13784: radtimes: Haitian Struggle for Freedom by Mumia Abu-Jamal (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

HAITIAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
============================
[Col. Writ. 11/18/02] Copyright 2002 Mumia Abu-Jamal

	The images of young, healthy, desperate Haitians, jumping overboard
into the roiling Florida surf, burns itself into the American mind,
evoking differing responses, depending on one's perspective.

	To many Euro-Americans, the image is a terrible one, which seizes
the heart in the icy grip of fear.  To many African-Americans,
however, the images evoke compassion, sorrow, and the shared feelings
of loss for their Haitian cousins, who feel compelled to brave the
terrible threats and dangers of the sea, to start a life of hope in
America.

	To them, the treatment of Haitians, who are routinely encaged in
demeaning conditions of confinement in de facto prisons upon their
arrival, contrasts sharply with the felicitous treatment accorded
their Cuban neighbors, who are encouraged, nay -- Invited! -- to
brave the churning waters of the Caribbean Sea to make it to the
Southern tip of Florida.  The U.S.-Cuban policy, with it's origins in
the dark days of the Cold War, is a remnant of the American
determination to stick their finger in the eye of their perennial
thorn-in-their-side, President Castro.

	For Haitians, the flight to the shores of America must be
bitter-sweet.  Shortly after the Haitian Revolution ended, around
1802, Haiti was the proud historical inheritor of the distinction of
a Revolution against tyranny, oppression and slavery, and emerged as
the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere (after the
United States), and the first people in history to stage a successful
slave revolution.  Their freedom came after the armies of Toussaint
L'ouverture and General Henri Christophe defeated the French and
English imperial armies in what was once called Saint Domingue (or
San Domingo).

	Indeed, when the Americans were fighting the British for their
independence, they had help from Haitians, who fought on the side of
the American revolutionaries.  Indeed, Christophe, when a younger
man, fought in the Battle of Savannah, in the regiment of Compte
D'Estaing, and was slightly wounded.

	After the Revolution though, the Haitians became victim of a
dreadfully 'bad press' by the Americans.  Instead of being seen as a
fellow member of the small confraternity of free nations, and
welcomed, it was seen as a Terror, and shunned.  That's because the
U.S. was a 'free' nation, only in name; but a slave nation in the
heart, and in fact.

	The victory of the Haitians so dismayed the French imperial designs
of Napoleon that he quickly sold the Louisiana Territory to the
Americans for a song (thus doubling the size of the United States).

	The Haitian Revolution sent shock waves throughout America,
precisely because the U.S. was a slave society, that talked about
freedom and liberty, but meant *white* freedom, and *white* liberty
(and really only meant white men of means and wealth).  It gave a
spur and a spark to the anti-slavery movement on these shores, as the
brilliant W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his "The Suppression of the African
Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638 to 1870":

		The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L'ouverture,
		played in the history of the United States has seldom been
		fully appreciated.  Representing the age of revolution in
		America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which
		contrived a Negro "problem" for the Western Hemisphere,
		intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became
		one of the causes, *and probably the prime one*, which lead
		Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the
		interworking of all these efforts, rendered more certain the
		final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in
		1807.  [p. 70]

	The grandsons and granddaughters of the 'Great Toussaint' are now
the subject of mass media demonization in every report on Haiti.
They are projected as the permanent 'Other', those strange folk who
believe in a strange religion, the very name of which has been the
synonym for weirdness (remember Bush I's rant about "voodoo
economics"?).

	When they arrive on the shores of the nation that their ancestors
helped free, they are thrown into Krome Correctional facility, or
hauled back into the hells of a Haiti that has been economically
choked to death.

	Yet, the images haunt us, for they tell us how we are perceived in
the eyes of our cousins.

Copyright 2002 Mumia Abu-Jamal