12874: Re: 12867: Stephen Ewen responds to Why aren't this listserver reserved to Academia....? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Stephen Ewen <stephenewen@character4success.com>

>Wouldn't that be a remarkable project, if from the street way of dealing
with the Haitian problems and all others, we reshape the ways we have been
exposing or given the Haitian problems into a resolving academic equation
capable of bringing infrastructure to Haiti?

Lack of infrastructure, for the present time, may be a blessing in disguise.
In fact, in many ways, it *is* a blessing in disguise to many among the
Haitian peasantry
today.  I will make this point more clearly and state why this may be so
after giving some preliminary background.

Recently, I was doing research for an undergraduate thesis in anthropology
among a group of Haitian peasants.  The group recounted certain stories to
me that are strong critiques of not only the historical  "uses of Haiti" (to
use Farmer's phrase), but how those "uses" continue to march on today from
present-day power actors, both external and internal (mostly the latter)
under a dream
of neo-liberal economic incorporation that is not necessarily subscribed to
my those it is hoisted upon.

As it was told me by particular peasant leaders, a "development project" of
a certain foreign company came to their region during the reign of Papa Doc.
The company had in-hand from him long-term leases to huge tracts of the
region's land--most of it the same land on which the area peasants had
farmed out a relatively adequate subsistence for centuries.  In exchange,
the large company promised to bring in schools, a hospital, water wells, and
steady jobs.  As events would turn out though, the promises were little more
than a pretense for the company to enrich themselves on the backs of the
region's peasants.

After numerous years of working for the grandon-s, the region's peasants
decided they'd had enough.  It had been too many years now since they had
begun to be exploited at the hands of the grandon-s.  Essentially forced to
work on the companies' non-food crop farms, and with very little land of
their own, many of the peasants began to face starvation.  As the peasants
organized to discuss their plight, they had visions of the many children,
older adults, and others in their community who were living with red hair
and extended bellies.  Also part of their vision was what was conspicuously
absent from it.  Scantly to be found were the many benefits promised to
their community when the companies initially arrived.

Urged on by hunger and the memory of those who had already died of
starvation, the peasants arrived at a plan that they saw as really their
only option.  So they set a day to carry it out.  Gathering up bottles,
machetes and other weapons, including boxes of matches, they rose up.  They
ousted the foreign landholders.  They burned the non-food cash crops to the
ground, and took control of the land on top of the ashes that remained.  It
took spilled blood for the region's peasants to take back the very means of
their survival

Today, and in their traditional fashion, they have planted an abundance of
food crops on the lands that once only provided export profits for a few.
As a result, the hunger these peasants once so painfully knew has all but
disappeared from their lives.  In addition, many are able to afford school
for their children, as well as a few other things, with profits made from
excess produce.

Though these same peasants expressed concern to me about Haiti's continually
deteriorating infrastructure, which makes marketing their produce into urban
areas more difficult, the leaders of the region's main peasant organization
see a very positive side benefit in it.  Apparently, when the poor
infrastructure is coupled with the threat of peasant resistance, a new
"business climate" has emerged.  As the peasant leaders stated to me, "Now,
the big companies are less-and-less coming to Haiti," which for the peasants
means that they can go on planting, harvesting, and living life as they best
see fit, though still remaining ever-vigilant.  It means, for them, what may
well be the difference eating enough and not eating enough.

Hence, in evaluating the lack of infrastructure in Haiti, we have to ask,
infrastructure *for whom*?  For a minority of Haitian elites in line with
external power actors? Or for the majority of Haitians because *they
themselves* see it as something they wish to have?  And for what ends will
the infrastructure serve?  For the extraction of resources for a few?  Or
for the benefit of the majority of people who live in Haiti, as *those*
people define what a "benefit" is or is not?

Stephen Ewen

sewe0171@fau.edu