U.S. Intervention Won’t Solve Haiti’s Problems
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No person familiar with Haiti’s political affairs was surprised to hear that despot Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on the morning of July 6. In the weeks leading up to the event, the people of Haiti had been engaged in a tireless civil unrest, catalyzed by Moïse’s tyrannous and illegitimate operations. Ruling by decree, the U.S.-backed president had overstayed his welcome in the presidential office, dissolved the Haitian parliament, and had been attempting to force a constitutional referendum that was postponed twice to September. The Haitian people’s response to these actions have been resistance. This resistance has been met with bloodshed.
One thing is clear: Moïse had never served the interests of the Haitian people. But despite this, his assassination, which was carried out by mercenaries that reportedly spoke English and Spanish, carries with itself a looming sense of uncertainty. Not only is the line of succession unclear, but the prospect of U.S. intervention is increasingly likely. House Rep. Andy Levin, co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, made the following statement in response to Moïse’s assassination:
“I implore the Biden administration to pursue a new policy toward Haiti…essential to bringing about true peace and security and preventing more atrocities like that which occurred this morning.”
This statement implies that Haiti cannot govern herself. It implies that Haiti cannot keep herself secure, and that an influential foreign power must step into the fold and bring order. This power would most likely be the United States.
Haiti has seen this before. In 1915, when president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was assassinated, Woodrow Wilson deployed 330 marines to the nation, who then occupied the country for the next 19 years. They imposed martial law on Haiti, and installed their own puppet president, Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave.
The marines took complete political and administrative control of Haiti. They changed the constitution of Haiti, and when the Haitian Congress rejected this constitution, they dissolved the Congress and resubmitted it on their own terms. One key provision of this constitution was to allow white foreigners to own and settle on Haitian land.
The marines created and trained a gendarmarie that killed as many as 6,000 Haitians and forced 5,500 others into labor camps. The U.S. occupation of Haiti enraged its citizens so much that noirisme, a pro-Black, anti-Western movement was born out of it which bore the support of writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Aimé Césaire. Yet today, Haitian citizens still shed blood in a struggle against U.S.-backed Haitian puppets and accompanying imperialist intervention. This is what helped turn what was once the most lucrative colony in the Western Hemisphere into the poorest nation in the West.
The 19-year occupation did not help anything in Haiti. Imperialism never does. What imperialism does instead, is what it is designed to do: to serve the imperialist country’s economic and commercial interests whilst simultaneously ravaging and suppressing the other. We have seen it in Africa, we have seen it in Latin America, and we have seen it for centuries in Haiti, carried out by multiple countries. There is no development in this.
C.L.R. James, in his lecture series Modern Politics, which he delivered in 1960, spoke with clarity on self-determination and imperialism:
“All development takes place by self-movement, not organization or direction by external forces. It is within the organism itself, i.e., within the society, that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities.
The citizen feels alive when he feels that he himself in his own national community is overcoming difficulties. He has a sense of moving forward through the struggle of antagonisms or contradictions and difficulties within the society, not by fighting against external forces.”
Haiti has been struggling against imperialism from the West since the very day she established her sovereignty. It is time that Haiti establish her own destiny, free from intervention from the United States, from France, from Britain, or any colonial power. She did not carry out a revolution to be under Western control. She carried out her revolution to be free.
