Haiti's Impact on the United States
Gro Mango
Ti Mango "no need to click on link" ;-)
Haiti's Impact on the United States -- what 'voodoo economics' and
high school textbooks reveal
July- September 2003
Greg Dunkel
Inspired by the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence, all sorts
of articles on Haiti are popping up, most bemoaning its current fiscal
crisis. Some examine the role the United States has played there,
mostly presenting its aid programs as benevolent attempts to install
democracy and alleviate poverty. Others, more accurately, analyze U.S.
efforts in Haiti as stifling democracy and the people's will along
with extracting every possible dollar.
But while it is important to describe the impact that the United
States, the world's only superpower, has and has had on Haiti, we must
note that Haiti, although poor and isolated, has also had a major
impact on the United States, stemming from its place in world history
as the only state ever founded through a successful slave revolution.
The successful revolution against the French slave owners is a
singular event. It is the only time that slaves managed to rise up,
smash their oppressors, and set up a new state and social order that
reflected some of their hopes and aspirations.
There are aspects of U.S. culture, ranging from marching bands and
music to dance and literature, where the impact of Haiti can be seen.
But the political impact of Haiti's successful revolution is the
clearest in some words and phrases commonly used in North American
English and also in how the history and significance of Haiti are
hidden in high school history textbooks.
When Martin Bernal wanted to uncover the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek
civilization and culture in his book Black Athena (1987), he looked at
the words the Greeks borrowed or absorbed from Egypt or Phoenicia,
among other evidence. The same kind of evidence of Haiti's impact on
the United States shows up in the mainstream U.S. press.
In the United States "voodoo" (the North American formulation of the
Creole "vodou") is associated with Haiti.
Major newspapers used the phrase "voodoo economics" over 1,000 times
in the last ten years. The New York Times used it at least 450 times
since 1980. "Voodoo politics" shows up much less frequently -- only 25
times in the last 10 years. "Voodoo Linux," a variant of a popular
computer operating system, also popped up as well as the "Voodoo"
graphics card for games running on PCs. There were too many
descriptions of voodoo rituals to easily count.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language even has a
definition for "voodoo economics": "Based on unrealistic or delusive
assumptions." But this definition hides the way the phrase is used.
When Warren Buffett, the billionaire head of Berkshire Hathaway, one
of the major players in the U.S. stock market, calls President George
W. Bush's tax cuts "voodoo economics" (Washington Post, May 20, 2003),
he was not only calling them "unrealistic." He was also predicting
that they would mobilize his class, U.S. capitalists, by stirring
their great greed, to support these cuts even if they were not in
their long-term interests.
When George H. Bush, the father of the current president, was running
against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in
1980, he called Reagan's supply-side economic policies, with their
plutocratic catering to the rich, "voodoo economics." Reagan's appeal
to the ruling class was more successful than Bush's since he got the
nomination, but Reagan did feel compelled to choose Bush as his
vice-president.
There are other examples. Jimmy Carter made the "voodoo economics"
charge in his debates with Ronald Reagan in the '80s. Sen. Carl Levin
(D-MI) in a 1992 press conference accused then President George H.
Bush of conducting a "voodoo" trade policy with Japan. John B. Oakes,
a former editor of the New York Times, which is considered in American
politics to be "liberal," said in 1989: "George Bush, who not so many
years ago was justly critical of Ronald Reagan's 'voodoo economics,'
has become past master of an even more illusory art form: voodoo
politics."
It is interesting to see how these white bourgeois politicians, some
of whom personally have vast wealth and all of whom represent vast
wealth, use this epithet, which in the context they use it has racist
connotations, primarily against other white bourgeois politicians.
In my Internet searches, I came across Kòmbò Mason Braide, a Nigerian
economist and political analyst. He called the recommendation that
Nigeria follow the economic policies of the Chairman of the U.S.
Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, "voodoo economics" and then
went on to analyze its effects on the politics of the states along the
Gulf of Guinea (Ghana, Nigeria, Benin and so on). Coming from an
economist who lives in a part of Africa where voodoo developed, this
epithet applied to Greenspan has a special sarcastic edge and Braide
tries to make a strong connection to Haiti.
(www.kwenu.com/publications/braide/voodoo_politics.htm)
While it is indisputable that "voodoo" is a widely used term in the
United States, the historical context of its introduction into U.S.
society was the uprising that began in August in the French colony of
St. Domingue, 15 years after the United States declared its
independence.
The U.S. bourgeoisie, which was in large part a slavocracy, was
completely shocked that the enslaved Africans of Haiti could organize
themselves, rise up, smash the old order, kill their masters, and set
up a new state that was able to maintain its independence. This
rebellion was such a threat to the existence of the slavocracy if its
example spread, and so inconceivable in a political framework totally
saturated with racism and the denigration of people whose ancestors
came from Africa, that the only explanation that they could see for
enslaved people participating in it was that they were "deluded."
They failed to consider that a majority of the enslaved people in St.
Domingue had been born in Africa in freedom and remembered what it
was. They did not have to be "deluded" into rebelling against their
oppression. They participated willingly.
Which doesn't mean that voodoo did not play an inspirational and
unifying role. It gave them the solidarity they needed to organize a
mass uprising of enslaved people under the noses of the slave owners.
The slaves in the north of St. Domingue, the greatest wealth producing
slave colony the world has ever known, organized for weeks beginning
in early July, using the cover of the voodoo ceremonies that were held
every weekend. Finally, 200 delegates, two from each major plantation
in the North, gathered on August 14 at Bois-Caïman, a wooded area on
the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, and set the date for the uprising
for one week later, the night of August 21, 1791.
Boukman Dutty, a voodoo priest, was one of the people who led the
ceremony and was selected to lead the uprising. According to
well-founded but oral sources (see Caroline Fick, The Making of Haiti,
p. 93, and C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 87), Boukman made both
a prayer and a call to arms with the following speech:
The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves
and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He
sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires
him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god
who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our
arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who
has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty,
which speaks in the hearts of us all.
The uprising did not succeed completely. The plan was for the slaves
in le Cap Français (now Cap Haïtien) to desert their masters and the
city on the night of August 21, and the slaves on the plantations to
rise up and burn them and kill their masters, join with the slaves
from le Cap, then seize and destroy the city. A few plantations rose
up early, tipping off the French slave owners, who retrenched in le
Cap. The city remained in their hands, but they could not crush the
uprising, which spread widely.
By the middle of September, more than 250 sugar plantations and
uncounted coffee plantations had been burned. A major part of the
colony that exported $130 million worth of goods a year, a vast sum
for the 18th century, was destroyed. The smell of burning sugar, death
and revolution filled the air. The slaves of northern Haiti had
embarked on a irreversible revolutionary course. Petrified slave
owners fled to Cuba, Jamaica, New Orleans, and the United States, the
closest havens.
The U.S. press was filled with lurid stories about the "chaos" that
gripped the island, the satanic rites that drove slaves into a
rampaging frenzy of destruction, about white slave owners fighting for
their lives. The United States had always had a significant trade with
St. Domingue, even when such trade was technically illegal. The young
republic wanted to keep from being entangled in the war between
England and France, while maintaining significant trade with this
French colony.
Still, the slave-owning President George Washington wanted to help the
French slave owners, who had appealed for aid. His secretary of state,
the slave-owner Thomas Jefferson, authorized $40,000 in emergency
relief as well as 1,000 weapons. Then Washington authorized $400,000
in emergency assistance to the slave owners of St. Domingue, on the
request of the French government who wanted this treated as a
repayment for the loans it granted during the Revolutionary War (see
Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, p. 31).
Later the Spanish governor of Venezuela also granted $400,000 in aid
to the French army Napoleon sent in a vain attempt to re-conquer
Haiti.
The first substantial foreign aid the United States ever granted was
designed to preserve slavery in Haiti. It didn't succeed.
The southern states followed the lead of the Spanish colonies like
Cuba and Louisiana (Spanish until 1803, when it became French so
Napoleon could sell it to the United States) in banning the
importation of slaves from St. Domingue. The slave owners were trying
to prevent their enslaved people from learning about Black
emancipation and Jacobin ideas of republican government. So terrified
were slave owners that some states briefly barred the importation of
slaves from anywhere.
In 1803, just before Haiti declared its independence, Southern
newspapers published a document supposedly of French origin discussing
how U.S. factionalism and popular habits would allow France to spread
sedition, especially if they controlled the mouth of the Mississippi.
The document was probably a forgery, designed to impress Southern
readers with the danger of French ideas and the vulnerability of
slaves to foreign incitement (Hunt, p. 35).
The shadow of St. Domingue haunted the Southern press. As early as
1794, the Columbia (South Carolina) Herald ran a series of articles
drawing the lessons of the slave insurrection. (Hunt, p. 111). Whether
the first major U.S. slave insurrection in 1800 led by Gabriel Prosser
was inspired by the events in St. Domingue is an open question, but
both the abolitionists in the North and the slave-owners' press in the
South analyzed it in that context.
The next insurrection organized by Denmark Vessey in 1822 in
Charleston, South Carolina, definitely was inspired by Haiti. Vessey
was born in the West Indies, traveled there as a slave trader's
servant and wrote to Jean-Pierre Boyer, then president of Haiti,
seeking aid. The reaction in the Southern states was to tighten the
bonds of slavery.
Nat Turner's bloody revolt in 1831 again was seen in the Southern
press as a replay of the tactics and the strategy of the Haitian
insurrection. He was compared in morals and boldness to Haiti's
founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Whether or not he was
actually inspired by the events in Haiti, Southern whites viewed his
revolt as coming from the same volcano of revolution. After this
revolt until the Civil War, the pro-slavery Southern press always
tried to cast Haiti in the worst possible light, as hell on earth, in
order to fight abolition and defend the institution of slavery, which
made them so much money.
One of the famous skirmishes preceding the U.S. Civil War, John
Brown's 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry, VA, was immediately interpreted
as "an abolitionist conspiracy to instigate a slave uprising" (Hunt,
p. 139). The Southern press resurrected the themes of "Northern
Jacobinism" and the Haitian revolution, in lurid, emotionally charged
articles, as if these were fresh events, not 60 to 70 years in the
past. Even during the Civil War, Confederate propaganda used Haiti as
an example of how the Confederacy was needed to protect white families
from the evils of Jacobinism and abolition.
For over 70 years, Haiti was the example that Southern slave owners
raised to defend their peculiar, and profitable, institution against
abolition, even to the last days of the Civil War. The image of slaves
breaking their chains was burned into their consciousness. The
Northern bourgeoisie, opposed to slavery because it hindered their
economic expansion, still were thoroughgoing racists and opposed to
the revolutionary example of Haiti, even though it was not a direct
challenge to their system of exploitation.
It is hard to know how much impact the Haiti revolution had on the
slave masses in the southern United States. They knew about it for
sure, despite the slave owners' attempts to insulate them from that
example. Enough refugee slave owners were able to find refuge in the
United States and Louisiana that the word spread about Haiti, about
this beacon of hope, this model of self-emancipation. The historical
record is still unclear about how deep Haiti's influence was.
Outside the South, however, Haiti was known and raised. In August 1843
in Buffalo, New York, at a National Negro Convention meeting, Henry
Highland Garner, a prominent abolitionist and a former slave, after
mentioning Denmark Vessey, Toussaint Louverture and Nathaniel Turner,
said:
Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is
the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this and
the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than
you have been -- you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have
already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you
are FOUR MILLIONS!
The Convention rejected Garner's revolutionary approach to abolition,
which was obviously inspired by Haiti.
With the end of slavery in the United States, Haiti as a political
issue began to fade. But its impact did not disappear. A singular
event like the Haitian revolution, raised so often and so sharply both
by reactionaries and abolitionists doesn't just vanish.
But the forum for using "voodoo" as a tool to attack and belittle
Haiti changed. Guide books, travel writers and pop historians started
filling their books, whose titles ranged from Cannibal Cousins, and
Where Black Rules White, through A Puritan in Voodooland, with lurid
and exaggerated tales of "voodoo" rituals. Books like these appeared
as late as the 1970s.
Theodore Roosevelt, taking a brief vacation to the Caribbean when he
was president in 1906, wrote a letter to his nephew, describing "the
decay of most of the islands, the turning of Haiti into a land of
savage negroes, who have reverted to voodooism and cannibalism"
(Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-1915, p. 5).
Roosevelt's charge of cannibalism had been made by another racist
president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1804 and was so commonplace in the
nineteenth century that Frederick Douglass felt he had to bring it up
in his speech on Haiti.
The fact that "voodoo" has been used as a term of disparagement and
contempt by so many bourgeois politicians and commentators for over
200 years makes it abundantly clear that Haiti still has a major
impact on U.S. society since the bourgeoisie of this cvountry has felt
it necessary to ideologically attack it for so long. The fact that in
other contexts like computer operating systems and computer graphics,
"voodoo" has positive connotations just strengthens the argument for
Haiti's impact on the United States.
Haitian History: What U.S. Text Books Don't Tell
Looking at how Haiti's history is presented in high-school textbooks
in the United States gives an insight into why many North Americans
know so little about Haiti and how this limited knowledge has been
distorted, muffled, and hidden behind a veil of silence.
In Saint Domingue in 1790, 10,000 people made fabulous profits from
owning almost all the land and from brutally oppressing 500,000
slaves, entirely African or of African descent, with some 40,000
people in intermediate positions, generally either enslaved people who
had managed to buy their freedom or had a French father. Fifteen years
later, in 1805, the slave-owning colony was gone, replaced by the
Republic of Haiti, whose citizens were mostly subsistence farmers who
had their own weapons.
It was the first successful national liberation struggle in modern
times. When Haiti declared its independence in 1804, it was the only
state in the world to have a leader of African descent. In fact,
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the governor-in-general in 1804, was an
ex-slave who had survived a cruel master.
One widely-used U.S. high school text book, World History: Perspective
on the Past, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., presents this struggle
in just a few sentences: "Toussaint drove the French forces from the
island. Then, in 1802, he attended a peace meeting where he was
treacherously taken prisoner. He was then sent to France, where he
died in prison. However, the French could not retake the island." (p.
536) About 30 pages later, when the subject of the Louisiana Purchase
comes up, a little more is said about Haiti: "Toussaint's fighters and
yellow fever all but wiped out a French army of 10,000 soldiers.
Discouraged, Napoleon gave up the idea of an American empire and
decided to sell the Louisiana Territory." (p. 562) (Actually, the
10,000 soldier figure is an error according to C.L.R. James, The Black
Jacobins, p. 355.)
Another common high school text book World History: Connections to
Today, published by Prentice-Hall, devotes almost a page to Haiti, but
sums up the struggle against the French attempt to re-enslave Haiti in
1802 in just a few words: "In 1804, Haitian leaders declared
independence. With yellow fever destroying his army, Napoleon
abandoned Haiti."
James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, which examines 12 widely
used U.S. high school history textbooks, makes it clear that
Perspectives and Connections are not just two bad apples; in fact, it
appears they might be better than most.
Here are the main points of the history they omit. On Feb. 3, 1802,
Gen. Charles Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law,
arrived at le Cap Français (currently Cap Haïtien) with five thousand
men and demanded entrance. Toussaint's commander, Henri Christophe,
was outnumbered and outgunned. Rather than surrender, Christophe
burned down the city (starting with his own house), destroyed the
gunpowder plant, and retreated into the mountains. Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, under orders from Toussaint Louverture, seized the French
fort called Crête-à-Pierrot in the center of the country with 1,500
troops, held off the 12,000 French troops that besieged it through two
attacks, and then his troops cut their way with bayonets through the
French forces to escape.
By the end of April, Louverture had been seized and sent to France,
and all his lieutenants had either been deported or incorporated into
the French army. But the popular resistance continued and intensified.
The French continued losing large numbers of soldiers to yellow fever
as well as small-scale but persistent attacks. Cultivators, fearing
the reintroduction of slavery, continued to flee to the mountains as
maroons and to form small armed bands.
By the end of July 1802, when news spread that the French had
re-instituted slavery on Guadeloupe, reopened the slave trade, and
forbade any person of color from claiming the title of citizen,
resistance turned to insurrection.
French reprisals were terrible but only seemed to strengthen the
conviction of the masses that they would rather die fighting than be
re-enslaved. And they insisted on dying with dignity, no matter how
cruel the French were. In one instance, when three captured Haitian
soldiers were being burned to death, one started crying. Another said
"Watch me. I will show you how to die." He turned around to face the
pole, slid down, and burned to death without a whimper. A French
general watching the execution wrote to Leclerc: "These are the men we
have to fight!"
In another case, a mother consoled her weeping daughters as they were
marched to their execution: "Rejoice that your wombs will not have to
bear slave children" (Carolyn F. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 221).
In September, shortly before he died of yellow fever, Leclerc wrote to
Napoleon that the only way France could win was to destroy all the
blacks in the mountains -- men, women, and children over 12 -- and
half the blacks in the plains. "We must not leave a single colored
person who has worn an epaulette." (Officers wore epaulettes.) The
commander of the French expedition saw no other way to win other than
genocide.
By the end of October 1802, the insurrection was so strong that
Toussaint's officers who had disingenuously joined the French,
deserted and began a counterattack. The struggle took a more organized
military character, while the popular insurrection intensified.
By mid-1803, the French were being mopped up in the south. Jérémie was
evacuated in August, and Cayes fell on October 17. Then Dessalines
decided to move on the French in Cap Français.
Without the artillery or logistics needed to support a long siege,
Dessalines decided to take le Cap by storm. He assigned a
half-brigade, commanded by Capois La Mort, to storm the walls covered
by the mutually supporting positions, Butte de la Charrier and
Vertières. Meanwhile, two other brigades maneuvered to seize batteries
protecting the city from an attack from the sea. While grapeshot cut
swaths through the brigade led by Capois, the soldiers kept pressing
forward, clambering over their dead and shouting to each other, "To
the attack, soldiers!" On Nov. 18, their combined assault took
Charrier, which opened the city to Haitian artillery. The French
general agreed to leave immediately and was captured ten hours later
by the British. On Nov. 19, 1803, the French army left Haiti for good.
This is the reason why "the French could not retake the island" and
why "Napoleon abandoned Haiti" -- the French were decisively defeated.
The masses refused to return to slavery and their leaders organized a
people's army that crushed the French.
World History: Connections and World History: Perspective don't treat
Haiti's history from 1804 to 1860. That period came before U.S.
capitalism had matured enough to expand aggressively into the
Caribbean.
In 1825, France forced Haiti to begin paying huge reparations
amounting to 90 million gold francs for freeing the slaves (worth
about $21 billion in today's currency counting interest). This money,
and the interest that Haiti had to pay on the bonds it floated to pay
it, are what Haiti is presently demanding as reparations from France.
Even though the United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862,
there was still a surprisingly substantial trade between Haiti and
France and between Haiti and the United States.
With the end of the Civil War in the United States in 1865, the
Caribbean became a cockpit of imperialist interventions and
maneuvering. The two high school textbooks under examination mention
Haiti from time to time as part of a laundry list of countries where
the U.S. intervened.
But the United States was not the only imperialist power splashing
around the Caribbean. In the years leading up to the first U.S.
occupation in 1915, the warships of Spain, France, the United States,
and Germany invaded Haitian territorial waters more than 20 times.
Even Sweden and Norway got into the act.
Germany, an imperialist latecomer, aggressively pursued its interests
in Haiti because it was restricted in other colonized parts of the
world. Fleurimond Kerns in an article in Haïti-Progrès (May 18, 2003)
describes one glaring incident:
Take the case of two German nationals living in Haiti (in Miragône and
Cap-Haïtien). After going bankrupt during the period of instability
between the governments of Sylvain Salnave and Fabre Geffrard, these
two Germans called on the German government to demand an immediate
indemnity of US $15,000 from the government of Nissage Saget. The
Haitian government had to give in because of the presence of two
German warships, the Vineta and the Gazella, under the command of
Captain Batsch. After their departure, the Haitians found their
warships damaged, with the national bicolor soiled with excrement. The
date was June 11, 1872.
While historians and some textbooks do list foreign, i.e. imperialist,
interventions in Haiti and the larger Caribbean, finding descriptions
of resistance is much harder. In her 294-page book Haiti and the
United States, Brenda Gayle Plummer has a paragraph on what happened
in Port-au-Prince on July 6, 1861. The Spanish navy was threatening to
bombard the city if Haiti did not offer a 21-gun salute and pay a big
indemnity. The people of Port-au-Prince were so upset when their
government capitulated that they came out into the streets and the
government had to use martial law to control the situation. (p. 41)
The case of Haitian Admiral Hamilton Killick is another outstanding
instance of Haitian resistance. At the start of the last century, both
the Unites States and Germany deployed Caribbean squadrons. Germany
wanted to project its military power to reinforce its commercial and
financial push into Haiti. The United States was planning on building
the Panama Canal to tie its Pacific coast to the Eastern Seaboard and
open up Latin America to its further imperialist penetration.
In 1902 Germany was meddling in a Haitian power struggle, backing one
leader while Admiral Killick backed the other. Kern in his
Haïti-Progrès article describes what happened on Sept. 6 of that year:
There was a major political struggle going on at the time between Nord
Alexis and Anténor Firmin about coming to power in Port-au-Prince,
after the precipitous departure of President Tirésis Simon Sam.
Admiral Killick who commanded the patrol ship La Crête-à-Pierrot
supported Firmin and consequently had confiscated a German ship
transporting arms and munitions to the provisional Haitian government
of Alexis.
Not sharing the position of Hamilton Killick, the government ordered
another German warship, the Panther, to seize the Crête-à-Pierrot. But
it didn't realize the determination and courage of Admiral Killick. At
Gonaïves, the Germans had the surprise of their life. When the German
ship appeared off the roadsted of the city, Admiral Killick, who was
then ashore, hurried on board and ordered his whole crew to abandon
the ship. The Germans did not understand this maneuver. Once the
sailors were out of danger, Admiral Killick together with Dr. Coles,
who also did not want to leave, wrapped himself in the Haitian flag,
like Captain Laporte in 1803, and blew the Crête-à-Pierrot up by
firing at the munitions. The German sailors did not even dream of an
act so heroic.
Through his self-detonation, Killick not only denied the Germans
possession of a Haitian ship and the German munitions it had seized,
he also came close to blowing up the Panther, according to one German
crewman who wrote a postcard home (Postal History: Germany -- Haiti --
United States at http://home.earthlink.net/~rlcw).
German influence in Haiti waned after the U.S. marines invaded
Port-au-Prince July 28, 1915 and began their 19-year occupation. At
that time, the U.S. had not officially entered World War One but it
was concerned to stop any attempt by Germany to set up a base in Haiti
and to protect the Panama Canal, which had opened for business the
year before. The U.S. occupation also ended the close financial and
commercial ties between Haiti and France, though not the cultural
ones. (France was an ally of the United States at the time, but also
an imperialist competitor in the Caribbean.)
The start of this occupation was made easy by the political and
administrative instability of Haiti, but it then met with four years
of fierce armed resistance from guerrillas known as cacos under
Charlemagne Péralte, and then later under Benoît Batraville. It caused
great controversy in the United States and deep resentment in Haiti.
The only mention that Connections and Perspective makes of the
19-year-long U.S. occupation of Haiti is to mention how Franklin D.
Roosevelt was true to his word, true to the "Good Neighbor Policy"
when he withdrew the U.S. Marines.
They fail to mention that Roosevelt's need to appear to have broken
with the expensive military interventions of his predecessors
obviously played a role in abandoning the protectorate in 1934, since
the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. They also
don't mention that there was a anti-occupation nationwide strike and
series of demonstrations in 1929, one of which the Marines put down
with deadly force (Nicols, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 151) . Over
the next five years, agitation, outcry and bitterness over this issue
continued, gained popular support and put relentless pressure on the
U.S. to pull out.
These two textbooks ignore and obscure the role that the people and
their resistance played in Haiti's history and the important role
Haiti played in the hemisphere's history. They disguise the
imperialist interests that U.S. and European interventions upheld by
giving only brief and simplistic descriptions of major events. Even
though the word "imperialism" does appear, these textbooks give U.S.
students no real understanding of the racism, violence and greed that
led the U.S. to repress and exploit the Haitian people for almost two
centuries.
revised version of two articles that appeared in Haïti-Progrès July &
September 2003
Kafou Lobo
wrote:
>*this is very long but a great read*
<snip>:
Yup, a must read for all useless racists. No, a must read for
all Americans (who can read and comprehend).
K.