22984: Simidor re: Cruising into History (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>


About a year ago I interviewed Ron Daniels about his “Cruise into History,” on Pacifica radio WBAI in NYC, and it was such a sweet and friendly conversation that it left my pro-Aristide co-hosts very much confused and probably under the impression that I was angling for a job with Mr. Daniels, or at the very least for a free passage to Haiti!  My anti-Lavalas co-hosts (we were a collective then) were equally puzzled until I explained.

Mr. Daniels is a conscious element within the so-called Black petty-bourgeoisie (US), with a minimal interest in Haitian politics.  His overriding interest is in cultivating Haiti as a niche for aspiring black capitalists, many of them in the entertainment field.  His “Cruise into History” was to set a trend by encouraging a new breed of visitors, hip African-Americans and Haitian-American “Diaspora” types with an interest in history, into an otherwise devastated Haiti.  A most deserving project any way you slice it.  Mr. Daniels came on the show with the glib pretense that his initiative was above Haitian politics, but everybody in the studio knew of his association with the Lavalas bicentennial committee (Leslie Voltaire and Co.).

Ron Daniels would, it seems, befriend the Devil himself to add glamour to his Cruise, hence his quick enrollment of Frandley Denis Julien, a leader of the conservative set in Cap-Haitien, once Lavalas had been driven off the stage.  Mr. Daniels is vaguely on the US left, but he is a pragmatist, and as such vulnerable to the wannabe ideologues and other certifiable Lavalas knuckleheads.  I imagine he is facing a mutiny as we speak – few people would pay $1,500-$2,500 for the pleasure of a week in Labadie, a place Mr. Daniels decried not too long ago as a “neocolonial enclave.”  And if he survives a mutiny, he will still have a lot of explaining to do, just to salvage his credibility.

My beef is not with Mr. Daniels, but with the Lavalas knuckleheads who once again couldn’t refrain from exposing that lower part of their anatomy where most of their thinking comes from.  In sabotaging Ron Daniels’ cruise into history, they have shown the extent to which their subservience to Aristide’s obsession with power runs against the NATIONAL INTEREST.  They fawned over the cruise and its organizers as long as it was going to feed into Aristide’s folly (as evident in the slogan “Jesus, Toussaint-Louverture, Aristide, the credo of the Haitian people”).  But the notion of allowing some autonomy to a worthy development project is anathema to them.  And so, they prove once again that theirs is a hegemonic, not a democratic, agenda.  Let the economy sink, let the whole country sink, if their man is not going to be the man on top.

To be fair, the major tenors of the Opposition have shown themselves equally oblivious to the National Interest.  This was painfully evident at the time of Regis Debray and his commission’s trip to Haiti.  Mr. Chirac, well before empanelling the Debray commission, had made the position of his government quite plain: France owes nothing to Haiti, and Aristide ought to clean his own mess instead of bothering his betters with pesky demands for reparation.  Debray’s task in going to Haiti, and he made this quite clear, was not to entertain any notion of reparation, but to fish for fools and so-called allies for his legalistic and immoral equivocations within Haiti’s intelligentsia.  He found such allies in the ranks of the No Collective, a set of very bright people who had come together to oppose Aristide’s manic and megalomaniac subversion of the bicentennial commemoration, and who strangely sought to improve their case with the Haitian masses by agreeing with Debray on the absurdity of Aristide’s reparation claims.

I made the point then that there are issues that transcend politics, and that Haiti will not survive unless Haitians learn to put the National Interest ahead of their own ambitions.  What was true a year ago with the No Collective is just as true today with the Cruise into History: those who sabotaged that effort for the sake of one man’s ambition acted against the best interest of the nation.  Some will argue that there lies the problem, that we’re still not a nation after 200 years of independence, but that’s another discussion.

Daniel Simidor