Humanitarian Imperialism: Aid as a Trojan Horse
We lived sustainably, with color and panache Long before the word sustainable became fashionable, before Scott and Helen Nearing experimented with non-establishment living in the 1930s and concluded that their project had failed because it lacked community, before even Henry David Thoreau noted that “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things […]
Haiti’s Open Vein at Caracol Industrial Park
Haitians, who previously sold their kin as outright slaves and sugar-cane cutters, continue to sell them into sweatshops and other horrific work environments at home and abroad. Consider the case of Caracol Industrial Park, in northern Haiti. The Haitian government should never have signed a deal with Hillary Clinton and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), […]
Food for the Gods: Link of Vodou to Haiti’s Agriculture, a Legacy of the Ancestors
Haitian religion and culture are so linked to local agriculture that Vodou ceremonies are routinely called manje lwa: food for the gods. Our lwa (gods, spirits, deities) must be fed. They are not eternal and can only exist so long as they continue to be summoned to participate in human affairs. In other words, their […]
Dominicans Are Not Haiti’s Enemies, Corruption and Occupation Are
We love blood, don’t we? As if, by staring at our reflections in this viscous red liquid we might lose fear. We are horrified and entranced by the eviscerated child in Gaza, or the naked Haitian man sprawled out on some unknown street, a bullet in his head, his life dissipating into a puddle of […]
Haiti’s Leadership Against Imperialism
By Michel-Ange Cadet Negro: that’s what they called us. Not to designate our person but mainly to assert a supposed supremacy which they believed themselves to hold and in the name of which we had to serve them, work however they wished, and satisfy all their whims, wealth, glory, pleasures… They wanted to make us […]
