Originally published at Liberation News on October 21, 2017
Participatory democracy
The Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) invited 70 international observers. The United Socialist Party of Venezuela invited 18. We did not see anything like what the Western media reported. Quite the opposite!
The delegation I was a part of—invited by the PSUV—visited 7 polling stations spread out across working-class communities in Vargas and Miranda. The polling stations were at schools and community centers.
We did not see any violent confrontations or crack down on the population’s right to cast their vote. People of all ages and from different political tendencies stood in line and voted side by side one another in peace. Some wore political t-shirts of their party; others were dressed casually. There were vendors circulating in the streets, children playing and normal neighborhood activity. Coordinators at polling stations were volunteers who were well-known to the community. They provided special assistance for the elderly and disabled to assess voting stations. We were free to interview and interact with voters and volunteers alike for the duration of the day on Sunday.
Our delegation—representing twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries and the U.S.— saw an electorate that was eager to cast their votes. We saw communities free to debate their problems and vote in a laid-back atmosphere. Lines that looped around polling stations moved swiftly. The biometric authorization equipment was modern and efficient.
At one station in Vargas, a middle-aged man waiting to vote cried out that the government was responsible for inflation and unemployment. His arguments were quickly drowned out by a group of women who recast the blame on the U.S.-sponsored economic war.
Rosa—a resident of Vargas state—stated emphatically to foreign visitors: “There is no dictatorship here. Tell Trump, Macri and the rest of the would-be invaders there is no dictatorship here. You see these houses, you see this community, you see everything we have here, it is because of the revolution.”
Here is the complete report of the International Electoral Accompaniment team for more details on the efficiency and transparency of the elections.
Against all odds: victory amidst the Economic War
What makes this electoral victory so impressive is that it comes amidst a devastating economic war that has forced tens of thousands of families to flee Venezuela.
International banks and financial institutions—dominated by the U.S. and their allies—have stripped the Bolivar of its value. The average monthly salary is 310,000 Bolivares. This is a paltry $10.30 when the Bolivar is converted into its street value. To gauge what this means in real life, a pair of imported sneakers costs in the range of one million to two million Bolivares. This gives a sense of just how stifling inflation and the devaluing of the currency is.
Add to this the impact of the 50 percent drop in global oil prices since 2013. After centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism, Venezuela is a mono-producer, highly dependent on oil for foreign revenue.
No country in Latin America besides Cuba has experienced such crippling “international” sanctions and a blockade. This has precipitated the exodus of more than 150,000 Venezuelans in the last year alone, according to scholars studying the emigration phenomenon.
Despite this reality, the PSUV won 54 percent of all votes!
Though the opposition predicted it would make big gains, it actually lost 3 million votes compared to the 2015 elections. The ruling party won 18 states compared to the opposition’s five, three of which were border states heavily influenced by neighboring U.S.-ally Colombia. Even in Miranda, a state known to have a history of anti-Chavista violence, 52.54 percent of the votes were for the government.
Nationally there was a 61.14 percent turnout. In order to gain a sense of the significance of this number, it is useful to compare this to U.S. presidential election turnout which has been between 54-59 percent the past 3 elections.
A 25-year-old worker in the public sector, Raquel Galindo, expressed a view that encapsulated the thinking of the vast majority of Venezuelans: “These election results showed the Venezuelan people’s political consciousness. We didn’t allow ourselves to be manipulated by the economic crisis. The opposition is divided and has lost credibility because it endorses violence. Many of their past supporters stayed home because of this deception. These elections showed Venezuela is a democracy.”
The U.S. media war
The U.S. press was largely silent about the elections, except to give voice to the right wing. The State Department claimed that the elections resulted were tainted, reflecting their usual disdain for Venezuela.
The hypocrisy is glaring considering the U.S. government has a history of shutting down polling stations, disenfranchising masses of Black, Brown and poor people the right to vote and failing to provide functional machinery in oppressed neighborhoods.
The New York Times accused the government of malfeasance, roadblocks, intimidation and “forcing voters to go to poor neighborhoods.” There were a total of 13,559 polling centers. Only 201 polling centers (a fraction of the total) were relocated, usually within a mile’s distance. Reading between the lines, perhaps what the Times meant was the polls were accessible to everyday, working people.
U.S. media reports are motivated by a desire to demonize Venezuela and have little to do with material reality. The U.S. media shows right-wing violence and sabotage and presents it as a “popular rebellion.” President Nicolas Maduro summed up the opposition’s response: “When they lose, they cry fraud. When they win, they shout ‘Down with Maduro.’”
Venezuelan canciller (the U.S. equivalent of the Secretary of State) Jorge Arreaza stated at the post-election press conference: “The U.S. media was silent after right-wing opposition violence in which human beings were burnt alive. Now they question the election results? Why? To promote more violence?”
Governors elections: a popular referendum on the revolution vs. the opposition
The overwhelming victory for the Bolivarian revolutionary was a rejection of the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) opposition and their strategy of provoking violence in order to justify a U.S. invasion. The past four months of guarimbas (armed riots) saw 147 deaths in the streets of Venezuela. There were paramilitary attacks on government forces. 29 Venezuelans were lit on fire by the opposition, many of them simply because they were Black. 9 of these citizens were burnt to death.
Before the attacks, the government ordered their troops not to fire back and to maintain peace, and continued to seek dialogue. PSUV youth leader Aybori Oropeza explained the “turn the other cheek” strategy to our delegation: “Chavez taught us to be patience and peaceful. We cannot can sucked into this trap. That is what the U.S. and their puppets want so they can bomb us.”
In anticipation of the elections, right wing demagogues made extremist, sanguinary predictions that this was the eleventh hour for the revolution and there was no way to deal with the government but through violence. Their admitted goal has been bloodshed in hopes that the “international community” (an euphemism for the U.S. government) would intervene.
Despite the media offensive, even opposition leaders recognized the results. According to one opposition leader, Enrique Ochoa Antich, the elections showed the Chavismo is the dominant political force in the country and independent bodies audited the election results 14 times, confirming just that.
Here is a more detailed analysis of the collapse of the opposition.
Another large reason for the PSUV’s success was its principled response to the Economic War. The government has provided subsidized food through the CLAP program and waged a campaign against state corruption. For a deeper analysis of the Venezuelan leadership’s moves to deepen people’s democracy and overcome the Economic War, see here.
In summary, the vote for the PSUV was a vote for peace.
The Latin American class struggle
We cannot underestimate the regional implications of Sunday’s solidification of the Bolivarian Revolution. The Bolivarian current has been on the defensive recently. The 2015 victory of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, the 2016 coup in Brazil and the changing of the guard in Ecuador this year have all been victories for right-wing forces aligned with imperialism.
Sunday’s victory in Venezuela; the massive campaign forming around Cristina Fernandez’s bid to be the senator of Bueno Aires province; the grassroots movement in Brazil against the coup and Rafael Correa’s pledge to take control back over the Revolucion Ciudadana are all signs that popular forces are fighting back across the region.
Sunday proved that a united, conscious people can overcome all odds. Despite the ruthless attempts by self-anointed global tyrants to strip Venezuela of any buying power, reduce it to hunger & pauperism, provoke massacres and mass migration, the Venezuelan people stood up and triumphed. Sunday was not just a victory for the working people of Venezuela; it was a victory for poor people across the world.
Originally published at Liberation School on July 7, 2017
Today, July 7th marks the 119th anniversary of President William McKinley and the U.S. government’s annexation of Hawaiʻi. When we hear any mention of Hawaiʻi, we undoubtedly first think of breath-taking beaches, volcanoes and tourism. But what is the class and national realty in Hawaiʻi that lies beyond Waikiki and the tourists’ paradise?
The modern history of Hawaiʻi is a history of anti-colonial resistance and class struggle. Understanding how this national struggle unfolded explains what class forces seized the reigns of the Hawaiian state and whose class interests the state protected. An examination of the profound national oppression that the Hawaiian people have suffered at the hands of U.S. imperialism lays bare the roots of Hawaiʻi’s modern social ills and the resistance that has emerged to reclaim Hawaiʻi.
The theft of a kingdom
Hawaiʻi consists of eight “main islands” which are, from the northwest to southeast, Niʻihau, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, Kahoʻolawe, Maui, and Hawaiʻi. There is anthropological evidence that the ancestors of the Hawaiian people first came to inhabit Hawaiʻi some 4,000 years ago (Sykes). However, for the Hawaiian people the last 200 years of history has been one long eviction from their island nation by colonial and neocolonial forces.
1778 marked the arrival of British captain James Cook, the first colonizer to try to explore and exploit Hawaiʻi. The Hawaiians defended the islands against Cook, ultimately killing him for his aggression against their nation. However, the British invasion set in motion the arrival of an onslaught of missionaries and marauders who began to stake their claim to the Pacific island. Their aim was to uproot the native economic and cultural system and replace it with a different social design based on a foreign religion and the supremacy of private property above all else.
Hundreds of missionaries arrived convinced they had to convert, what they termed, “a licentious, indolent, improvident and ignorant” people to Christianity. But behind the cloak of these so called “humanitarian” motives was an interest in laying claim to Hawaiʻi’s vast wealth. Many of the chief capitalists who formed the initial colonial ruling class arrived as missionaries or were the sons of missionaries. The church and big companies worked hand in hand and were in essence one in the same. In the words of Desmond Tutu, describing the South African people’s own experience with European conquest: “the colonizer arrived with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other.”
The leading American companies who sank their fangs into Hawaiian land and squeezed the peasantry to extract profits were referred to as “the Big 5:” Castle and Cooke, Alexander and Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors and Theo H. Davies & Co. Holding a monopoly over the land but faced with a labor shortage, the sugar cane and pineapple plantation owners looked to contract laborers from abroad, preying upon the poverty of Japanese and Chinese laborers. The Hawaiian census of 1890 indicated that there were 40,612 Native Hawaiians, 27,391 Japanese and Chinese laborers but only 6,220 Europeans and white Americans. The Big 5 was faced with a fundamental contradiction: How could they maintain power over the land when they were such a tiny minority of individuals?
Post-1890, foreign capital recruited labor from the Philippines, Portugal and Puerto Rico. Fleeing the colonial conquest and the savage class inequalities of their own homelands, tens of thousands of Portuguese, Filipino and Puerto Rican peasants came across the seas to Hawaiʻi. 184,000 immigrant laborers from these countries were officially recorded as having arrived in Hawaiʻi from 1852-1905.
Because they were so numerically small, the Hawaiian ruling class looked to the U.S. to provide them with protection. Motivated to expand their profiteering off of the rich Hawaiian soil, the Big 5 entered into a “reciprocity treaty” with the United States, the latest country seeking to join the club of imperial powers. The colonial agreement was that big sugar cane interests would be allowed access to U.S. markets without tariffs in exchange for allowing the U.S. government to maintain exclusive commercial and military control over Hawaiʻi. In 1887 Pearl Harbor was handed over to the U.S. on what Queen Liliʻuokalani called “a day of infamy for the Hawaiian people.”
As long as the ruling elite could depend on a compliant monarchy to do their bidding, they could maximize their profits. However with the death of the puppet King, Kalākaua, the sugar cane elite ran into a problem. Kalākaua’s sister, Queen Liliʻuokalani came to the throne and refused to do the bidding of foreign interests at the expense of her own nation. She immediately moved to pass a constitution that would allow only Hawaiian citizens to vote. When bribes failed to buy her off, the propertied interests resorted to force.
In 1893, with the support of the U.S. military who invaded Honolulu and surrounded the Queen’s Iolani palace, the leading imperial business interests waged a coup d’etat. Up against a superior military power, Queen Liliʻuokalani was forced to sign over Hawaiʻi to the foreign sackers who misleadingly called themselves “the Committee of Safety.”
The Queen’s refusal to resign captures the spirit of the Hawaiian people’s resistance:
“I, Liliʻuokalani, by the Grace of God under the Constitution of the Kingdom, Queen, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a provisional government of and for this kingdom.
That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose minister plenipotentiary, John L. Stevens, has caused the US troops to land at Honolulu and declared that he would support the provisional government.
Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps the loss of life, I do under this protest, and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the U.S. shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”
Sanford Dole, an elite judge, whose son would go on to be the future founder of the Dole fruit conglomerate, was placed at the head of the U.S. protectorate to rule on behalf of the foreigners. Officials banned the use of the native language in 1896. Under the presidency of William McKinley expansionists and missionaries annexed Hawaiʻi in July of 1898, making it an official U.S. protectorate. The seizure of Hawaiʻi initiated a century of U.S. wars of conquest abroad. Soon followed the U.S.’s conquest of Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In the 20th century the U.S. military would go on to launch hundreds of invasions, reminiscent of their seizure of Hawaiʻi which proved to be the beginning of the “American Century.”
The many uses of Hawaiʻi
Because of its function as a strategic U.S. military outpost during WWII, Hawaiʻi was made a state in 1959. Located more than 1/3 of the way across the Pacific, the U.S. military continues to maintain a web of bases and over 50,000 troops spread across Hawaiʻi as a menacing threat to the nations of the Pacific and Asia. The U.S. military occupies 1/4th of all Hawaiian land, employing 60 million rounds of live ammunition training every year.
The U.S. military’s abuse of Hawaiʻi is the clearest violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. In 1976, the military’s bombing runs on the island of Kahoʻolawe became a center of protest. Similar to the popular struggle to force the Navy to leave Vieques, Puerto Rico in 2001, Hawaiians protested the use of their islands for war and destruction. Under mysterious conditions two sovereignty activists, Kimo Mitchell and George Helm, were disappeared. Helm wrote these words about the struggle to defend the land which would become an example for water defenders at Standing Rock and beyond:
“There is man and there is environment. One does not supersede the other. The breath in man is the breath of papa (earth mother). Man is merely the caretaker of the land that maintains his life and nourishes his soul. Therefore, the ʻāina (love of the land) is sacred. The church of life is not in a building, it is the open sky, the surrounding ocean, the beautiful soil.”
After years of protest the U.S. government was finally forced to end live-fire training on the island in 1990.
Like other underdeveloped nations, Hawaiʻi has become dependent on a militarized economy. One out of 5 families in Hawaiʻi has a family member in the military. A majority of Hawaiians and workers in the U.S. can’t afford to leave their island or state. In the cruelest of ironies, for many Hawaiians the only perceived economic and physical escape from island poverty is to join the U.S. military. The military feeds off of the chronic unemployment that plagues the Hawaiian nation. Conscripted Hawaiians are sent off to fight wars of conquest and plunder. When the author interviewed a group of Hawaiian GI’s and veterans about why they had joined the military, they had an all too familiar response: “I wanted to make something of myself. There were no other opportunities.” They also spoke about the bonds they made in the military with Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and other oppressed nationality soldiers. Thousands of miles away from their island home, stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq or Korea, they were keenly aware of who their true enemies and friends were.
The Water War in Maui
Foreign capital, mainly from the U.S. and Japan, controls the lion’s share of the land, property and means of production. Alexander and Baldwin [A&B] is one of these corporations. A&B made its initial massive profits from the surplus value extracted from super-exploited sugarcane laborers. Today A&B continues to dominate the sugar, shipping and most importantly the water supply on the island of Maui.
Maui is an island internationally renowned for its natural beauty and the diversity of its climate. An island that can be circled in a mere six hours, Maui is the home of deserts, rain forests, jungles, volcanoes, freezing cold mountain peaks, water falls and some of the most awe-inspiring waves in the world.
What was once a serene natural landscape, has been converted into a top tourist destination. For the Hawaiian people who make their living on the island, the tourist reality is omnipresent. “It is like we live in a park.” This is how one Maui native describes living in his ancestral land. Surrounded on all sides by invasive tourists and resorts, what has been left for the Hawaiian people?
Brain drain is one cruel result. Refusing to serve foreigners for a living, many of Hawaiʻi’s top intellects have left for the colonial mainland in pursuit of more rewarding careers.
In pre-colonial times, the Hawaiian community ensured that the natural streams flowed continuously for everyone. Each family carved out their ditch to catch the amount of water they needed and let the water flow on to the next community. A concept such as privatizing water was beyond comprehension. This was introduced with the advent of European settler rule.
Today the water no longer flows. In order to provide sufficient water resources to the sugar cane fields, A&B built dams and ditches to monopolize the water and cut off farmers’ access. They continue to feed their sugar cane and siphon off the precious water to make desert areas green resorts for tourists, with artificial water-falls, plants, grass and golf-courses. The entire ecosystem of Maui has been altered for the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. The eviction from the land proletarianizes more and more Hawaiians, forced to make ends meet as servants in the tourist industry. A majority of farmers now have to buy water from Alexander & Baldwin.
On the island of Maui alone 60 billion gallons of water are diverted from natural watersheds to supply real estate interests (Al-Jazeera). The water war in Maui is symbolic of the overall struggle of Hawaiians to regain control over their land and lives. One leader of a farmers’ collective posed the struggle for sovereignty in the following terms:
“The theft of our water is the theft of our natural existence. As indigenous people we know how to coexist with the planet. Water and land was healing. Today when we see our people destroyed by drugs and depression, we bring them back to the land and to the water so they can rediscover their spirituality. Their culture was stolen from them. We need to bring it back.”
Tourism: An economy of servants and the served
7,000,000 tourists per year visit Hawaiʻi.
In popular, tourist culture Oahu is referred to as the “gathering place.” But the gathering of who? On the north side of Oahu is Turtle Bay. Italian, American, Japanese and other wealthy tourists pay an average of $350 dollars a night to stay at a massive, glamorous hotel complex that sits in plain view of the world’s most coveted surfing waves. Replete with jacuzzis, saunas, & back-rubs, the massive Turtle Bay complex is set back behind walls of security.
Before this reality of haves and have-nots, one is left to ask the question: how much has the economic system changed since the days of servants and slaves, masters and overseers? Racism, paternalism and inequality still govern human relations in the Pacific.
Oahu’s work force does the cooking, driving, and waiting that keeps the tourist industry running. Waikiki, one of the US’s largest tourist destinations generating $6.8 billion in revenue per year, is an obnoxious and painful reality. The local mixed Asian & Pacific population dresses up in Aloha shirts and feigned smiles to serve the privileged.
Oahu functions as a sort of Mecca of Pacific Island and Asian cultures. The supremacy of U.S. capital in the region has created a concentration and mix of Filipinos, Fijians, Samoans, Chuuqueese Islanders, Vietnamese, Koreans, Tongans, etc. across Hawaiʻi. Honoululu is the New York City of the Pacific & one of the most diverse places in the world, uniting toiling people from the entire Pacific and Asia in a small geographic area.
The locals talk about taking back this “Aloha culture” which has been kidnapped by interests alien to those of the Hawaiian people. Hawaiian reggae artist Mana Kaleilani Caceres’ lyrics expose the history of Hawaiʻi that is absent from the tourist brochures.
“They Took the Land
They Took Aloha
Overthrew the Queen
Even though They Didn’t Know Her
Suppressed Ikaika (strength) and the Kupuna (ancestors)
Broke the ʻOhana (family)
But They Couldn’t Take the Mana (spirit)”
Multinational unity: same struggle, same enemy
A young woman in Waiʻanae donned a t-shirt that read “I’m Chiwai‘ianfilarican and what?” Her Chinese, Hawaiian, Filipino and Puerto Rican ancestry represented the historical roots and journey of Hawaiians today. Another young mother explained her bloodline: “Well on my mom’s side, we are Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Haole (white), Puerto Rican and then my dad is half Samoan and mixed Tongan, Filipino and Portuguese.”
The Hawaiian working class is comprised of the descendents of the late 19th century plantation workers and a host of other Asian and Pacific nationalities dislocated from their homelands and pulled to Hawaiʻi by U.S. capital. The multinational Hawaiian working class works shoulder to shoulder today in providing the services that make tourism and production run in Hawaiʻi.
Through a wide array of laws and segregation the ruling class tried to drive wedges between the different nationalities. For example, Hawaiians are today considered U.S. citizens and are entitled to certain “benefits” such as food stamps, public housing and welfare. However, immigrants from Samoa, the Philippines and other neighboring countries in Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Asia who come to Hawaiʻi in search of work are defined as undocumented and are forced to take the lowest paying jobs and live in inferior housing. Having fled the conquest of their own island nations, they are then scapegoated for the unemployment and poverty that exists in Hawaiʻi. These are the same divide and conquer tactics that Bigot-in-Chief Donald Trump and other demagogues use today across the U.S.
The successive waves of migration from oppressed nations to oppressor nations have not been voluntary. Colonial profiteering disoriented entire national economic infrastructures in the Pacific and Asia in order to meet their own economic imperatives. Stripped of a chance as economic stability in their home countries, hundreds of thousands of families have involuntarily migrated in search of work in the Hawaiian tourist industry.
A microcosm of the entire U.S., Oahu is called a melting pot. But who gets burned at the bottom of the pot? Who rests at the top on a float to savor, relish and delight in the finished product of the social labor? How was the American dream built up on the back of so many millions of other dreams?
The Polynesian Cultural Center exposed
The Polynesian Cultural Center [PCC] is among the most vivid examples of the racist, ultra-exploitive brand of tourism. The PCC is a theme park on the Northeast Coast of Oahu owned and run by the Mormon Church. Claiming to be dedicated to the promotion of Polynesian cultures, the Mormon Church charges up to $285 for the super-ambassador passes “to experience authentic villages from Samoa, Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii and Fiji.” A whole range of exploited Pacific Island nationalities are converted into stereotyped mascots who sing, dance and smile on the command of the PCC supervisors.
The Mormons portrayal of the happy “native” is reminiscent of the Black-face, minstrel shows used by white supremacy to shape the general (mis)perception of African American identity. Every thing in the PCC is staged — the clothing, the monologues and the villages. There is no deeper investigation of the rich histories of resistance and courage that formed these nations. Hundreds of Polynesian youth dance, sing, serve and entertain hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. 90% of the PCC work force is not paid a salary for their labor which generates hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for the Mormon Church. Instead, for working five days a week, the church “grants” them discounts off of their tuition at Brigham Young University. For this, they are told to be thankful.
One mormon recruiter explained:
“Without our help, these poor people would be stuck back in their countries.”
Cultural exchange can be a beautiful thing but not on these terms. All of the artificial smiles dupe the gullible tourist into believing that everything is happy and jolly across the Pacific. Hawaiʻi is by no means alone in playing this role. From Rio de Janeiro to Bangkok to Santo Domingo, corporations monopolize the most precious beaches and natural beauty and preserve it for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy. This brand of tourism continues to be a scar across Hawaiʻi’s heart.
The inequality of nations
The main feature in the epoch of imperialism is the inequality of nations. The oppressor nations exercise economic, military, political and cultural domination over the oppressed nations. In the “rich” nations, such as the U.S., Britain, and Japan, the ruling class and the ‘better off’ sectors of the working class can afford to take vacations abroad. They make enough money and they do not need a visa or any other paperwork that would prevent them from traveling. Yet when members of oppressed nations, with the exception of a tiny, ruling elite, desire to visit the exploiter nations there are all types of obstacles in effect to limit their ability to travel. Even within the most “advanced” nation, the United States, most families cannot afford to leave their block or community because they are too busy surviving. The dream of leaving the Bronx, Oakland or Kansas City to explore the Pacific Islands or Southern Africa is a pipe dream for most workers.
Life does not have to be this way. Under socialism there would be equality of all nations. Every human being, in addition to enjoying free access to housing, healthcare and education would benefit from the right to travel and explore other national cultures. Travel and international exploration would cease to be the exclusive privilege of the few.
While the surplus value created by worker’s sacrifice today makes billionaires out of the owners of our labor, in a socialist world society’s surplus would guarantee that there was enough money to pay for these rights for all workers. How outdated is this racist epoch when travel is the exclusive right of mostly privileged white tourists! Airline companies should work for the benefit of all and not to profit off of those who can afford the privilege to travel. Instead of first class and coach tickets there would be free trips as part of educational and community activities for youth, students and workers. Nations would relate to one another on an equal basis with mutually beneficial trade agreements like those that today exist between Cuba, Venezuela and the rest of the ALBA bloc (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas).
The other Hawaiʻi: the forgotten coast
The tourist economy means skyrocketing real estate prices and a major housing crisis for working class Hawaiian families. Three years ago, governor David Ige declared a state of emergency before the housing crisis. Hawaiʻi has the highest rate of homelessness of the 50 states. With land gobbled up by the tourist industry, Hawaiians are left to scramble to find affordable housing.
The Great Mahele or the Great Dispossession of 1848 passed under pressure of missionaries and foreign business concerns signified a counterrevolution in property relations. Special interests parcelled up the land, breaking the traditional communal trusteeship over the land and collectivized cultivation.
Prior to colonization, the Hawaiian social system consisted of a monarchy with a ruling class and commoners. While there were battles for political control between different warring chiefs and large tracts of land were redistributed when power changed hands, there was no class stratification to the extent that would be introduced. This legacy of private property is the material basis for understanding the deep class stratification that persists today.
Outside of Honolulu, on the West side of Oahu, there are no tourists. This is not the Hawaiʻi of the tourist brochures. Only 30 miles from some of the most expensive and popular tourist resorts in the United States but here there is a different reality. For this reason, the West Coast is called the “forgotten coast.” Here there are communities ravaged by homelessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, senseless violence, gang violence, domestic abuse against women and children, teen pregnancy, school drop outs and soaring prison rates.
Many families gravitate between shelters and overcrowded Section 8 housing. There are currently 6,100 federal and State public housing units in Hawaiʻi and a waiting list of over 10,000 with the Public Housing Authority. Of the 5,800 homeless people counted in the most recent survey on Oahu, 3,500 people are in shelters and 2,200 are unsheltered (Hussey 1). Authorities constantly target makeshift homeless communities for destruction.
Camp 125 is a make-shift squatter’s camp in Waianae. Hundreds of families constructed their living quarters with tents on the beach shore. If Camp 125 were pushed any way further from Waikiki, it would fall into the ocean. Families tie up long blue and black plastic sheets to trees and hoist them up as the roofs for their homes. They break crates or wooden boards for the floor. The police continually harass the community and threaten to push them out of existence. In the summer of 2010, two beach residents, among them a U.S. military veteran, tired of being pushed down and arrested by the police, hung themselves to protest the destruction of their camp.
In camp 125, the Hawaiians, Creole or Pidgin flowed naturally, unintelligible to outsiders. Pidgin according to local knowledge was the Cantonese word or pronunciation for business when the Hawaiian Islands functioned as a trading and meeting point for international commerce. Hawaiian Creole grew out of the 200 year Hawaiian class struggle. The Pidgin becomes a reflection of assimilation or cultural resistance. The deeper one penetrates into the harvest, the land, the country, the more alive the native Hawaiian language and pidgin becomes. There were also white Hawaiians who are born and raised working the land at peace with the native communities. They too spoke pidgin, showing that both class and race were determinants of social position.
Hundreds of families survive at the end of Oahu where the mountains meet the sea in Mākaha. The resistors do not know when they will be expelled permanently. Their experience with eviction is a microcosm of the past 200 years of Hawaiian history.
Crystal Meth, gangs and oppression
It is only within this history of economic and cultural dislocation that one can begin to understand the modern day issues affecting Waianae, Wahiawa, Nanakuli and other working class communities across Oahu and Hawaiʻi. Ruling class ideology asserts that social problems are the fault of the individual. Liberals hoist up this or that politician or social program as a way of resolving social ills. But these minor concessions do not begin to address the underlying causes of social inequality.
A group of four young single mothers commented on the epidemic: “Well we ain’t got shit else to do on this island. Some beers, getting high, we rolling.” They commented on how the state locked up many young fathers for the typical crimes of poverty; stealing cars, fights and hustling. They explained that any crime that nets more than a year is served in the mainland, thousands of miles away from their family. They referenced the A&E show Dog the Bounty Hunter, explaining how their families were the ones being hunted down for their petty crimes. For the privileged, the plight of the poor makes for great entertainment.
It was common in the working class districts to see posters of women and men scratching deep scars and scabs. The posters were warnings about the effects of Crystal Meth. They were side by side Heineken ads that read “Keep Hawaiʻi green…Buy Heineken.” Across New York City’s poor communities, the Department of Health (DOH) uses similar degrading images for its Hepatitis C “prevention campaign.” These are classic examples of neoliberal public health interventions seen across the USA that blame the “victim” while failing to address the root cause of the illnesses eg. housing, working, generational trauma, post-colonialism.
Many studies show drug abuse is as common if not higher in wealthy communities yet there were DOH posters in those neighborhoods? The billboards, tv programs, radio ads and songs that bombard the children have damaging effect on their self-esteem.
Only a few miles west of Waikiki are the largest housing projects in the Pacific. When one enters the Kuhio Park Terrace (KPT) or Crawford Housing Development it is similar to an urban housing model in any inner-city. There are 350 units in each building with a total of about 3,500 people.
The residents here complained of raw sewage backing up into individual units, lack of hot water, leaking pipes and stairs littered with trash, wet with rain water and reeking of urine. There was only one working elevator is in each building, creating long waits for the 2,000 tenants. Many of the families here are Samoan and KPT is known as the most dangerous housing development in Honolulu. Junior, Donald and Thomas described how KPT projects were in a rivalry against Crawford housing. Groups of youth band together and fight groups from neighboring projects & towns. Overwhelmed by the loss of control over their surroundings, the abused lash out in anger at their own class. Mikey, lamented the loss of several of his friends to this senseless violence among the oppressed. In arguments over girlfriends or alcohol, all too often the beef ended in the death of loved ones.
There is nothing natural or inevitable about this suffering. Hawaiʻi is the Puerto Rico of the Pacific; the loss of self-determination is the cause and the context of the social ills that befall people.
The equality of nations
There is a strong sovereignty movement fighting for native Hawaiians’ economic, political and cultural rights. On the 100 year anniversary of the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the Hawaiian people took to the streets demanding 1.3 million acres in land and reparations from the U.S. government. U.S. presidents have issued official U.S. apologies but nothing more. Like Puerto Rico, Guam and other U.S. territories, Hawaiʻi is still a colony in every sense of the word.
The greatest support for the Hawaiian people’s just struggle for self-determination is to fight to seize power for working people across the United States. One of the first decrees of a socialist government in the belly of the beast would be the restoration of reparations and land to their rightful owners so that Hawaiʻi, Palestine, Puerto Rico and so many other neo-colonies can at least breathe and grow freely.
While the equality of nations may appear to some to be a far flung fantasy, this is what the PSL fights for day in and day out. In the words of Karl Marx, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it.”
Long live the Hawaiian and all oppressed nations’ right to self-Determination!
Works Cited
Al-Jazeera. Inside the USA: The Other Hawaii. September 26th.
Hussey, Ikaika. “Following Beach Eviction, Waianae Man Commits Suicide.” The Hawaiian Independent. July 19th, 2010.
Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Times Books. 2006
Silva, Noenoe. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to Colonialism.
Sykes, Brian. The Seven Daughters of Eve. 2001
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 1980.
Originally published at the Council of Hemispheric Affairs on November 11, 2019.
Yesterday, Sunday November the 10th, at approximately 4pm (eastern standard time) the democratically elected president and vice president of Bolivia, Evo Morales and Álvaro García respectively, were forced to resign from power. This was no voluntary resignation as CNN, the New York Times and the rest of the corporate media is reporting, nor has it been accepted by the Legislative Assembly as required by the Constitution of Bolivia.[1] This was a coup that employed threats and brutality against Morales, García, members of the cabinet, congressional representatives, and their families. Both the commander in chief of the military and head of the Bolivian Police requested, in no uncertain terms, the resignation of Morales.[2] The coup forces, led by Pro-Santa Cruz Committee president Luis Fernando Camacho, continues to target Movement for Socialism (MAS) activists, progressive social movements, and Indigenous peoples of Bolivia.
Behind the Misleading Headlines
The corporate press has predictably given one-sided coverage of the unfolding situation in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, a resource-rich Andean nation of 11.5 million, of which approximately 50% are Indigenous[3]. While the mainstream media act as cheerleaders for the unrest in Hong Kong and magnify any sign of discontent in Venezuela or any other country perceived by the US government as “enemy”, it has largely ignored the popular uprisings in Haiti, Chile, Ecuador and beyond. Now, in the case of Bolivia, conservative circles in the Americas are celebrating an opportunity to take power back from a president, administration and people who have been a regional driving force for the advancement of Indigenous, environmental, women’s and workers’ rights. Bolivia has enjoyed one of the most stable economic growth rates in the Americas, between 4% and 5% in the last years, and decreased poverty among millions of Bolivians, from 59% to 39%, according to official data from the World Bank.[4]
Protest against the Coup, in solidarity with the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales and the Bolivian people, in front of the Organization of American States, OAS, in Washington DC. (Photo-credit: Cele León)
A Call for Solidarity
On Thursday, October 24th, Bolivia’s election panel declared Morales the winner with 47.07% of the votes and Carlos Mesa the runner up with 36.5% of the votes.[5] According to a Center for Economic and Policy Research, Morales had a sufficient margin of victory to be declared the victor in the elections.[6] The Organization of American States presented findings that the election had irregularities and that the “auditing team could not validate the electoral results and were thus, recommending another election.”[7] The opposition contested the election, led by extreme right wing leader of the Santa Cruz Committee, Luis Fernando Camacho. Camacho is involved in the continental corruption case known as “The Panama Papers”[8]. He also has links with terrorist and separatist Branko Marinkovic, who enjoys safe harbor in Brazil, which is governed by the right-wing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil[9]. In response to charges that the election was not valid, Morales invited the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) to conduct an audit.[10] The opposition rejected these calls, reiterating their demands for Morales to step down.[11] Morales responded to the OAS audit, which claimed there were irregularities, by calling for new elections and a reconstitution of the electoral commission but the coup leaders rejected all of these concessions.[12]
Since the anarchy began, all of president Morales’ public statements have pleaded for peace and dialogue. However, the opposition has no interest in the social peace the MAS built. Quite the opposite, they want to reverse all of these gains.
In the town of Vinto, protestors brutally attacked, cut off the hair and marched MAS mayor Patricia Arce through the streets to humiliate her. Anti-government forces have picked up arms and burned down the homes of MAS activists and family members. In response, Morales said: “Burn my house. Not those of my family. Seek vengeance with me and Alvaro. Not with our families.”[13]
The U.S. headlines do little to explain the racial and class divide that defines Bolivia historically and at the current moment. Pro-democracy forces should seek to understand the inner-dynamics at work in Bolivian society and support the restoration of democratically-elected government and peace. Veterans of centuries of resistance, the Bolivian people are poised to keep resisting the coup and preserve the historic gains of the “process of change”.
Protest against the Coup, in solidarity with the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales and the Bolivian people, in front of the Organization of American States, OAS, in Washington DC. (Photo-credit: Cele León)
Behind the Propaganda
Morales and the Movement for Socialism’s (MAS) true crime ⎯ in the eyes of the salivating gas multinationals and their local lackeys ⎯ was the severing of Bolivia’s historically exploitative relationship with the U.S.
In 2005, Evo Morales became the 80th president of Bolivia and its first Indigenous. In 2006, the MAS re-nationalized Bolivia’s vast gas reserves. Morales expelled the DEA, USAID, the Peace Corps and the U.S. ambassador because of their agendas of political intervention in domestic affairs, which is illegal in any country, as it is surely in the US. Aware of the 200 plus U.S. military invasions in the continent in the 20th century, the MAS established an anti-imperialist military school to train their own officers and rank and file soldiers. Cholitas, as Aymara women are known, have made important gains since 2005. Traditionally alienated from the formal economy and exploited as servants in the homes of the wealthy, Bolivia’s women have carved out new economic and cultural terrain to exercise more self-determination over their lives.
Despite all of the social and economic gains, the process of change was unable to completely transform the old state apparatus over the past thirteen years. In the decisive moment, when the rule of law came under attack, important sectors of the military high command and the police supported the coup.
In Evo’s own words upon resigning, in order to prevent more attacks against innocent Bolivians, “my sin is I’m indigenous and I’m a leftist.”
Protest against the Coup, in solidarity with the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales and the Bolivian people, in front of the Organization of American States, OAS, in Washington DC. (Photo-credit: Cele León)
Contextualizing the Coup
Contrary to what the second-place candidate Carlos Mesa, Luis Fernando Camacho and other pro-coup forces would have us believe, the violence and chaos is not just about Morales’ fourth presidential term; it is about what class forces control the future of Bolivia.
The overthrow of the MAS government and the victory of pro-U.S. interventionist forces, for the present moment, represent a monumental setback for the Bolivian people as well as for the cause of regional independence and democracy, akin to the rise of Pinochet in Chile in 1973.
While 66.2% of Bolivians are of Indigenous or mestizo (mixed Native and European with the indigenous component higher than the European) ancestry, the violence is concentrated in Santa Cruz and other areas where the largely lighter-skinned, Spanish-descendent, wealthier sectors have no interest in Bolivian unity and democracy.[14] The concentration of wealth in these sectors is the result of unequal development, a direct product of centuries of colonialism.
Santa Cruz tried to secede from Bolivia in 2008. The secessionist forces trampled on the red, yellow and green flag of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the Wiphala, electing instead to fly the green and white regional flag. The call for “autonomy” and the latest burning of homes and violent attacks seek to steal back the direction of the Bolivian state. Driven by racism and a thirst for the unconstrained power they have been accustomed to since the inception of Bolivia’s history, these class forces believe they have won this round, forcing Morales and García from power.
Protest against the Coup, in solidarity with the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales and the Bolivian people, in front of the Organization of American States, OAS, in Washington DC. (Photo-credit: Cele León)
An Insurrectionary Continent
It is important to place the temporary setback in Bolivia in the wider context of what is unfolding across Latin America.
Bolivia’s neighbor to the south, Argentina, just rejected the right-wing agenda of Macrismo at the polls. To the west, Chile is in revolt against a billionaire agenda and president, Sebastián Piñera. Further north, Colombia rejected Uribismo in local elections. Lula –the most popular politician in Brazil — is free after 19 months as a political prisoner. Millions of Haitians are in the streets demanding an end to U.S.-led exploitation and occupation. In Ecuador, there is a popular movement against Lenín Moreno’s hard turn towards the neoliberal economic model. And in Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leads a new party which aims at building a post-neoliberal order for the country. Venezuela and Cuba continue to fight back against an all-out U.S. diplomatic, military, media and economic offensive.
Protest against the Coup, in solidarity with the Bolivian government, President Evo Morales and the Bolivian people, in front of the Organization of American States, OAS, in Washington DC. (Photo-credit: Cele León)
The Coup Cannot Bury the Process of Change
As this article goes to press, there are numerous official denunciations of the coup from governments which defend the constitutional order in Bolivia as well as expressions of solidarity from progressive forces around the world. This is indeed a great blow to democracy and social justice in the Americas.
The OAS, after having failed to denounce the violence and racist attacks perpetrated by coup forces, has belatedly voiced support for the preservation of the constitutional order, for a new electoral authority, and for new elections, all of which were sought by President Morales himself.
The OAS statement declares:
“The General Secretariat requests an urgent meeting of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia to ensure the institutional functioning and to name new electoral authorities to guarantee a new electoral process. It is also important that justice continues to investigate existing responsibilities regarding the commission of crimes related to the electoral process held on October 20, until they are resolved.”[15]
Now that President Morales and Vice President Álvaro García have resigned and the coup has polarized Bolivian society, it will be difficult to re-establish the “institutional functioning” undermined by the coup. Morales has been granted asylum by Mexican authorities. Celebrants of the anti-Indigenous victory are burning the Whiphala in public squares. Popular mobilizations against the coup and in support of Morales which are now on the rise, are being met in some areas with brutal repression by the police.[16] There are reliable video and testimonial reports that mutinous police, who stayed in their barracks during the violence and destruction wrought by the anti-government forces, are now using live ammunition on people in El Alto.[17] Meanwhile the MAS and other organizations that have been major protagonists of the process of change are seeking to protect their ranks from persecution and regroup in order to defend the progress of the past decade, gains which have lifted millions of Bolivians out of poverty, revalorized Indigenous culture, and contributed to continent wide aspiration of realizing the Patria Grande. As Evo Morales has promised, “the struggle continues.”[18]
End notes
[1] Londono, Ernesto. “Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down.” New York Times. Nov. 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/world/americas/evo-morales-bolivia.html. See Article 161 (3) of the Constitution of Bolivia: The Chambers shall meet in Pluri-National Legislative Assembly to exercise the following functions, as well as those set forth in the Constitution: 3. To accept or reject the resignation of the President of the State and of the Vice President of the State.
[3] International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). According to the 2012 National Census, 41% of the Bolivian population over the age of 15 are of indigenous origin, although the National Institute of Statistics’ (INE) 2017 projections indicate that this percentage is likely to have increased to 48%. https://www.iwgia.org/en/bolivia
[17] In a tweet on Nov. 11, Evo Morales said: “After the first day of the civic-political-police coup, the mutinous police repress with bullets to provoke deaths and wounded in El Alto. My solidarity with these innocent victims, among them a girl, and the heroic people of El Alto, defenders of democracy.” https://twitter.com/evoespueblo/status/1193943984424603650?s=20
Originally published at Toward Freedom on February 4, 2022
Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, by Dan Kovalik (Hot Books: New York, 2021)
Academic and activist Dan Kovalik’s new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, was written on the frontlines of the twin struggles of our time, the class struggle and the fight for Black liberation. Reading it brought me back to so many magical and contradictory movement moments that I could not resist writing a review.
‘White People Go to the Back of the March’
On the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in 2017, thousands of protesters took to Fifth Avenue and the frigid streets of New York City to demand criminal charges against the police who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; and hundreds of other unarmed Black and brown men. Some Black Lives Matter march marshals had determined that Black and brown families and activists—presented as the only real victims and fighters—would march in the front. White people—presented as all equal benefactors of white supremacy and white privilege—were assigned to march in the back, separated from the youthful, militant front. It was a strange scene. Forty-nine years after the U.S. state assassinated Dr. King for risking his life to organize a multiracial movement against white supremacy—and in his final months, a Poor People’s Campaign against the capitalist system—surely he would find it curious we no longer needed outright white supremacists like Bull Connor or George Wallace; we were now capable of segregating our own marches.
Malcolm X’s only meeting with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 26, 1964, during the U.S. Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964 / credit: Marion Trikosko
So many questions leapt into my mind as my eyes traced the 10-block-long protest. Where did poor whites belong? Veterans? Whites who had been through the prison system? How about Black students who had both parents in a position to pay their tuition out of pocket at NYU or Columbia? They had all earned the front? Then there was my Ernesto Rafael, my son, half Dominican, half poor-white, harassed by the police too many times in the Bronx. Where did he “belong,” according to the marshals?
This was but one example of the new racial dynamics on display across the country in the BLM movement from Oakland to Boston, and everywhere in between. For class conscious revolutionaries throwing down in the heart of this mass movement, it represented a series of fresh, unique challenges.
When I picked up Kovalik’s new book, I was intrigued by his biting class analysis of the similar experiences he had. In chapter 2, “Cancellation of a Peace Activist,” he writes directly about being a participant on the frontlines of the BLM movement in Pennsylvania, ducking and dodging police batons as organizers collectively figured out their next strategic moves. Kovalik, a union and human rights lawyer and professor, based out of Pittsburgh, dives deep into the contradictions he and so many others experienced. Kovalik slams both the arrogance of isolated white anarchists whose faux militancy puts all protesters at risk, as well as the bullying tactics and racial reductionism of some radical liberals. This took me back to the explosion of protests following the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, which brought millions of people into the streets to denounce the epidemic of police terror in Black and brown communities. Millions were in motion and different political tendencies vied for leadership. Kovalik examines key lessons to be drawn from the almost decade of collective experience we have as a movement in what came to be known as “Black Lives Matter.” This is but one must-read chapter in Kovalik’s exciting new book.
Woke Capitalism
Kovalik’s book is an expose of Woke Capitalism and the cancer of cancel culture.
While millions took to the streets to stop President George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the peace movement was eerily silent when Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, became “the drone-warrior-in-chief, dropping at least 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone.” (pg. 109) He critiques the peace movement for going quiet every time a Democrat is (s)elected to the oval office.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
This page-turner exposes today’s liberal establishment, which touts “racial equity” without ever questioning the underlying structure that intensifies white supremacist control of society’s institutions. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is but one example of a liberal who bloviates over the U.S. Capitol rioters and their violent methods. Yet, he advocated for the bombing, sacking and recolonization of Iraq. (pg. VIII) The book exposes corporate and campus departments that pay hefty salaries to “experts” to lecture on “racial justice” without ever touching the structures that buttress white supremacy and racial and class segregation. These defenders of racial capitalism—from the academy to the pressroom—give political cover to hucksters, who make a killing by bullying white liberals into forking over money, lest they be labeled racist. As one class-conscious scholar sarcastically asks in Black Agenda Report: Do we really “wonder why these rural voters didn’t just go to their local Barnes and Noble to purchase a copy of How to Be an Anti-racist before the election?” Are all of the books that have emerged from the White Privilege Industrial Complex reaching that mass of “deplorables,” whom Arlie Hochchild refers to in her monumental sociological exposé as “strangers in their own land”? (“Own land” as in stolen Indigenous land).
Kovalik takes on the Frankenstein-esque outgrowth of cancellations in academic institutions and beyond, asking what are the political forces behind them? He offers the real-life example of the canceling of Molly Rush, an octogenarian peace activist who reposted a quote that took on a life of its own. Instead of speaking with her face to face to clear the air, internet activists dragged her down and expelled her from the movement, like a group of pre-teens playing a game of Telephone. (pg. 13) Kovalik surmises that many keyboard warriors who have never stared down police lines or even handed out a flyer don’t want dialogue and growth. They want to score woke points and “likes” to the detriment of other comrades.
Liberal bully politics short-changes us all. Kovalik takes a big leap to the international realm to examine the West’s arrogant dismissal of Cuban medical internationalism, the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and China’s success controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. China had two deaths in 2021. Kovalik concludes:
“It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain. In so doing, they have taken ‘cancel culture’ to the very extreme, and they may get us all canceled, permanently, in the process…” (pg. 139)
A sit-in protest on July 8, 2016, in San Francisco in response to the Alton Sterling shooting / credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen
We Never Give Up on Our People
It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.
How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.
This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?
When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?
A Boston police mug shot of Malcolm X, following his arrest for larceny in 1944
As Marxists, revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, we believe nothing is permanent; everything is in a state of flux. The watchwords are growing through contradictions among the people, healing and restorative justice. We don’t have the luxury of discarding comrades. There has to be a path back or we risk cannibalizing and condemning our own ranks. Who would Malcolm X have been if everyone had given up on him in his 20s, when he was imprisoned? How many young Bobbies, Hueys and Assatas are sidelined right now? How can we be less judgemental and give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes?
The Other White America
Black and Brown people in the United States, and those in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, have every right to be angry. But angry at whom?
Most white people are not CEOs or members of the ruling class; many more are National Guard soldiers, correction officers and other reactionary rent-a-cops, the overseers of a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. But the racial portrait of state repression is more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of the Atlanta police force is Black. Over half of Washington, D.C.’s police force is Black.
A liberal portrait of white privilege fails to tell the full class story in the United States. Seventy million people received Medicaid in 2016—43 percent were white. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white. Over 100,000 overdoses took place in the past year. The overwhelming majority of opioid overdoses occur among poor whites, roughly 72 percent. Are these cast-off layers of our class our enemies?
A demonstrator raising awareness of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015 / credit: Voice of America
Kovalik points out that similar to white people, “the top 10 percent of Black households hold 75 percent of Black wealth.” (pg. 96) Is every brother your brother?
Given the complex class and racial terrain, do we cast poor and working-class whites away as “a basket of deplorables” or do win them over to defend their class interests? Wouldn’t sticking all white protesters in the back of marches with more yuppified layers only alienate them more? Is the movement a “safe space” for them, or more importantly a revolutionizing space?
Cancel This Book refuses to give up on the other white America—the poor, forgotten and de-industrialized “oxy-electorate” (writer Kathleen Frydl’s term for white people who live in the U.S. Rust Belt, where OxyContin addictions are on the rise). Those white people are full of disappointment and hatred for this system—between the tens of millions who refused to vote for another neoliberal Dixiecrat like Hillary Clinton, and the tens of millions of others who were duped into believing a spoiled, trash-talking, billionaire, real-estate mogul hoax and punk with infinite air time was their white knight.
As Malcolm X taught: “The truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it is against the oppressor.” We can win over workers who have only ever known the american-dreaming chauvinism they have been fed. Bursting with ideological perspicacity and revolutionary hope, this book pushes us not to get caught up in the liberal webs of identity politics and call-out culture.
Kovalik also challenges the white liberals who unknowingly acted as “masochists at the protests.” This constructive critique is not meant to take away from anyone’s hard work and real contributions. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was one outgrowth of these liberal politics, which relegated many well-intentioned, liberal, student and petite-bourgeoisie (“middle-class”) whites to cheerleader positions. Is this the militant mass-movement that is going to stand up to the State Department, the Pentagon, the police and the intelligence agencies? When Malcolm held up white abolitionist John Brown’s life as an example of real struggle to follow, he was challenging these liberal politics.
Amidst the ever-evolving dialectics of our movement, Kovalik’s book comes as a breath of fresh air. It is a clarion call about the damage we are collectively doing to our movement if we do not center class politics next to the need for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.
Originally published at Black Agenda Report on March 27, 2024 by interviewer Ann Garrison
Ann Garrison spoke to Professor Danny Shaw, who speaks fluent Haitian Creole and returned from his last trip to Haiti one month ago.
ANN GARRISON: Danny, I know this is a large ask, but can you outline what has happened in Haiti over the past 20 years, beginning with the overthrow of President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and leading to the current crisis?
DANNY SHAW: The last truly participatory democratic elections in Haiti took place in 2000, when the masses were inspired once again by President Jean Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian and truly a man of the people, who came out of the La Saline and Cité Soleil ghettoes. The movement he led was so powerful that it was called Lavalas, the word for flood in Haitian Creole.
Aristide had been the democratically elected president in 1991, but he had been taken out by a coup after just a few short months. Then, when the Haitian oligarchs and the US foreign policy establishment saw that he was about to be elected again in 2000, they immediately mobilized a hybrid war against him, first a media war and an aid war—cutting off aid. At the time, Haiti was receiving roughly $600 million per year through NGOs and USAID, and that was halved as soon as Aristide returned to power in 2001.
The hybrid war also galvanized and armed these paramilitary outfits, and one of their leaders, Guy Philippe, led the coup that removed Aristide. Philippe received all types of help from the Dominican generals and oligarchs, and from US intelligence. With relatively few paramilitary soldiers, he crossed the Dominican border to northern cities and then the capital, Port-au-Prince, in the south. And he of course was working very closely with what was called the the Group 184 led by a multimillionaire Haitian businessman. Most of these Haitian oligarchs who own the mines, plantations, and ports don’t even have full- time residence in Haiti. They live in Miami, France, and Montreal.
That 2004 coup was engineered and carried out by the US, France, and their proxy paramilitary forces in Haiti. Once it was successful, the Haitian people were again up against a cruel, unelected military dictatorship. This continued for two years, but ultimately Rene Préval was elected president for the second time. Both times the US took out Aristide, Rene Préval followed him. Préval is part of Lavalas but is by no means the inspirational leader that Jean Bertrand Aristide is.
Elections were held again in 2011, and that’s when Michel Martelly came to power. He was from the PHTK, which was in power before Aristide was removed. Martelly was extremely corrupt and had no real political leadership experience. He was a neo-Duvalierist, and he had nothing but scorn for the 99.9% of Haiti. Haitians often talk about him as the one responsible for the gangster ideation of Haiti. Experts on Haiti agree that the country really begins to be in the hands of the paramilitaries after he comes to power in 2011. He’s just another kleptocrat and US government lackey, who serves US and oligarchic interests.
Then, in 2018, a mass, nationalist, anti-colonialist movement exploded against the PetroCaribe Scandal . Venezuela had sent billions of dollars in petrol aid in solidarity with Haiti, seeking to work with the the past Aristide-type leadership, the Lavalas leadership that follows in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Dessalines , the original liberator of Haiti. But what they got was President Michel Martelly and then President Jovenel Moise, who stole more than $6 billion of the PetroCaribe funds.
I believe it was at the end of summer 2018 when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets against the government of Jovenel Moise, demanding to know where their money was. Moise was highly unpopular, as was Michel Martelly.
This movement was explosive. I was there in 2021, when there were supposed to be new elections, but those elections never happened. Jovenel Moise, unpopular as he was, insisted on staying in power, and a movement of millions of Haitians exploded. It galvanized all sectors of Haitian civil society, and the streets were full of resistance. I have many fond memories of those days.
AG: This is 2021.
DS: Yes. Then on July 7, 2021, President Jovenel Moise was assassinated and that became carte blanche for the Haitian ruling class to repress the movement. The movement of millions of Haitians was no longer in the streets. And then the US came in once again and said that Ariel Henry, one of the coup-mongers from 2004, would be the prime minister.
There was no election. The Haitian people again had no say. And then Ariel Henry was in power up until last week when the State Department, according to the Miami Herald, informed him that he was no longer president while he was on a plane flying back from Kenya, where he’d been trying to arrange for Kenyan police to lead the new invasion and occupation of Haiti. So Haiti is now without a head of state. Headlines will say it’s a failed state, but I think we can say it’s a successfully neo-colonized state.
AG: What role is Jean Bertrand Aristide playing in Haiti now?
DS: It would be difficult to quantify the amount of trauma inflicted upon the population who see him as the modern father of the Haitian popular movement. It’s similar to how we hear medical experts say that children in Gaza don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder because all they’ve ever known is trauma. I think that’s true of Haiti, the Palestine of the Caribbean, and certainly their most righteous popular leaders like Aristide. Because of US imperialism, he was twice couped and twice kidnapped.
He has largely retired to private life, where he now oversees a university, offering opportunities to thousands and thousands of Haitian students, the next generation of Haitian professionals, doctors, lawyers, writers, and poets, and he’s still extremely popular, specifically in the ghettos of Haiti, where so much of his support came from. In 2021, before the mass movement was repressed, it was not uncommon to see T-shirts and signs and portraits of Aristide wherever the popular movement was flexing its muscles. Haitians have been saying for decades that he has more than nine lives because there’ve been so many ambushes and attempts on his life. In 2004, he was whisked off to the Central African Republic, then to South Africa, where he received an anti-colonial hero’s welcome, but he wasn’t able to return to Haiti for six or eight years. Now I think it’s kind of an implicit deal with the corrupt colonial power structure that he can stay so long as he doesn’t rise to power again.
So the 2021 movement wasn’t trying to pivot to Aristide again for a third presidency, but it was demanding a true transition, not one overseen by the Blinkens and Bidens and the Republicans and the Democrats, but one that’s overseen by true representation of the peasant sector, the women’s sector, the neighborhood sectors, and all the popular sectors of Haiti.
AG: What are the most salient points that you would make to anyone who’s been hearing that Haiti is in the news again, but doesn’t have a lot of background?
DS: How tragic, how racist it is that Haiti is only in the news when it has to do with some disaster—a coup, an earthquake, an epidemic, the next occupation, or the assassination of this or that president or dictator. Two weeks ago, Haiti was trending on social media and on front pages all over the world. I even received calls from India about Haiti, which is quite rare. And it was because there were these horrific white supremacist rumors that Jimmy Chérizier, one of the paramilitary bosses, was a cannibal who had eaten one of his victims.
Any attack like that on any Haitian is an attack on all Haitians, on their self-image and self-esteem. The war on Haiti is an information and media war. So I think it’s important to move beyond those headlines. There is indeed a crisis but it’s not a crisis that was just made in Haiti. We have to understand the colonial context. MOLEGHAF, one of the key grassroots popular movements in the ghettos of Port-au-Prince, lays it out that the masses are trying to organize their own transition out of this crisis, a popular transition. MOLEGHAF and the Black Alliance for Peace will have a press conference about it this week.
AG: What does MOLEGHAF stand for?
DS: It stands for the National Movement for Liberty and Equality of Haitians for Fraternity. It’s one of the grassroots actors that organizes popular education and resistance like Fanmi Lavalas. Everyone should check out them and their people-to-people fundraiser.
The United States is overseeing a seven-person “transitional government.” Last week Anthony Blinken oversaw a meeting to arrange it with CARACOM leaders, particularly Guyanese President Irfaan Ali and Jamaican President Andrew Holness. These are imperial stooges.
Anyone who wanted to even be considered for this new, seven-person, transitional government had to agree to the pending US-sponsored and directed invasion and occupation of Haiti, the fourth invasion and occupation in the past 100 years.
The paramilitary gangs supposedly signed a truce about 10 days ago, but the violence continues. There are now close to half a million Haitians who have been displaced by these death squads. The mainstream media calls them “gangs,” but that word isn’t sociologically sufficient to understand this phenomenon. These are paramilitaries armed to the teeth.
The US and the Haitian ruling class have a history of using paramilitaries, and they’ve reactivated their agent, Guy Philippe. It seems as though the US understands that the more chaos they can engender, the more justification they have for carrying out their fourth invasion and occupation.
AG: What role would you say the drug traffic from Latin America to North America and Western Europe is playing in this?
DS: It’s extremely difficult for an investigative journalist or an ethnographer, like myself, to connect all the dots, but it’s very clear that in the south of Haiti, there are massive shipments of cocaine and marijuana coming into the ports. The ports are controlled by the billionaire and multimillionaire families. They also control landing strips in small private airports.
No guns and no drugs are produced on the island. There’s no culture of consuming these drugs there. Moonshine is the only intoxicant most people can afford. So it’s a transshipment point because of this intentionally “failed state.” The mercenary bosses, the leaders of the death squads, the warlords, they’re the ones that control the central arteries of Haiti, the central roads that connect Port-au-Prince to the south and every exit out of Port-au-Prince. That’s why we can say that Port-au-Prince is like Gaza or the West Bank.
It’s highly profitable for these gang bosses to control what we would call highways. And that’s how we begin to explain why there are paramilitary gangs. Haitians always say that this is a planned and organized disaster because it’s inexplicable that in a country where the vast majority of people try to survive on two dollars or less per day, there will be these young people gripping weapons that range in price from $10,000 to $30,000.
How could they have such massive arsenals? Well, it’s because the drugs come into the south and then get exported from the north of Haiti to the North American and European markets. Maybe the oligarchic families of Haiti’s 0.01% could afford cocaine, but hardly anyone else can, and it’s not part of Haitian culture.
There’s a history of drug dealing among the kleptocrats and the ruling class and the generals under Duvalier and the US-appointed generals.
AG: I believe you said that there’s only one boat in the Haitian Coast Guard.
DS: Yeah, one boat, so it’s a smuggler’s paradise, and every day there are fewer police. On average, every month, these paramilitaries kill dozens of police. Not that the Haitian police as an institution are the answer; they fired on the masses during the 2021 mass uprising.
Guy Philippe served time in a Florida jail for being a drug trafficker and money launderer, and now he’s back attempting to be the next president of Haiti.
AG: Some say that the coalition of paramilitary groups led by Jimmy Chérizier, aka “Barbecue,” is revolutionary. What’s your response to that?
DS: I think it would be a grave mistake to oversimplify a complex historical and sociological phenomenon. To anyone who tells you Barbecue is the savior of Haiti, I would say that’s absolutely ridiculous. That’s based on my many different conversations across the ghettos of Port-au-Prince and in the north and south. There are an estimated 12 to 13 million Haitians, and they probably have 12 to 13 million different points of view on Barbecue.
And what I hear from the Haitian people all the time is that if he’s truly a revolutionary, how come all the blood on his hands is that of the poor, the dispossessed? You know, show us the pudding. Talk is cheap. When are you going to walk the walk? If you really have a war on the oligarchy and this putrid system, how are you going to carry that out? Are you going to march on the oligarchs in the mountains? So a lot of people think it’s all talk.
Some people just see him as a media phenomenon. There’s been an incredible amount of intrigue around him. What you hear a lot and what I heard in 2021, when I marched shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the streets, was that Barbecue was one of the enforcers for Jovenel Moise, the dictator at the time, and that he stopped people from the ghetto in downtown Port-au-Prince from participating in that massive popular insurrection.
Some say that Barbecue’s name is because when he was a little boy, there were so many Jimmies where he lived that he was called Jimmy Barbecue because his mother sold barbecued chicken at night. Others say it’s because he burned down so many people’s houses.
I think it would be a grave mistake for anyone to put all of their eggs in the Jimmy Chérizier basket. He’s completely unproven. He’s never been connected to any type of actual organized resistance across Haiti, so time will tell. It’s way too early to cast any type of final judgment. For foreigners, it would be so exciting to think that he is a Haitian Che Guevara, but the majority of the Haitian people are not buying that.
Jimmy Chérizier is definitely a leader, but what type of leader? There’s no question that he’s charismatic. To be able to somehow bring together all of these different gangsters, some of whom are just 100% criminal cutthroat butchers and rapists, is no small feat. But what is he going to do with this alliance, and how much bloodshed and displacement are they responsible for? About two weeks ago, Jimmy Chérizier held a press conference to announce that all these different paramilitary death squads are uniting. And he says to the Haitian people, “You have to excuse us, you have to forgive us for what we’ve done.”
You’re talking about upwards of half a million refugees, internally displaced people, just in Port-au-Prince. So it seems completely ridiculous to think they can just say they’re sorry.
The true revolutionary force in Haiti is the leadership of the mass sectors, the peasantry, the workers, the ghettos, the women’s sectors, and the unification of all these civil society sectors, but they’re always under the gun. It’s been said by so many that Jimmy Chérizier and these other gang leaders are the Tonton Macoutes of today, so we should continue to weigh all of the ethnographic evidence and provide platforms for different Haitians and translate their voices, as we will in the press conference we have coming up with MOLEGHAF and the Black Alliance for Peace.
I think that’s the most important role that we can play to encourage the Haitian people to be the protagonists who usher in a new day with a true sense of economic, political, cultural, and diplomatic self-determination.
Originally published at Black Agenda Report on March 20, 2024
One year since the murder of community leader and poet Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste, his dedication and love for his nation and his people lives on.
Port-au-Prince is on fire. Not since Haiti rose from bondage to defeat the 60,000-strong army of Napoleon and all of the French empire’s reinforcements of tens of thousands of mercenaries has Haiti confronted such a dire moment. Paramilitary gangs armed to the teeth with U.S. weaponsterrorize entire communities in Port-au-Prince and Latibonit.
Buried within the hellscape of hunger, overflowing garbage and sewage, with gun battles brewing on every korido (alleyway) and kwen (corner), there is resistans.[1] Who are the nameless, fearless warriors who keep fighting for another Haiti beyond paramilitary and foreign control? How can we highlight their stories of hope as the corporate media feeds us nothing but anti-Haitian and anti-Black stereotypes? How can we be in solidarity with the popular movement in Haiti during these critical weeks when the U.S. prepares its next invasion? At a historical moment when colonialism has sought to bury the Haitian people’s collective self-esteem, the smiles, the courage and the love still burst forth. Thank you Tchadensky! Mèsi Tchadenksy! Souri w ouvri wout pou Ayiti. Pwezi ou te viv e mouri pou peyi a. Byento ase Ayibobo.[2]
Last year, on Tuesday, March 21st, a sniper’s bullet from an Israeli-made Galil ripped through the flesh of 24-year-old Haitian community leader and writer Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste. The war in Port-au-Prince counts among its victims hundreds of thousands of children and families who have been burnt out of their homes, raped and murdered. In Sniper City, death squads battle each other, the organized and unorganized masses and the police for territory and power. The police are among the favorite targets of the mercenaries, with on average 15 officers murdered every month in the capital. Amidst the imperial maelstrom, despite the bullets, gangs and hunger, community and resistance leaders continue their work, steadfast and confident in their people, their ancestors and their spiritual way of life. Armed with his perennial smile and poetry, Tchad was one such example of a determined militan (member of the organized protest movement) who never ceased to believe in and fight for Haiti’s unfinished second revolution.
“Pa Gen Moun Pase Moun” (No one is better than anyone else)
To walk with Tchadensky in the korido yo (alleyways) of Belè, Fò Nasyonal and Port-au-Prince’s many sprawling, perilous slums was to walk shoulder to shoulder with revolutionary royalty. In neighborhoods where the battle for hegemony plays out between criminal, paramilitary organizations and the masses, every neighbor, every elder and youth knew him and looked up to him. He didn’t believe in eating alone. Children gathered around cement blocks or big boulders that served as makeshift tables eagerly waiting to see what their big brother had cooked up for them. His habit of always sharing his hot plate worried his mother who perennially wondered if her oldest son had eaten enough. The elders reminded younger generations that this collective approach flowed from lespri aysyen (the Haitian way or soul).
Squatting in front of a ripped poster of Jan Jak Dessalin, on a side alleyway off John Brown Avenue, the 24-year-old speaks to a group of Rasta youth: “We fight for everyone to be treated like the dignified human beings that they are.” He stopped mid breath and mid sentence and pleaded with his political family: “Why are we losing this battle? How do we take our neighborhoods back?” Despite fleeing from home to makeshift shacks and then sleeping in the streets, in stadiums, abandoned buildings and in public parks alongside hundreds of families displaced by the proxy death squads, Tchadensky never stopped reading and writing. He cited Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin who taught that it was important to find time to read and write even if it was on the battlefield. Tedina, his life partner, remembered him as a prankster, a chef, a perfectionist, a scholar, an indefatigable fighter and lover of life.
Tchadensky performs his first love, poetry.
“I don’t have time for hate. I only have time for love.”
A year after his death, the university where Tchadensky studied and performed has yet to come to terms with their loss. His close friend and colleague James Junior Jean Rolph offered his own eulogy, reminiscing that this youthful renaissance man did not “have a big head, constantly motivated his peers, worked and progressed without complaining and always had his head in the books.”
Tchadenksy, like so many in this city of 2.5 million, lived on the run. He remained a light in Port-au-Prince’s most infamous neighborhoods 一 Matisan, Delma 2, Kafou Fèy and Belè. These are the bidonvils (ghettos) that provide the canvas for the clips of unrestrained violence that circulate on Haitian whatsapp. Tchad and the movement rejected the sensationalism of the media. Internally within MOLEGHAF and other socialist organizations, they discouraged the sharing of what they saw as “Black Death Pornography.” Tchad and others cautioned against the sharing on Whatsapp of grizzly images of heads cut off, sexual violence against the most vulnerable, bodies tortured and massacres. After a deep breath, he patiently explained to a crowd that they and their self-esteem had been brutalized and traumatized enough. The insurgent’s responsibility was to re-instill hope and love in the masses. And this is what our protagonist did until he was again run out and his home, alongside thousands of others, was burnt down. How many poems, memories, dreams, libraries and futures have disappeared in the flames, smoke and ashes of imperialism? For some militan, what they most lamented after the loss of life, was the loss of memories. How many bookshelves of fresh literature and newly-written poems have been sacrificed at the altar of the U.S. government’s obsession with guns, violence and plunder?
Haiti’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, published the poet’s last words “Running, Always Running” which has survived the author and the hybrid war[3]:
“Running, Always Running”
I am always on the run Until I am out of breath
I am not an athlete I am no type of sportsman But I am always running
I am fleeing and hiding from stuff I did not do
After Lasalin I am in Aviyasyon I sprint through Dèlma 2 All I know how to do these days is run Drenched in sweat I am running out of breath
I’m not running To get in better shape Or to impress anyone with a 6-pack I run because I am on the run
I have my backpack on My baby is in my hands I have blankets wrapped around me I grab any last memories I can I drop my passport in the fury I search for a corner A nook and cranny To rest my weary head My exhausted body To think of the life I completely lost.
We all run We run together Our grandmothers Little ones Everyone United Running Some of us are burnt Others are on fire All of us running shoulder to shoulder with the trauma To see who will cross the line of death first.
After Kanaran I run through Divivye Then Site Solèy We are all running Drenched in sweat We are running out of breath We search for a hiding spot A refuge Where we can maroon the bullets So the stray bullets Do not Swallow us whole On the path where we are running”
A march to remember the families massacred in 2019 in Lasalin who were stripped naked before being butchered.
David vs Goliath
And on a Tuesday, like any other, surrounded by one of his usual extended families, Tchadensky suddenly went quiet and crumbled underneath his own weight. The children saw the bleeding wound on the side of his stomach and screamed out “Amwey! Tchadenksy pran bal.” “Help! Tchandenksy was shot.” Amidst the shock, his comrades scrambled to gather the money necessary to pay a motorcycle to bring him to The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital.
According to Domini Resain, Coordinator of Mobilization for MOLEGHAF, (Movement for the Equality and Liberation of All Haitians ), the student leader was organizing a community meal and a workshop for children displaced by the gang war when a sniper blasted a bullet from an IMI Galil into his abdomen. Everyone speculated: “the sniper who shot Tchad, was he a police officer, a paid assassin or a gang member from the G9 or G-Pèp paramilitaries who have know reconstituted themselves under the command of Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier as the Viv Ansanm alliance (Live Together)?” Domini intervened before a crowd who gathered to express their condolences: “Does it matter who killed Tchad? They are all the same. These are not stray bullets as they claim. They are state bullets. These are PHTK bullets. These are police bullets. These are Washington bullets .”
In the “Confessions of a Haitian kidnapper ,” police officer Arnel Joseph unpacks the secret connections that exist between political and economic power elites, the Haitian National Police and the gangs. While the dominant narrative carried by telejòl (television or media reports carried by mouth or through rumors) stated that a stray bullet struck the popular leader, the militan were quick to point out that these were state bullets and Washington bullets.
As Peter Hallward’s classic book , Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment,on the rise and repression of the Lavalas movement shows, all of modern Haitian history is a contest for power between the desperately poor 99.9 percent and the fabulously opulent 0.1 percent of the Petyonvil mountain enclave. In this asymmetrical war, Tchad mobilized poems, smiles and flowers as his class enemies hired professional assassins for a cheap day’s pay. How many tens of thousands of Lavalas organizers and fighters from the broad social movement have been disappeared, exiled, imprisoned and assassinated?The oligarchy disappears the expression, art and leadership they deem to be an obstacle to their rule. If anything remains clear in Haiti, it is the fact that a handful of elite families hide behind their heavily-fortified castles and the carefully curated media they own and manage. There are more private security guards than public police in the most unequal country in the Western hemisphere. It was an entire system that murdered Thadensky, like so many others from his generation.
A smile as eternal and irresistible as one of Tchadensky’s poems
Washington Bullets and Resistans Ayisyen (Haitian Resistance)
The average life expectancy in France is over 82 years. The average life expectancy in The Dominican Republic is 73 years. In Haiti , it is 10 years less. For a revolutionary in Haiti, the statistic drops several more decades. Tchadenksy joined a growing list of community leaders liquidated under the rule of the PHTK, the Haitian Bald Headed Party, named so because their first dictator, Michel Martelly was bald. The party’s rule is especially sinister because they hide behind their hired mercenaries, denying any involvement. Paramilitaries are more effective in Haiti, just as they were in Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador and other U.S. neocolonies because they are not accountable to anyone.
The modern makouts (thugs and assassins) are loyal to Izo, Kempès Sanon, Barbecue, Vitalhom or whoever the local warlord is. Three survivors of a kidnapping in Mon Kabrit, who do not want to be named, explained: “The young recruits didn’t have money to eat that day but they gripped AR15s and AK47s worth over $10,000 on the streets of Haiti. We know they are involved with the drug trade. How can they get such expensive weapons when most of us are hungry? When they divided the men from the women (the speaker looked down), the kidnappers screamed allegiance to their leader Lanmò San Jou (Death without a day announced). They asked us who we were loyal to…which political party or gang? Refusing the debate, we looked away. They hit us and reminded us that their president and the president of all of Haiti was their boss, the paramilitary gang leader, Lanmò San Jou.” This anecdote is telling and sheds light on the highly localized reality of gang bosses who preside over their own fiefdoms of looting, raping and destruction. This is the colonial Haiti run by guns for fire that Tchadensky resisted, and the one that ultimately consumed him and thousands of other innocents.
The notorious warlord and ally of Barbecue, Kempès seeks to burn Fort Nasyonal and Solino the ground.
Our protagonist never hesitated to denounce the powers that be, “the gangsters in ties ” and foreign forces who fanned the flames of the fratricidal war. The griot articulates what so many know but cannot express or are deathly afraid to express – the chaos in Haiti has its origins faraway in the palaces and boardrooms of Washington D.C., New York, Miami, Ottawa, Montreal and Paris. While CNN, Fox and the New York Times deceitfully portray Haiti as isolated, the Caribbean nation of over 11.5 million has for centuries been integrated into the international capitalist machinery .[4] And if the maroon nation ever steps out of line, U.S. Marines are not far off to remind them of their place in the global pecking order. Washington now prefers mercenaries from Brazil, Kenya, Chile, Chad, Nepal or Benin to carry out their fourth invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years.
Regardless of the historical odds, there is an abundance of leaders and organizations who trained with Tchadensky and are fighting to elevate their homeland out of the neoliberal quagmire. They too are survivors of this hybrid war. Highly conscious of the ideological and media war against them, MOLEGHAF, the Black Panthers of Haiti , model another brand of leadership, honest, self-sacrificing and anti-imperialist.[5] For this reason, they have been targeted by state and paramilitary bullets. Many political demonstrations and protests in Haiti are in front of the U.S. embassy precisely because of this anti-imperialist awareness. Dahoud Andre, a spokesperson of KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of “Haiti Our Revolution Continues” on WBAI analyzed the ins-and-outs of the struggle today for Haiti’s definitive self-determination on Black Agenda Radio.
On the anniversary of the death of a Haitian Fred Hampton, take time to resist the mainstream clichés against Haiti and share the memories of our Haitian saints. The Gregory Saint-Hillaires , Jean Anil Louis Justes and Tchadenskys gave everything for everyone, while awaiting nothing for themselves in return, as they fought and fell in combat in order to guarantee all the homeland’s children an abundance of water, food, peace, liberty, dignity and joy.
Professor Jean Anil Louis Juste, here with the eternal comandante of the Caribbean, was assassinated hours before the 2010 earthquake for being a free thinker and organizer against the PHTK dictatorship.
Fanmi Lavalas (Sali Piblik) KRÒS Kowòdinasyon Rejyonal Òganizasyon Sidès yo MOLEGHAF: Mouvman pou Libète Egalite sou Chimen Fratènize Tout Ayisyen OTR: Òganizasyon Travayè Revolisyonè Radyo Resistans SOFA: Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen Rasin Kanpèp Konbit Òganizasyon Politik ak Sendikal yo Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan MPP Movman Peyizan Papay Movman Popilè Revolusyonè (Sitè Soley) Sèk Gramsci Sèk Jean Annil Louis-Juste KOMOKODA (Komite Mobilizasyon kont Diktati an Ayiti Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti) Jounal revolisyonè: La Voix des Travailleus Revolutionaire Platfòm Ayisyen Pledwaye pou yon Devlopman Altènatif SROD’H: Syndicat pour la Rénovation des Ouvriers d’Haïti ROPA: Regwoupman Ouvriye Pwogresis Ayisyen OFDOA :Oganizasyon Fanm Djanm Ouvriye Ayisyen Altènativ Sosyalis Fwon Popilè e Patriotik JCH Jeunesse communiste haïtien
[1] All spellings are in the national language of Haiti, Kreyòl, not the colonial language, French.
[2] Translation: “Your smile opens up a new path for Haiti. Your poetry lived and died for Haiti. See you again soon comrade God bless!”
[3] For the original version of the poem in Kreyòl see the embedded link. With permission from Tchadensky’s family, I translated the poem into English.
[4] The Haitian state last conducted a census in 2003 under the leadership of Jean Bertrand Aristide so the population is probably much higher than 12,000,000.
[5] Partial List of Leftist, Anti-Imperialist Organizations in Haiti
Originally published at Liberation News on July 19, 2017
A march of over 10,000 Dominicans blanketed the immigrant community of Washington Heights in scorching hot uptown Manhattan on July 16. The march was timed to coincide with a national Marcha Verde in the Dominican capital city Santo Domingo where over 200,000 people marched 4.2 km converging on Congress.
Outraged at the corruption that has long been common practice in Dominican politics, the Dominican people took to the streets en masse to say “Basta Ya,” enough is enough.
Impeach President Medina!
The tipping point came last year when the Brazilian mega construction firm Odebrecht was caught red handed paying bribes to President Danilo Medina, his underlings and opposition party leaders from the PRM to score massive construction deals in the Dominican Republic. Grupo Odebrecht handed out payoffs of millions to key politicians and the government intentionally marked up the price on projects in order to overcharge Dominican taxpayers.
Danilo Medina presides over what is one of the most corrupt political systems in the Caribbean. The 2016 presidential elections proved to be yet another contest to control the purse strings of the nation and pillage the treasury.
Chanting “Danilo te jodiste por el dinero que cogiste” (Danilo you screwed up by stealing our money) and “el pueblo trabajando y el PLD robando” (the people working while the PLD robs), the sea of green moved up Broadway with onlookers joining the crowd.
Ángel García, the national spokesperson of la Juventud Duartiana (The Juan Pablo Duarte Youth) analyzed the significance of this historic movement:
“The Marcha Verde’s importance is that is has unleashed a movement that is empowering the citizenry. This mass movement represents a new precedent in our country. Never before in our national history have we mobilized so many people to stand up to impunity. Now everyday workers and students are becoming conscious that they have a responsibility to act as fiscal watchdogs over government functionaries. Those who thought themselves untouchable and above the law are finally under pressure; the bureaucrats understand that political delinquency will be punished. The massive green wave is demanding convictions of the corrupt politicians, the return of the money they stole to the public treasury and the suspension of all contracts with Odebrecht.”
Building a mass movement
Green became the color of this historic movement because it was distinct from the purple and white political symbols the Dominican electorate was accustomed to. Green symbolized something new and fresh that a people exhausted by traditional politics could believe in. The color symbolic of nature became the color of the anti-corruption campaign.
Grassroots, leftist organizers were determined to launch a movement that masses of people could believe in and be proud of. Regional marches delivered green torches to historic places. Organizers in green shirts collected millions of signatures in green books. These were the building blocks of one long organizing campaign, culminating in this Sunday’s marches.
This is the most massive resistance movement the D.R. has seen since the “Cold War” when a vibrant, united Dominican left challenged the U.S. puppet Joaquin Balaguer for power.
The challenges of a mass movement
The Green March movement is similar to the anti-Trump movement in that it is an ideologically diverse movement of millions with different political actors. There is a left and right wing vying for leadership.
The other big bourgeois party, the PRM wants to cash in on La Marcha Verde movement. Don’t let its name fool you. There is nothing revolutionary about the leading “opposition” party, the Partido Revolucionario Moderno or PRM (Modern Revolutionary Party, formerly the PRD, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano).
The PRM is caught in a big contradiction. How can they lead the protest movement when they are complicit in the scandal? The PRM president Andrés Bautista and their spokesman in the House of Representative Alfredo Pacheco are both implicated in the scandal. The PRM cannot demand jail time for the purple thieves (the color of the PLD) and liberty for the white thieves (the color of the PRM). Their claim to be part of La Marcha Verde is like Hillary Clinton’s claim to be part of the resistance in the U.S.: complete hypocrisy.
This is one of the great lessons the Dominican and American people are learning. The PLD and PRM and Republicans and Democrats represent the two heads of the same coin of corruption and inequality. Voting for either one is a lost vote because the same exploitative system remains in power. Carlos Amarente Barat, leader of the PLD’s Political Committee, recognized the danger “this movement represents to the entire political system.”
The task before the Dominican left is to win people away from the two traditional parties. The challenge is that when elections come in 2020, the PLD and the PRM offer bribes of 500 pesos (roughly $10 dollars), bags of Pica Pollo (fast food) and boxes of rum in order to buy votes. This tradition一dating back to Trujillo and Balaguer一gives a sense of just how rotten the system is. La Marcha Verde represents a steel wrench thrust into this corrupt political machinery.
The way forward
The Dominican left一which is composed of El Frente Amplio, El Movimiento Popular Dominicano, La Fuerza de la Revolución and other organizations一is committed to turning the green torch into a red torch. While the PRM and other liberal parties try to steal the media spotlight and take credit for the mobilization, it has been grassroots anti-imperialist organizers who have given the movement its national coherence.
In the U.S. we are all too familiar with the abuse of authority. Our reality here of jail for the poor and impunity for the rich is a mirror image of the Dominican reality.
It is also important to highlight the colonial relationship that exists between the two countries. The U.S. government works hand in hand with their Dominican cronies to keep the revolutionary movement at bay, twice occupying the Caribbean country in the 20th century. It is the U.S. military that trains and funds the Dominican military and U.S. capital that super exploits Dominican workers in la zona franca (Free Trade Zones or sweatshops). Until D.R. is free of external influence, millions will have no choice but to migrate in order to make a living.
All progressive and revolutionary people should salute the unity and courage of the Dominican people and continue to stand with them in the streets. From la avenida Duarte in Santo Domingo to Broadway in Washington Heights, we have the same enemy and the same struggle. Hasta la victoria siempre compañer@s!
Originally published at Liberation News on June 15, 2012
The boxing world and workers everywhere have lost one of their giants with the passing of Cuban heavyweight champion Teófilo Stevenson June 11.
The 6 foot 3 inch, 209 lb. boxer is one of only three fighters to win three Olympic Gold medals alongside Hungarian László Papp and fellow Cuban Félix Savón. He was on track to achieve a fourth gold medal in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles but Cuba and 12 other socialist countries joined in solidarity with the Soviet Union’s decision to boycott the games that year.
Fidel Castro summed up Stevenson’s selflessness in a tribute stating: “He could have achieved another two Olympic titles hadn’t it been for certain duties that the principles of internationalism imposed on the Revolution.”
What stood out about “el caballero del ring,”—the gentleman of the ring as he was popularly known—was not just his agility as a heavyweight, his jab which kept his opponents at a distance or his punishing right hand, but his integrity as a human being and boxing champion. In a conversation with Cuban youth, he stated “Sports is not about feeling superior to anyone else. Sports is about harmony. It’s about our health. It’s not to mistreat anyone else. Sports is one of the healthiest things we have in society.”
Stevenson recorded 302 fights—losing only 22—an unheard-of number in this day and age. He never entered the ring with any intention of gaining money or fame, onlyfor the love of boxing, sports and competition in general. If some fighters could be considered one dimensional, Stevenson represented the very best of human qualities.
In an age where championship boxing fosters show-boating, arrogance and multi-million dollar fights, Stevenson offers us another model to follow. In the words of one of the Cuban Five, René González, “Stevenson was so modest he appeared to reject the very idea of his own greatness. As an athlete he made millions of his countrymen and women quiver; as a human being he merged with all of us; and despite his impressive physical stature, he was just another one of us.”
Imperialism —with its constant cliches in the media about “defectors” from communist countries— could never buy Stevenson. Even though he was offered $5 million dollars to fight Muhammad Ali for the world title in 1976, he declined, stating “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans? I wouldn’t change a piece of Cuban soil for all the money they could give me.”
Teófilo Stevenson will forever be a shining example of hard work, humility and grace for young boxers and athletes the world over. Along with revolutionaries and boxing fans the world over, we offer our condolences to Stevenson’s family and to Cuba for this loss. ¡Hasta Siempre Campeón!
Originally published at Liberation News on July 14, 2017
Long Island is home to some 8 million people but is often overshadowed by its giant neighbor to the west, New York City. Often misperceived as a more privileged area, Long Island is host to the same class strife and stratification that plague New York City and every city in this country. As part of the growing momentum around the People’s Congress of Resistance, we wanted to highlight some of the local struggles Long Islanders are engaged in.
Justice for Elizabeth Stenson
Local hero Elizabeth Stenson
On May 18, Elizabeth Stenson of Amityville, age 58, was involved in a horrible accident in Hicksville in which two people died. According to people who knew her, Elizabeth had a seizure as she drove and lost control of her vehicle. She immediately surrendered to the police. Showing no sympathy for her medical condition, the Nassau police locked her up and charged her with two murders. While in jail, Stenson and her family desperately tried to access her medications for her heart condition. The authorities ignored her and her attorney’s constant request, and deprived Stenson of her blood pressure medications. Correction officers found her dead from a massive heart attack on May 27.
The Nassau community demands justice for Elizabeth Stenson who according to close friends was an inspiration to all. Having herself survived addiction and the streets, she became a mentor and mother figure for many addicts in Bay Shore and Central Islip.
One friend remembered Stenson “for helping and changing hundreds of lives with her selfless service. She was known for hugging the unhuggable and loving the unlovable. The amount of pain she was carrying from that horrific accident is hard to even imagine. This is extremely sad from all sides.”
Police and ICE murder people
RIP Kenny Lazo
Unfortunately, Elizabeth Stenson’s story is not rare. Twelve inmates have died at Nassau’s jail in the past five years, including Iraq War veteran Bartholomew Ryan, age 32 and Kevin Brown, age 47. The State Commission of Correction found that both of these deaths and many others were preventable. Armor Correctional Health Services has been at the center of the controversy and is facing several lawsuits from the families of the victims for having provided shoddy health care for the Nassau inmates.
These shocking deaths are all too familiar. In 2008 Kenny Lazo was beaten to death while in Suffolk County police custody. In 2003, 18-year-old Sha-Kie Williams stated that while he was handcuffed the police shoved him down an elevator shaft. Williams fell four stories and was hospitalized at Stony Brook but luckily survived.
Rolando Meza Espinoza
Brentwood’s Rolando Meza Espinoza died on June 10 while in ICE custody in New Jersey. The Honduran native died of internal bleeding and hemorrhagic shock at Jersey City Medical Center. Meza had diabetes, anemia and cirrhosis of the liver and did not receive the attention he deserved. His lawyer Manuel Portela and family assert that ICE made a mistake in apprehending Espinoza who did not even closely resemble the individual they were looking for.
Nine people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office. Meanwhile, private prison stocks have nearly doubled in value since Election Day.
Understanding MS 13: Intervention comes home to roost
The mainstream media specializes in scaring people with horrific tales of MS 13 recruitment tactics and murders. What they never mention are the modern day roots of the massive exodus out of El Salvador, Nicaragua and other Central American countries. “The American Dreamers” would have you believe families just uprooted their lives because the United States is just so great. Nothing could be further from the truth.
People’s victory in Nicaragua, 1979
In the 1980s the U.S. unleashed a series of covert wars against liberation movements in Central America. The CIA and other intelligence agencies misappropriated millions of tax payer’s money to conduct illegal wars against the Sandinistas, the FMLN and other revolutionary movements in the region. When they could not achieve Congressional approval for their dirty wars, the intelligence cabal resorted to the sale of cocaine and crack to raise funds. This was the famous Iran-Contra scandal first uncovered by San Jose Mercury journalist Gary Webb.
The death tolls from the U.S. proxy wars were staggering.
– 75,000 dead in El Salvador
– Tens of thousands slain from the Contra war in Nicaragua
– Hundreds of political “disappearances” in Honduras
– Some 100,000 people murdered in Guatemala
– To this day, the number of dead from the U.S. “Christmas bombing” of Panama in 1989 have yet to be counted.
By making life unlivable, U.S. foreign policy de-futurized entire nations, displaced hundreds of thousands of families and orphaned a generation of children. How cruel and myopic for Trump to brag on Twitter about his “success” in closing the border to Central Americans, considering the historic debt this government has to those nations.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. On June 13, ICE conducted Operation Matador arresting 45 “confirmed” gang members, many in Central Islip, Brentwood and Bellport which is home to a big Salvadoran and Central American community.
Yes, we should decry the Central Islip deaths and any violent episodes in our communities but we have to dig deeper. Violence begets violence. How short-sighted to engage in sensationalism, denouncing individuals acts of desperation, without analyzing the hate that hate produced. The communities of Central Islip, Brentwood and Bellport are now dealing with the direct consequences of Reagan and the United States’ foreign policy.
ICE and the Suffolk Police may provide sensational headlines and photo ops but they provide no real solutions. There is a certain truth to the statement that “nothing stops a gang bullet like a job.” Investment in jobs and education in Suffolk County and a 180-degree change in U.S. foreign policy are long-term solutions.
Opioid nation: a cry for help
In 2016, over 500 people suffered fatal overdoses in Long Island, mostly from heroin and fentanyl. This past month of June, on one weekend, there were 22 overdoses.
Dylan Caruso in action
Twenty-four-year-old Dylan Caruso was one such victim. A star lefty pitcher and captain of Sachem High School’s baseball team, Caruso overdosed two weeks ago on opiates and died. Displaying absolute callousness before the family’s mourning process, the Suffolk county police waited outside the wake at Claude R. Boyd/Spenser funeral home to harass and eventually lock up Dylan’s older brother.
Families devastated by drug abuse are often survivors of generations of family violence and trauma.
Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry is making a killing off of our pain. The $1.05 trillion global industry is invested in getting more people addicted to opiates. The fastest growing group of “illegal” heroin addicts are prescription pill addicts who can no longer “legally” fill their prescriptions. The Sackler family—owners of Purdue Pharma, the producer of OxyContin—are worth $14 billion dollars. As the .001 percent counted their profits, 66,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year.
Every hood’s the same
Newsday, owned by Cablevision, is Long Island’s most popular daily and the most widely read “suburban” newspaper in the country. Newsday publishes weekly mugshots that criminalize and dehumanize working people without saying a word about the lives they led.
People are not born criminals. In the words of the Greek scientist and philosopher Aristotle: “Poverty is the mother of revolution and crime.”
Predictably, no rich people appear in Newsday’s mugshots because the rich can afford lawyers and can buy their way out of trouble with “the law.”
Keenen King, Anthony Garriques and the man that murdered them, Christopher Bouchard
Nineteen-year-old Keenen King and 20-year-old Anthony Garriques were considered criminals. Why? Because they were young and Black. Believing the two young men had stolen his younger brother’s dirt bike, Marine Christopher Bouchard hunted them down in his minivan and murdered them on June 21st. Bouchard charged into in coming traffic to intentionally ram into the two young men in North Bellport, killing them both. The police only charged Bouchard with reckless endangerment. Why? Because in Long Island, Black Lives do not Matter.
This article focuses on just a few of the injustices that communities are organizing around in Long Island. They are just the tip of the iceberg.
Everyday, the geographically narrow Long Island sees more golf courses, wine vineyards and seasonal housing while working families scramble to make ends meet and find shelter.
Long Island is no different than any other community in the United States of Trump.
Everyday the rich get richer and the poor die off silently. There have been a rise in hate crimes against Muslims and immigrants and a spike in the membership in the local KKK chapter in Hampton Bays. Local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Black Lives Matter, Redneck Revolt and other groups have stood together in defense of the communities under attack.
The People’s Congress of Resistance on September 16-17 will bring together representatives of communities affected by addiction, police terror, gentrification and other social problems so we can find solutions to the common problems that plague us across this country.
