring is precariously
exposed. A little spider has found a haven in the corner of the windowsill, where no
dust-rag, no broom ever quite reaches. Electricity is rationed, available only from
5:30 PM to 4:00 AM. Street noises invade throughout the night. Motorcycles,
evangelists with loudspeakers, little brass bands, roosters even here in the
comparative affluence of Petionville. My walls are painted a nauseating green.
The street is my refuge. The inept pretensions of Haiti�s third-string bourgeoisie,
here in the streets at least, are diffused, swallowed up by the frenetic culture of
survival that animates these byways, the chaos of the pure market, of truly primitive
accumulation. Here is a cornucopia of commodities, fruits, breads, cigarettes,
plastic shoes, cheap watches, steaming food, sold right on the sidewalk out of bowls
and baskets. Here are trash, skiddish animals foraging in filth, and a wild-west
intermixing of foot and vehicle traffic. No set prices anywhere. Every exchange
alternates between belligerence, laughter, feigned pain at an insult�an appearance of
extreme tension to the blan, but this is a game that animates the entire culture, this
ribbing and debating, these loud voices with the plosive cadences.
The streets of Petionville, the most affluent section of the capital, are named after
heroes of the Revolution for Independence. But the names are selective; Chavannes,
Petion, Rigaud, Oge. Mulattos all. The only exception is L�Overture, the ex-slave
general who led the first stage of the Revolution, when slavery was abolished.
Toussaint L�Overture was black. But like Aristide today, he was a conciliator. He
never desired nor demanded independence. So the color-obsessed capital elite
rehabilitated him into the good black.
The rest, the mulattos of the Revolution never wanted to throw off the French, the
blan. They wanted to replace them and grow rich on the sweat of the former slaves.
Indeed, many themselves owned slaves before the Revolution. To this day they
contemptuously call the black peasant the gwo zoteey, the big toe.
Conspicuous among the names unlisted among the Petionville streets is Dessalines.
After the French duped L�Overture and sent him to die in a putrid cell, Dessalines led
the bloody march to independence.
Class memory is long in Haiti, and Dessalines was feared by the privileged mulattos.
He had the personal power to mobilize the masses. In one engagement, at Crete Pierrot
in 1802, he rallied 900 ex-slave soldiers and civilians to reject surrender and break
out of an encirclement of 16,000 French soldiers, a feat of arms astounding by any
measure in any war in history.
When the mulattos claimed the land based on the ownership of their white fathers,
after Napolean�s legions were vanquished, Dessalines asked them what the former slaves
who led the Revolution would get. The mulattos were champing at the bit to begin a
vigorous and lucrative trade with the French, and other Europeans as well.
Dessalines, who had seen French perfidy and brutality reassert itself at every
opportunity, shed his shirt to show them the mass of lash scars covering his
coal-black back, and told them with no equivocation, he was done with the whites.
The mulattos foresaw their anticipated fortunes dwindle to naught.
While Dessalines massacred the French in Cap Haitien, winning infamy among white
historians, the mulattos plotted. They assassinated Dessalines in 1806 and forbade
his name to be spoken for 40 years. Their subsequent repression of the mass of former
rebels was ferocious. This ferocity was motivated by the one true constant of almost
200 years of Haitian ruling class history�dread of the masses. Dessalines had to go
because he could mobilize the masses.
It would be a mistake, however, to generalize Dessalines� confrontation of the
mulattos into a description of Haiti�s societal tensions as a color problem. The
black grandons of the north are as avaricious and cynical as the whitest compradeur,
and just as terrified of popular rebellion.
Haiti�s struggle is a class struggle, pure if not simple. Color is just part of the
context, the psychology. Look at the Bush cabinet.
In my walks down these streets named after Dessalines� nemeses, I find an internet
caf� of all things. Here is a place where I can check email, surf a bit on the web,
stay connected with my family who I have deserted yet again.
January 19. A fellow Haiti-phile has forwarded me an article by email about the
confirmation hearings of Colin Powell. The hearings are, of course, a love-fest.
Powell wears white denial as his personal armor�the almost-Black Knight. No one dares
speak the forbidden�My Lai, Panama, Iraq. No one can acknowledge�on pain of political
suicide�that this man is a brilliant hack, a well-groomed ticket puncher who will
order the annihilation of thousands of innocents, but whose real talent is hiding the
bodies. The obsequious, lily-white Senators ask him about Haiti, this almost-a-negro
and a West Indian to boot, and he doesn�t hesitate. He puts Haiti firmly in its place.
The Administration of George W. Bush, Powell explains, will tentatively accept the
grotesque capitulation of a wavering Aristide to reschedule the legitimate elections
of several of his own party members in response to a US/OAS campaign of demagogy to
discredit those elections. It is a breathtaking betrayal by Aristide. Powell calls
this acquiescent, nay, submissive posture �an appropriate road map to get started,�
but adds that the Administration can not rule out additional demands. No careful
Clintonesque camouflage from this administration. The colonial relation will be naked
and unashamed. U.S. policy, the Secretary of State-designee explains, always has been
and always will be to keep Haitians from coming to the United States. And on their
knees at home.
My companion for this trip and a friend for the last four years, Harry Numa, Secretary
of the Pati Popile Nasyonel (PPN)(National Popular Party), is very focused on the
upcoming Haitian presidential inauguration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I have copied
the post about Colin Powell and shared it with him and other PPN members.
�Is Colin Powell an Uncle Tom,� one asks me. He and his comrades have just exploded
in a babble of outrage at this imperial arrogance. �Is he a token?�
�Uncle Tom was a phrase of contempt that Malcolm X used to differentiate the house
slave from the field slave,� I say. �Powell has transcended that. He is no longer
just the house slave. He is now one of the masters. He is a brilliant bureaucrat.
Hardly a token.
�Many people regard an Uncle Tom to be someone who is witless, a fool who sells out
his own people, like Clarence Thomas. Powell is no fool. He is ruthless and very,
very smart. Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom. Powell is evil.�
Heads nod. This is a distinction easily grasped in Haiti, where foolishness and
villainy have shared a lot of spotlights.
�Aristide is a fool, or an opportunist, or both,� one explains. �He has this
tremendous power, and he refuses to use it, even when people threaten him with
violence.� They believe Aristide is self-interested, potentially even autocratic. He
may see himself as a kind of Haitian Pope. Fanmi Lavalas, his party, is organized
more like a church than a political formation. And the church is where Aristide�s
roots are. He remains, however, in many ways, a political naif. He�s never
understood the dominant class� terror of the people.
They are referring to Aristide�s tolerance and capitulation before the
sometimes-violent provocation of something now referred to as �the opposition.� So I
need to understand clearly why the PPN, this growing, highly conscious left political
formation, organizing relentlessly among the gwo zoteey, is defending Aristide. And
they are. Critically, but doggedly.
As an American, steeped in the narrow rhetorical strategies of a politics of
personality�Gore, Bush, Buchanan, Nader�I am unaccustomed to looking beyond the
talking head to the social forces that underwrite them.
Even as we are inaugurating our own de facto regime�the idiot prince, Dubya, and the
court of his father, the immanence gris�the Haitian �opposition� is swearing Aristide
will never sit. February 7th is his inauguration, and they have not only denounced it
as �illegal and illegitimate,� they have formed their own �parallel� government. Some
have claimed that �extra-Constitutional means� will be employed if necessary.
Who is the �opposition,� whose latest handle is Convergence Democratique? It�s always
French. The name.
�The dominant class speaks French, but all Haitians speak Kreyol. When the dominant
class doesn�t want the people to know what it�s up to, it speaks in French.�
Convergence is the latest in a line of �opposition� coalitions. During their failed
attempt to buy the last election, fueled by American dollars from the National
Endowment for Democracy, the dominant formation was called Espace de Concertacion.
The name changed, but many of the people are the same.
Convergence is a polyglot. Pasteur Luc Mesadieu, a Protestant fundamentalist, Gerard
Pierre Charles, ex-communist turned chief bourgeois idealogue, Serge Gilles, long-time
representative for French political interests in Haiti, Evans Paul, former mayor of
Port-au-Prince whose party the FNCD Aristide cut out of his cabinet in 1991, Victor
Benoit, a perennial political lightweight who associates himself with every new
bourgeois formation he can find, Hubert de Roncerey, Baby Doc�s Minister of Social
Affairs who in that capacity acted as slave-trader for the Dominican cane plantations,
and fellow Duvalierist, Reynold George, a man once deported from the United States for
involvement in drug trafficking.
This is whom the �free� press of the United States refers when they cite the Haitian
�opposition.�
Every faction of the Haitian dominant class, factions who are generally at war with
one another, is represented in Convergence. Their one point of agreement? They are
all opposed to Aristide.
There have been no smoking guns, but when they threatened violence, the level of
violence escalated. When they threatened bombs, there were bombs. Two alleged
coup-plotting cells have already fled this year to avoid arrest, one to the Dominican
Republic, the other to Ecuador. In no case has the United States political
establishment or the obedient corporate press called for investigations or expressed
an iota of outrage.
But on January 9th, a small affiliate of Aristide�s Fanmi Lavalas party, the Ti
Komunite Leglis (TKL) had one chapter that made a veiled threat in response to the
announcement of Convergence that it would launch its �parallel government,� They
produced a list of �collaborators,� some of whose names were patently ridiculous.
Fanmi Lavalas is largely, and regrettably, unstructured. Loose cannons appear with
some frequency. But it was a threat, not terribly specific, with no action taken. It
was a hotheaded and inappropriate reaction to a very real campaign to reverse the
popular will. Still, the shit storm followed from up North.
Republican Congressmen Benjamin Gillman (NY) and Peter Goss (FL) made headlines with
their joint denouncement. �In speaking at the church of St. Jean Bosco, the men
issuing these threats clearly suggested to Haitians that they were speaking for Mr.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide� �Instead of keeping his promises to President Clinton [to
reschedule elections of previously elected Senators, and other capitulations], Mr.
Aristide is condoning by his silence thuggish acts of violence in his name.� Of
course, there were no �acts.� But facts have never been obstacles to Republicans.
And there was deafening silence from Gillman, Goss, and all the rest, when weeks
earlier Evans Paul called for Haitian drivers to run down Fanmi Lavalas in the streets.
Harry Numa: �These attacks on Aristide from Convergence and the right-wing in the
U.S. will continue regardless of what concessions Aristide makes. It is not Aristide
they hate, but his connection to the masses that they fear. He was elected with 92
percent of the vote. This is a terrible power as they see it.� Bingo!
There it is again. The one true constant.
Harry and many others wish Aristide would use his immense power to respond decisively
to the attacks, but they fear the worst. Aristide could very well be another Peron.
He began as a nationalist and a populist, but under incessant pressure and with more
than a little personal ambition, he is being co-opted. He will inevitably shift to
the right. Indeed, Aristide is already offering an olive branch to Marc Bazin, former
World Bank representative, the U.S. supported candidate against Aristide in 1991, a
member of the subsequent coup regime�s cabinet, and the darling of the U.S. neoliberal
establishment.
�Who cares how the Bush Administration will react if he mobilizes the population
against Convergence?� asks Numa. �Convergence and the U.S. want him out, whether he
does or not� because he can. We have a saying in Haiti. If you don�t say �Good
morning� to the devil, he will eat you. If you do say �Good morning� to the devil� he
will eat you.�
Their harsh criticisms of Aristide aside, they defend him not because of some personal
quality and not based on his program, but because he was chosen by Haiti�s majority,
unlike Dubya, who seized power through a judicial coup d�etat. �The population
selected him, and when he betrays them, the population can reject him. We are not
defending Aristide. We are defending the people�s right to select their own leaders.
And we are defending our sovereignty.�
The PPN people I talk to admit that this fight among politicos�focused for the time
being against Aristide�is really a family feud, a tussle among the bourgeoisie�the
land-bourgeoisie, the trade-bourgeoisie, the lumpen-bourgeoisie�that has been set
aside to close ranks against this man who has captured the imagination of the ominous
many. Aristide would quite likely cut deals with them all, were it not for their
terminal fear of his rapport with the great potentiality.
But the mighty Northern metropole is involved, and it�s to the hegemon these plotters
will turn in a pinch. So it�s not just an internal matter, not just Haiti inventing
itself.
The options are not pretty for Convergence, but the threats are out there. They have
said they will not tolerate this �illegal� government of Aristide. �They can not
afford to look like it�s all a bluff,� Harry says. Haiti is a backward society, and
machismo matters. Reputations and rumors can have the power of bombs and bullets.
The Police Nacionale d�Haiti (PNH) are not cohesive in their political loyalties. If
they took sides at all in a fight, they would be fragmented, and many would side with
Aristide. Others, aggressively recruited during the U.S. occupation by the CIA, might
move against. But it�s a wild card. So a coup might have to be privatized. A group
of re-armed Fraphists perhaps, with the tacit approval of their old CIA handlers. Of
course this kind of putsch is a very risky option. Alleged conspirators of this ilk
are already on the international lam.
Assassination of Aristide is also very risky. Aristide�s assassination would ignite a
conflagration. The only way this might work is if they could convince the Dominicans
to intervene. Post-assassination turbulence creates the fear that this instability
will spill across the Dominican border, so the Dominicans have their pretext to invade.
Bush�s National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, a fellow oil-person who shares the
Bush thirst for Caspian Sea petroleum, and who has promised a Kissinger-like
realpolitik, says this administration will only intervene with direct military force
when there is a clear and compelling interest for the U.S. ruling class. She
advocates having our allies shoulder more of the load in the periphery, a question of
economy of force. Allies like the Dominicans.
This is consistent with the Powell Doctrine for the U.S. military. Begin with a
measurable objective. Apply overwhelming high-tech force and limit American
casualties to an absolute minimum. Gain control over the press, and give complacent
America its morality play.
This is no recipe for Haiti. You could bomb the existing infrastructure into an ash
heap and it would leave 75 percent of the country yawning. The international press
can enter Haiti through its porous borders with near impunity. And the last
occupation, beginning in 1994, in which I participated, is an indication of what the
next would be� indeterminate, intimidating no one for more than a moment, and a risk
that our own soldiers�especially black soldiers�will see more than they ought of our
own government�s motives and methods.
Haiti is slippery. It�s hard to get hold of. Sometimes it bites.
�If the Dominicans invade, and Aristide is dead,� says Harry, �then the OAS can be
invited in to relieve them. The U.S. can then play a role of post-crisis benevolence
as it restructures Haiti to suit itself.� This is mass paranoia if it is paranoia at
all. This strategy, of course, is one the U.S. has employed again and again.
Americans even wrote Haiti�s Constitution once.
These transparent pretexts for intervention are not for Haitian consumption. The
average illiterate peasant knows bullshit when she or he sees it, literally and
figuratively. Their experience with both is vast. These pretexts are for us, the
blan, the Americans. We are the real market for political snake oil, for
rationalization, for Manichean simplicity, for denial.
The vast majority of us watched the theft of our own elections, wrung our hands for a
day, and went shopping. Blan will eat anything.
That�s not to say that the Haitians can�t be distracted, bamboozled, manipulated. A
fair number of people here still believe in werewolves and witches (instead of
Scientology and CNN, I suppose). But their exploitation at the hands of the dominant
classes is brutally direct, unadorned, and unabashed. It doesn�t take a PhD. And the
Haitian collective memory about the foreign policy establishments of the United States
is crisp and current.
No one here needs the data, the dates, the tortured analyses. Many are so confident
of U.S. official pronouncements that they use them like a compass. When the U.S.
Embassy expresses it aims, it�s like a north-seeking arrow�which they use to travel
directly to the south. Experience.
Here in Cap Haitien, where I now sit, one can see the mountains folded, layer upon
receding layer along the northern coast. No people understand the principle of
protracted struggle better than Haitians. Deye mon, gen mon. Beyond every mountain,
is a mountain. Their rebellion has been punished, from home and abroad, for 197 years.
Two peasants lead us now on a foot tour of the region around Marmelade. My age
catches up with me, and I beg for the mercy of a halt. If this country were flattened
out, it would be the size of Texas, I think. And some 5 or 6 million wills are daily
forged on these breathless slopes.
Aristide, the conciliator, may go the way of Toussaint L�Overture. Plenty of people
here still name their children Dessalines. New Year�s Day, 2004, is the Revolutionary
Bicentennial, and it�s in people�s heads�the work left undone.
There is a new saying on the street here. Why should we be afraid of one Bush, when
we are 8 million bouches? Bring it on. We can take anything.
�Ladies and gentlemen, the revolution will not be televised��
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