a1938: May 1st - Champs Mars - PLEASE POST ANONYMOUSLY (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Bob, Please post this anonymously. Thanks

Just read that Haiti Progres ramble, as as one who was on Champs de Mars on
May 1st, I must say that it strikes me as yet more self-serving,
faux-radical posturing from the HP gang, and posturing that doesn't even
make good propaganda., at that.

The people described as "chimères" were, I assume, the lads protesting at
the western edge of the park for the arrest of the of a government employee,
who allegedly shot one of their number at the roadblocks earlier in the
week.  Our group walked among them and saw nobody hassled or otherwise
bothered, and I certainly didn't see Annette "So Anne" Auguste, one of the
most annoying lumpen activists in Port-au-Prince and someone who would have
definitely been whining 'aba imperialis' or some such slogan at the top of
her lungs. We walked freely throughout the area and saw no sign of
barricades.

The idea that the PPN folks could muster more than, at most, a few hundred
people, let alone the thousands they mention, is preposterous and laughable.
Most politically active people in Haiti, if they think about the obscure,
politically impotent party at all, have always seen PPN for what they are, a
rich-kid vanity project bankrolled by Ben Dupuy's money. They are now and
always have been motivated more by a knee-jerk and immature obsessed
anti-Americanism and inflated sense of their own importance in the world
than any genuine, grassroots, long-term desire help and work for the Haitian
people, most of whom do not in the least fit very well into PPN's humorless,
textbook conception of the world, anyway. The PPN march we saw numbered in
the low hundreds, not the mid-thousands. Not even close.

As for the grandstanding idea that this was some kind of watershed
anti-Lavalas moment, the 5,000 plus in attendance at Brignol Lindor's
funeral in Ti Goave, who tossed bottles and rocks at heavily-armed CIMO's
who then fired back with tear gas and live bullets, might have been just a
bit more significant. Say what you want of them, at least they faced the
government's baton head-on. Perhaps PPN's assertions of activism and courage
play better in bourgeois drawing rooms in New York and Port-au-Prince than
they do in the streets.