Haiti

"Bay piti pa chich."

"Toupre pa lakay."

"Dèyè mòn, gen mòn."

"Lafimen pa janm leve san dife."

"Manman pa janm mode pitit li jouk nan zo."

"Mapou mouri, kabrit manje fey li."

"Men anpil, chay pa lou."

"Merite pa mande."

"Piti piti zwazo fè nich li."

"Zafè kabrit pa zafè mouton."

"What we have learned in one long year of mourning after Haiti's earthquake is that an exogenous plan of reconstruction – one that is profit-driven, exclusionary, conceived of and implemented by non-Haitians – cannot reconstruct Haiti. It is the solemn obligation of all Haitians to join in the reconstruction and to have a voice in the direction of the nation."

"I say it, and I say it again, the Haitian people are a non-violent people. They voted for democracy. They will continue to fight in a peaceful way for democracy, and I will continue to be faithful to them doing the same. The peaceful approach, fighting peacefully for the restoration of the constitutional order...This is what the Haitian people want: Peace and democracy."

"Allow me to break down the facts of hunger as they stand right now. 811 million people are chronically hungry. 283 million are in hunger crises — they are marching toward starvation. And within that, 45 million in 43 countries across the globe are in hunger emergencies — in other words, famine is knocking on their door. Places like Afghanistan. Madagascar. Myanmar. Guatemala. Ethiopia. Sudan. South Sudan. Mozambique. Niger. Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Haiti and on and on and on. The world has often experienced famine. But when has it ever been so widespread, in so many places, at the same time? Why? Three reasons. First, man-made conflict. Dozens of civil wars and regional conflicts are raging, and hunger has been weaponized to achieve military and political objectives. Second, climate shocks /climate change. Floods, droughts, locusts and rapidly changing weather patterns have created severe crop failures around the world. Third, COVID-19. The viral pandemic has created a secondary hunger pandemic, which is far worse than the first. Shutdowns destroyed livelihoods. Shutdowns stopped the movement of food. Shutdowns inflated prices. The net result is the poor of the world are priced out of survival. The ripple effect of COVID has been devastating on the global economy. During the pandemic, $3.7 trillion in incomes — mostly among the poor — have been wiped out, while food prices are spiking. The cost of shipping food, for example, has increased 3 – 400%. But in places of conflict and low-income countries, it is even worse. For example, in Aleppo, Syria — a war zone, where I just returned from — food is now seven times more expensive than it was 2 years ago. The combined effect of these three — conflict, climate and COVID — has created an unprecedented perfect storm."

"All I gotta say about Elian is, thank God he's Cuban. 'Cause if he had been Haitian, you'd have never heard about his ass. If Elian Gonzalez was Elian Mumoombo from Haiti, they'd have pushed that little rubber tube back into the water. "Sorry, fella. All full.""

"We were referred to as “The Pearl of the Antilles,” the most productive colony—but productive for whom? Not for the slaves working in the plantations. It was a wealthy colony, but once the colonizer left, he left with all the wealth. This is not to make excuses. We made a lot of our own mess, too. But we started out with a lot of negatives that are still against us today."

"I don't understand the world. I don't understand why some people have to suffer so much and others don't. I don't understand the unfairness of all that - I can't wrap my brain around it. Seems like it should be the opposite, like global warming should make Haiti discover that they have the secret plant that makes them all rich, because they've suffered enough, those people."

"With many misgivings, I accepted the mission to Hayti. I distrusted my qualifications for the office; but coming to me as it did, unasked, unsought, and unexpected, and with the earnest wish of the President that I would accept it in the interest of the peace, welfare, and prosperity of Hayti, I felt I could not decline it. I shall leave a comfortable house and a healthy climate, and shall probably have to occupy trying positions; but I go forth hopefully... Hayti is but a child in national life, and though she may often stumble and fall, I predict that she will yet grow strong and bright."

"There is something about Hayti which we have to deplore, and so there is about the United States. Let us go back 100 years and look at Hayti, and we find it surrounded by slavery and the whole Caribbean Sea reddened by the curse."

"A word about Hayti. We are not to judge her by the height which the Anglo-Saxon has reached. We are to judge by the depths from which she has come. We are to look at the relation she sustained to the outside world, and the outside world sustained to her. One hundred years ago every civilized nation was slave-holding. Yet these negroes, ignorant, downtrodden, had the manhood to arise and drive off their masters and assert their liberty. Her government is not so unsteady as we think."

"What's clear is that the 1804 revolution never ended. The U.S. and the Haitian elite seem as determined as nineteenth century France to keep Haitians enslaved, though sweatshops have replaced plantations and UN tanks Napoleon's army."

"Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is."

"I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them."

"Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave."

"They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince'. True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it's a deal'. And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."

"Those of you who have been there [Haiti] know it is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It has everything. It has everything above the ground, and everything under the ground…. It is an amazing place. I strongly recommend that whenever you get a chance, if you haven't been there, that you go to Haiti. I think it was a certain Queen of England who said that after her death "Calais" would be found written on her heart. When I die, I think that "Haiti" is going to be written on my heart."

"Haiti's dictators, led by General Raoul Cedras, control the most violent regime in our hemisphere. For 3 years, they have rejected every peaceful solution that the international community has proposed. They have broken an agreement that they made to give up power. They have brutalized their people and destroyed their economy. And for 3 years, we and other nations have worked exhaustively to find a diplomatic solution, only to have the dictators reject each one."

"The Good Lord who created the sun which gives us light from above, who rouses the sea and makes the thunder roar—listen well, all of you—this god, hidden in the clouds, watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge! He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us."

"From their French masters, [the slaves] had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilization had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught."

"Historians otherwise eager to find evidence of “external” participation in the 1791 uprising skip the unmistakable evidence that the rebellious slaves had their own program. In one of their earliest negotiations with representatives of the French government, the leaders of the rebellion did not ask for an abstractly couched “freedom.” Rather, their most sweeping demands included three days a week to work on their own gardens and the elimination of the whip. These were not Jacobinist demands adapted to the tropics, nor royalist claims twice creolized. These were slave demands with the strong peasant touch that would characterize independent Haiti. But such evidence of an internal drive, although known to most historians, is not debated—not even to be rejected or interpreted otherwise. It is simply ignored, and this ignorance produces a silence of trivialization."

"The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century."

"Like many West Indians of my generation, I have been reading C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins over and over for many years. I know many of its passages by heart... I found myself reading The Black Jacobins differently. I found myself wondering about the distance that separated James and me; I found myself looking back at James looking toward me and thinking that I inhabit as a dead-end present the postcolonial future he lived as a fervent expectation and hope... I think that The Black Jacobins offers us a very tantalizing hint, one that has everything to do with modernity. I mean if you compare the story of slavery told in the body of the text (which belongs to 1938) to the one told in the appendix, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro” (which belongs to 1963), a very interesting contrast comes into view. Whereas the earlier story belongs to the familiar resistance narrative of slavery-as-repressive-power (remember the great first chapter, “The Property”), the later story underlines something else, namely, the power that produced the subjects of a distinctive civilization—a power, in other words, that didn’t only negate (“demoralize” is the word James uses here) the humanity of the slave, but contributed to structuring and shaping the conditions of a particular form of humanity."