No to US/UN occupation!
ASHINGTON'S plans for Haiti are
IN THE wake of
W now fully outlined. They include an the US occupation carried out through two occupation in instruments: a reorganised military and police on
Haiti we were the one hand, and an economic restructuring, on sent the the other. This will bring Haiti back in line with the rest of the Caribbean, where formal democrafollowing draft cy, dominated by an elite, have eagerly accepted a statement from neo-liberal economic programme.
the US
Everyone in Haiti believes that the US embasrevolutionary sy and US agencies, from the CIA to US Aid for
International Development (AID) were involved socialist in the coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide organisation, three years ago. After all, General Raoul Cedras et
SOLIDARITY.
al were on the CIA pay-roll. But then Washington leisurely waited while State terror took its course before giving the "final" ultimatum to the coup leaders. The wait allowed the popular movements to be weakened by repression. As a result, 5 thousand were killed, 300 thousand driven into hiding, and 40 thousand attempted to leave the island in boats — most of whom were returned by the US
Coast Guard into the hands of the military.
So Washington sent the troops in like some cowboy who's been asked to save the town. The majority of the Congressional Black Caucus thought Washington could intervene on the side of good this time, helping to alter the balance of forces. But that is a misreading of Washington's motives and aims. Haiti, after all, is an important source of cheap labour for the two hundred US businesses that employ over 100 thousand
Haitians. And US AID has already spent over $26 Million to keep it that way. It worked with Haitian businessmen during President Aristide's government in opposing the raise of the minimum wage from fourteen to fifty cents and hour.
Washington "lost" the 1990 Haitian election, when Marc Bazin, the candidate the US backed with more than $2 million, was one of many candidates who lost to Aristide and lavelas movement. Following the coup Bazin was illegally installed by the military - but he didn't last. So the one alternative to Aristide that Washington had was quickly used up.
### Submission
Now Washington has set the stage to win what they have not been able to through other means. They demand that Aristide submit to a gain through other means. They demand that Aristide submit to a structural adjustment policy, to an amnesty of those who used State terror against the popular movement, and to a recognised military and police force. These conditions are an attempt to repudiate his demand for justice and sever his government from the grass-roots organisations that were his base.
Of course the US media lap-up all of Washington's proposals like so much cream. Why question the ability of the
US military when they have trained and armed the
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9
International Viewpoint #260 October 1994
According to Allen Nair's 3 October article in the Nation, Major Louis
Kernisan will be in charge of retraining Haiti's policy. He sees the infamous section chiefs, who terrorise the rural population, as, on balance, a positive force. Nairn captures Kernisan's sensitivity to civil rights:
"Popular uprising? Under the watchful eye of 6 thousand or 7 thousand international observers? I doubt it. This is only the kind of shit they've been able to get away with when there is nobody watching... They tried that before and it brought them two years of embargo and their little guy in golden exile in the States."
While US spokespeople emphasise that the "worst" human rights violators will be removed from the army, it looks like the fox is in charge of the chicken coop!
### Popular movement
However, the US plans can be pushed off centre by the intervention of the popular movement in the streets of Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien. US soldiers stood by and saw members of FRAPH (the para-military goon-squad) shooting into demonstrations. Back home, the American public got a good look too, through the extensive media coverage. So, after initially standing on the sidelines, the US military was forced to begin to disarm the Haitian military, and then FRAPH. But despite these moves, the basic US goal remains the same: to insure the continuation of a repressive apparatus. Accompanying this first goal is the other aspect of Washington's programme: the economic strings.
A structural adjustment plan, presented by Aristide "advisers", Leslie Voltaire and Leslie Delatour, to the World Bank last August commits Haiti to halve its civil work-force, privatise public services, slash tariffs and import restrictions, end price and foreign exchange controls, grant aid to the export sector, enforce an "open foreign investment policy", rewrite corporate law, limit the scope of State regulation, and create special corporate courts with judges who are particularly sensitive to the problems of economic efficiency. In return, Haiti would receive $800 million in "aid", including $80 million for its foreign debt.
Imposition of this plan would jettison any possibility of raising the minimum wage, granting aid to the peasant sector, subsidising prices so the poor would have access to basic foods, or relaunching needed health, sanitation and literacy campaigns. Although the
Haitian Economic Plan promises to invest half of the proceeds from privatisation in providing infrastructure and housing in the poorest areas, the promises are vague.
The Clinton administration has attempted to surround President Aristide with "advisers" who will be able to "open doors" for Haiti in the international community. These will attempt to prevent Aristide's government from carrying out the radical reforms it began to initiate in its first seven months of office. But in addition, Washington has also attempted to box Aristide into holding the next presidential election in December 1995, when he will have actually been in office less than two years out of his five-year term. Nothing in the Haitian constitution necessarily calls for such an election. It merely states that a president is to serve for a five-year term and may not stand for immediate reelection.
Neither the Bush or Clinton administration defended Aristide against the CIA disinformation campaign (whose informants were the Haitian military officials who carried out the coup against Aristide); neither did they ever put into place a tight embargo — as Aristide and the mass movement in Haiti had demanded — against the military regime; and neither did they aid those who fled the repression. In fact, last year Haitian imports to the US increased by forty-four percent over 1992. As late as this April, the US Ambassador to Haiti, William L Swing, explained in an eleven page message to Washington that "the Haitian left manipulates and fabricates human rights abuses as a propaganda tool."
While Haiti may seem like a poverty-stricken and distant country to most to Americans, it is a significant source of superprofits for US business. Americanowned businesses forced by the embargo to shut down temporarily are impatient to re-open. As a recent Christian Science Monitor article quotes Robert Antoniadis, president of a hand-crafted gift-ware company: "I can't think why they are making us wait another month. Both US manufacturing and agricultural interests want to make sure Haiti is an appendage of the US market. State Department talk about how the Haitian markets can "conquered"
Moreover, in the NAFTA/GATT world order, US workers are told that jobs which paid $15-20 an hour will now be done for $6 an hour. Otherwise, they will go to Mexican workers for
$1.50 an hour; if they do not want them, the jobs will move on to Central America for seventy-five cents and hour — and if they will not do them, then they go to Haiti for fourteen cents! In this sense, all US capital feels an interest in the cheapest possible Haitian labour.
Of the two specific demands raised in the seven-point agreement between the illegal Haitian government and Jimmy Carter one was over granting amnesty to the people Clinton had finally called murderers, rapists, and terrorists — although he conveniently left out that they are drug runners too - and the second dealt with immediately lifting the embargo.
### Distrust and hatred
Why have so many US politicians expressed so much distrust and hatred for Aristide? It is not just an expression of racism towards a president who is Black, but also because Aristide is not a conventional politician who rose through the ranks of the political/diplomatic ladder. He was the spokesperson for the grass-roots movement as it flowered in the post-Duvalier period. It is a movement of peasants, trade unions, students, women, poor communities, and it is rooted in the ti legliz. - the church of the poor. Aristide's base is the popular movement, the overwhelming majority of Haitians, whose demands cannot be met at the same time a structural adjustment policy is carried out. Those who hungered and thirsted for justice went to the polls in December 1990 and overwhelmingly smashed through "business as usual" in the Haitian State. They defended their vote in January, when a coup attempted to steal it from them. And now, Clinton is gambling, that they have suffered sufficiently from the repression of the last three years so that they cannot rebuild themselves in time, they will fail to rebuild the bridge between Aristide and themselves.
It is clear what Washington's programme is, and it should be clear to all that it is has nothing to do with the restoration of popular democracy, but only the facade of its narrowest outline. It is continued support to the five families that rule Haiti and the US multinationals. As a matter of fact, Carter and Clinton's call for amnesty asks President Aristide and the Haitian parliament to begin by violating Article 147 of the 1987 Haitian Constitution, which specifically prohibits granting more than "political amnes-
10
International Viewpoint #260 October 1994
CUBA ty" to coup plotters. That is, they may be granted amnesty for the act of the coup, but not for the crimes of murder, terror, and rape.
What remains to be seen is whether the popular movement, no matter how bloodied, can rise and reshape itself. Solidarity activists, US grass-roots
Asphyxiation movements and socialists need to clearly oppose Washington's manoeuvres. We need to give solidarity to the Haitian masses, who have fought tenaciously for generations to secure democracy and justice.
• Support the Haitian people's right for President Aristide's return and right to function without conditions!
• The Popular Movement yes! US/UN occupation no!
• The right of political asylum for Haitian refugees! Shut down Guantanamo! *
FIDEL Castro has a victory. He has compelled Mr Clinton to reverse an American policy that, since the Cuban
Refugee Act of 1966, gave automatic US entry to anyone leaving Cuba. Mr Clinton now is sending refugees picked up at sea to Guantánamo, the US naval base in Cuba, and putting those who reach the United States into camps.
This is a comprehensible response to the anxiety of Floridians and others over the new and deliberately provoked refugee flow, but it is nonetheless a US humiliation.
"It is the latest event in America's
35-year obsession with Fidel Castro that produced the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 and the collaboration of the US government with organised crime in a series of increasingly grotesque projects for Mr Castro's murder."] This comment by the American journalist William Pfaff bears witness to the unease provoked in the United States by the lack of symmetry in the immigration policy adopted towards, respectively, Cubans and Haitians. The latter, fleeing the pitiless repression of the dictator Raul Cedras, are considered as economic refugees and deported to Guantánamo, while the second, judged victims of the "tropical gulag", benefit from a privileged political status. The fear of a massive Chhan ayodue on the pup of tha
THE U.S. ... ..movement in solidarity with the pro-democractic forces in Haiti opposed the US occupation of Haiti with demonstrations and vigils in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, Washington DC. Since last July most solidarity organisations had been operating under a planned action called for the day of the intervention or the following day. Organisations in solidarity with Central and Latin America worked with the Haiti groups to build the meetings or demonstrations. However all the actions were small (50-300), limited to the revolutionary left, peace forces and Haitiand living in exile. This is partly due to the fact that President Bill Clinton identified US interests with opposing human rights violations, and specifically called the leaders of the military coup murderers, rapists and torturers in his 15 September address to the nation. The majority of the Congressional Black Caucus, usually a grouping taking progressive political positions, and Randal Robinson, an African American whose group, TransAfrica, had been instrumental in opposing US investment in the South African apartheid regime, called for US military intervention and supported the occupation. Because the US media portrayed the mainstream debate over US intervention in Haiti as one in which the right was opposed and the progressive forces supported it, few Americans knew that the Haitian popular movement and the US-Haitian solidarity movement were opposed to any form of intervention and called for the tightening of the embargo. In fact, the media presented the embargo as only hurting the poor which the rich got richer. Of course this was true as long as there were loopholes in the embargo. So far many Americans, there seemed to be no other alternative to ending the military coup and its horrific repression but to send in the troops. The Haitian solidarity movement, which has only the most minimal national co-ordination, recognises the need to educate the American population in the face of the tremendous distortions presented by the range of politicians and the media. In early October, for example, the US media portrayed the paramilitary bterror against an unarmed civilian population as "Haitian-on-Haitian violence" A ten-hour teach-in at Wayne State University, sponsored by the Michigan Committee for a Democratic Haiti, and African Studies at Wayne State University, and endorsed by many university programmes as well as community groups, was held on 29 September, the eve of the third anniversary of the military coup. On the following day, many forums and rallies commemorated the anniversary itself. Dianne Feeley O massive Cuban exodus on the eve of the crucial mid-term Congressional elections in Florida led Clinton to change a policy which was over twenty-five years old, and whose main principle consists in reinforcing the embargo to stimulate illegal emigration while dissuading legal emigration which is regulated by the accords signed between Cuba and the US in 1984.
### Tensions
The objective is a double one; to increase the pressure on Cuba itself, to increase the tensions there, and to put the haven of American liberty in a good light, through the clandestine arrival of Cuban "balseros". 2 But the internment, in camps surrounded by barbed wire, of tens of thousands of refugees on a military base, makes a joke of all democratic principles evoked by Washington to justify its Caribbean policy.
Moreover, the viability of such a "solution" is doubtful; the confrontations, even before the arrival of the Cubans, between Haitian refugees and US marines at the base (sixty-five people were wounded) indicate the explosive character of such human concentration. In this sense, Castro has effectively turned against his enemies
1. Interational Herald Tribune, 25 August 1994.
2. A rudimentary raft made with tyres and bits of wood, so as to cross the straits of Florida, or around 150 kilometres.
11
International Viewpoint #260 October 1994
JANETTE HABEL
the gun aimed at his own head. Unlike Erich Honecker, who closed the frontiers of East Germany, Castro opened his, thus avoiding the repressive option. Indeed, it was following attempts to stop refugees fleeing (leading to deaths and injuries) that serious incidents took place in July in Havana, provoking for the first time hostile public demonstrations. By allowing the malcontents, the down and outs, the unhappy or marginalised youth, to leave, Castro hoped to stiffen the ranks and rebuild a broad consensus broken by the breadth and duration of the crisis.
### Gravity
But none of this can hide the gravity of the situation on the island. The collapse of exchanges, the economic disorganisation following the disappearance of what is still called the "socialist camp" in Cuba, have amplified considerably the effects of the US embargo in force since 1960.
Even it it does not explain everything, this embargo, reinforced in 1992, has catastrophic effects, often underestimated in Europe, although noted by the American press. All trade with the island is virtually forbidden. Boats which trade with Cuba cannot dock in American ports for at least six months. Most Americans expose themselves, in principle, to legal proceedings if they visit the island. Even the UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq authorise the purchase of food and medicines for humanitarian reasons; but, in Castro's Cuba, Us food and medicines can only be obtained when they result from donations. 3
Certainly, the embargo is not alone responsible for the crisis. The brutality of the break with the ex-USSR has led to a veritable economic collapse. The logic of development (or rather nondevelopment) implied by the subordinated integration of Cuba in Comecon has been suddenly broken, depriving the country of its sources of supply and its export markets. Some basic articles have suddenly disappeared, products as indispensable to agriculture as fertilizer and insecticides are no longer available. Replacement parts for the repair of fac-
Cuban minister for foreign affairs has put it, "bureaucratic obstacles" have also contributed to the crisis,4 and more generally the economic policy chosen by Castro himself, characterised by an arbitrary and voluntarist centralisation, which leaves no place to local initiatives, can be criticised. The contradictions of the economic reforms undertaken since 1993 and the inequalities which have flowed from them, and the legalisation of the dollar, have profoundly disorientated a population previously united (in still significant proportions) around a project of social justice and national liberation. It is this consensus of resistance which has been broken by the needs of what is now called the struggle against "egalitarianism" judged responsible by the Cuban leaders for the very low productivity of labour. This judgement led to vigorous protests during the workplace assemblies held earlier this year where the waste and corruption of the leaders was criticised, without any programmatic alternative emerging.
### Fate
The end of the Cuban crisis is not predictable, in that the fate of the island is over-determined by the historic conflict which opposes "the most powerful state in the world to one of the weakest". . This smacks, in Pfaff's words of "the realm of political pathology" 5 But US diplomacy cannot be reduced to psychiatry. It is guided by two parameters; the needs linked to internal policy (the weight of the Cuban electorate in Florida, on the eve of Congressional mid-term elections in November and in two years for the presidency) and those linked to foreign policy. In addition to the crisis in Cuba there is that of the Dominican Republic, where fraudulent elections a year ago reinstated a quasinonagenerian dictator violation of human rights can no longer be counted, and the economic situation gets worse and worse. In Jamaica, the situation is hardly better. Outside the islands, the countries bordering the Caribbean (Mexico and Venezuela) could in the years to come experience a destabilisation which would compromise the proposals for the enlargement of Washington's economic sphere on the continental scale. In this optic, the Cuban issue remains vital to the US. Eliminating this anomaly is not just an economic imperative, but a political one; it underlies the control of the region and the credibility of the world's most powerful nation.
After the end of the cold war, how can such harassment be legitimised, if not by the necessity of overthrowing the dictatorships and re-establishing democracy? Pfaff ironically remarks: "Only a truly innocent man could say, as Bill Clinton said on [19 August], that all the United States wants for Cuba is that it be swept up in the hemisphere wave of "democracy and freedom'."6
Infernal
The Cuban emigrants are fleeing first and foremost from an infernal everyday existence; but political asphyxiation also aggravates their demoralisation and despair. In this sense, the crisis is not only social, but also institutional. The gap between the cultural level attained by the new generations and an authoritarian and repressive mode of government has never been so large. The germs of revolt which now manifest themselves witness to it, even if they only represent a minority.
But the so-called democratic normalisation which is demanded of a small, poor third world country is a denial of justice; it hides — just like so-called humanitarian intervention — other priorities, it masks the oppression of the weakest by the strong.
Like all embargos, this one has been imposed - and recently re-inforced — on the Cuban people, to bring it to its knees. Its lifting is the first of democratic demands. *
3. Time, 29 August 1994.
4. Le Monde, 4-5 September 1994.
5. International Herald Tribune, 25 August 1994.
6. Ibid.
tories, in particular in sugar, no longer exits. This largely explains why the last two "zafras" (sugar cane harvests) have been the worst for three decades.
One cannot, however, avoid the question of the government's own responsibility for the current economic difficulties. As Roberto Robaina, the