Essential The Official Contemporary Haitian Geopolitics/Event thread

[loyola llothta]

Obama Administration On Haiti

A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.

(This article was taken down by The Nation due to an embargo, but it was excerpted at Columbia Journalism Review.)

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.

These papers have come to light thanks to Haiti Liberte, a small Haitian newspaper with offices in Port-au-Prince and New York City.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikil...-nation-2011-6

 

[loyola llothta]

Haiti History: During the Holocaust Haiti Issued Passports To Jewish Families to Leave Germany

Did you know that Haiti was instrumental in saving the lives of several dozens families of Jewish descent as they fled the Nazis during World War II?


Most people, aren’t aware of it, and even today only a handful of historians may know this, but Haiti was indeed responsible for saving about 70 Jewish families (an estimated total of up to 300 lives) during the horrendous Holocaust that occurred in the 1930s, in which Jewish families were hunted down in Europe and placed in concentration camps, some starved to death. Some were Austrian Jews, others were Polish Jews, still others German Jews, and a trickle of Romanian-Jew and Czech-Jewish descent.

300 lives…That number is certainly not as high as the number of Jewish families that Schindler helped saved, but a human life is a human life.

According to documents furnished to Kreyolicious.com by the Jewish dating from December 5, 1939, it was estimated that anywhere from 250-300 individuals fleeing Nazi Germany had come to Haiti. There were others other than this bunch who never came to Haiti at all, but from Germany were given Haitian passports by the Haitian government that allowed them to flee Germany to other countries.

In a then-confidential report done by Manuel Siegel to the Joint Relief Committee (this was set up from New York to help Jewish refugees in several different countries, including Haiti), it’s affirmed that the first flow of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and arriving in Haiti started around March of 1938. Siegel attested in his report that he was unable to form a committee made up of Haitian Jews, writing that the estimated 10 Haitian Jewish families, some of whom had come to Haiti from Northern Africa in the 1900s, and others who had arrived before (in the 1800sin Haiti), “desired to be helpful but feared to identify themselves with the refugees in view of their relations with the government”. The Jewish cause found plenty of sympathetic ears in Haiti, according to Joint Relief Committee records. One such person was Gontrand Rouzier, a Haitian lawyer and Rafael Brouard, the then-mayor of Port-au-Prince. Siegel managed to gather up several heads of the Jewish families to form a committee, and the Committee regularly sent the refugees small remittances to maintain themselves. The committee estimated that about 10% of the refugees were able to make a living as bakers, doctors, shopkeepers, photographers, among other professions.

While some of the refugee families arriving in Haiti were self-sufficient, and while others managed to make a living, some found it hard to adapt because work permits were difficult to get. At one point, a special tax was actually placed on the refugees awaiting visas to the USA ($50 every six months), a tax that the Committee tried to get abolished. Writing to the Committee, one representative wrote in a confidential letter that he suspected that an influential German chummy with the Haitian Minister of Interior was behind the sudden tax.

Subsequent correspondence does not indicate whether the tax was canceled or not. What is known however is that the majority of the families eventually received visas to leave Haiti for New York, and families like the Mohrs did. Another portion went to other countries in South America, and Central American countries like Panama and Cuba. A small portion remained. According to the report done by Manuel Siegel, dating from 1941, one of patriarchs among the Jewish refugees settled in Cap Haitian with his family, and was able to make a decent living in that city as a physician. It’s indicated in the JDC records that two other families settled a few miles away from Port-au-Prince and were given remote agricultural land to settle. There were a few deaths as well, according to the JDC reports from tropical diseases.

There has been some observations made that far from wanting to save Jewish refugees, accepting Jewish families fleeing the Nazis from Germany into Haiti was purely business. For example, some of those Jewish families who were able to arrive in Haiti, and those furnished with Haitian documents to flee Germany were given those passports and official documents at$3000-5000, a huge sum for that time (heck, a huge sum for our time too; although the JDC report from 1941 says up to $3000). Misha Mitsel, an archivist with the American Jewish Distribution Committee of New York agrees that yes, indeed, while it was somewhat of a business transaction, “However, even such policy was better and human considering that more developed countries closed doors for Jewish emigrants.”

Bill Mohr, who is now in his 70s, fled Germany (4 years of age at the time), and spent a year in Haiti, before his family was furnished with a visa by the American Consul in Haiti to go to New York told The Jewish Weekly in an interview in 2010:

“I do not know what would have happened if Haiti had not opened its doors to those fleeing the Holocaust My mother’s mother and sister had found safe haven in Portugal, while my mother’s younger sister was caught and spent the war in Auschwitz.”

Mohr is putting together a Memory Project to gather the memories of people just like him who were saved from the Holocaust through passage to Haiti, or who were given Haitian documents to allow them to leave Nazi Germany. He recalls the pride he felt when Israeli medical teams landed in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti. It brought back some bittersweet memories for him, and he is working hard with his wife in making sure that this aspect ofJewish Holocaust-Haitian connection is never lost.

 

[intruder]

Im loving this move

Haiti will officially become a full member of the African Union in June

http://africanleadership.co.uk/blog/?p=8537

 

[loyola llothta]

No policy change Look back: Haitian Boat People Ask Why U.s. Bars Them If They Were Cuban, They'd Be Welcomed By The Coast Guard, Not Taken Back Home.

By Donna St. George, Inquirer Staff Writer
POSTED: June 09, 1991

MIAMI — On an overloaded fishing boat, Immacula Jacques fled Haiti in desperation, sailing for 25 days under a scorching Caribbean sun, as mosquitoes swarmed, sharks lurked, water ran out and waves tossed wildly.

To her surprise, Jacques survived - only to learn that America shuns Haitian refugees.

If she were Cuban instead, Jacques, an industrious woman, would almost certainly have a job and a green card now, nearly two years later. Her children could join her in Miami. She would not fear deportation or political persecution.

"It's unjust," she says softly in Creole, her somber, dark eyes dimming.

The longtime disparity between policies for Cuban and Haitian refugees is especially stark now in Florida, as Cubans cross the Florida Straits in larger numbers than at any time since the 1980 Mariel boat-lift.

Day after day, Cuban arrivals are welcomed in Miami as brave men and women who have escaped the misery of Castro's communism. They are processed quickly by immigration officials, then released to begin life anew in America.

By contrast, when a boatload of Haitians is sighted near the Florida Keys, they are led aboard a Coast Guard cutter and hauled more than 500 miles back to their poverty-stricken homeland. Their rickety boats are torched or sunk. The refugees never set foot in Florida.

"What we've seen is predominantly black people being sent back to their country but Cubans - mostly white people - being treated differently," said Rev. Thomas Wenski, director of Miami's Haitian Catholic Center and pastor of its Notre Dame d'Haiti Church. ". . . The situation has been indeed racist."

In this fractured city with its Caribbean flavor, where Cubans and Haitians historically have come by the thousands, the daily reminder of disparate treatment adds to already-tense racial conflict.

For almost a year, blacks in Miami have been staging an economic boycott and "quiet riot" against the city's predominantly Cuban power brokers. The protest started when Miami officials snubbed Nelson Mandela during his visit last summer because he had made a favorable remark about Castro.

The Mandela snub led to other angry complaints about the way blacks are treated in Miami, including allegations of discrimination against Haitian refugees.

That policy "is a constant sore," said Miami city manager Cesar Odio, who agrees that it is unfair to Haitians. "I do feel it's an enormous factor in keeping the ethnic tension here."

Immigration officials argue that the seeming inequity is simply the result of a 1966 law, the Cuban Adjustment Act, that allows Cubans to find political refuge in the United States from communist rule. Even if the law did not exist, they say, Cuba refuses to accept returned citizens, but Haiti takes them back.

"We would undoubtedly be returning Cubans, too, if we could," said Verne Jervis, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

But refugee advocates also point to other factors. Amid a call for increased border control in 1981, President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order that allowed the United States to interdict and return fleeing refugees.

At the time, the United States supported Haiti's corrupt, right-wing Duvalier regime and was able to get Haiti's support for the new policy. In the decade since, the United States has almost uniformly refused to consider Haitian boat people "political refugees."

Instead, it has viewed those fleeing Haiti - the hemisphere's poorest country - as "economic migrants," making them ineligible for the political asylum they need in order to stay.

Some Caribbean experts, such as Ken Boodhoo, a professor at Florida International University, argue that it is almost impossible to separate politics from economics in Haiti, just as it is in Cuba. "It's a very specious argument," he said.

Boodhoo and others say the distinction is used as a method to exclude Haitians: poor, black, powerless people from a country that has been U.S.-supported, and to whom national political leaders do not feel beholden.

"In the last decade, about 2 percent of Haitians seeking asylum have been granted protection," said Arthur C. Helton, director of the refugee project for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, based in New York. "For all other nationalities, the average is 25 percent."

The INS says last year's average for all nationalities was smaller - about 15 percent. Racial discrimination has nothing to do with it, the agency says. ''I don't know why they see it as racism," Jervis said. "Certainly a number of Cubans are black, or at least dark-skinned."

At the least, the refugee policy is uneven. When Afghans arrive by plane, or Mexicans are caught crossing the U.S. border on foot, they are allowed a hearing to make their cases for political asylum. If denied, they have extensive appeal rights.

The Haitian interdiction program, on the other hand, has for 10 years allowed Haitians only brief interviews with immigration officials, who decide on the spot whether they get to go ashore and try for asylum. Very few are allowed - only 25 of 24,255 during the last decade.

Since January, however, immigration officials have conducted longer interviews, and they have granted 20 of 959 refugees a shot at asylum. Now, ironically, more boat people have asylum cases pending as Haiti has moved from the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier to its first representative government, under populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Critics say that is evidence that Haitians with legitimate asylum claims have been turned away for years. And, though pleased by the changes in the interview process, they say the interdiction program remains unfair because it singles out one group and denies opportunities that others get.

"We would do that with other nationalities too, if we could," maintained Jervis of the INS, who said it was a question of geography. Traveling on sagging boats packed with passengers from bow to stern, Haitians are usually sighted and intercepted before they arrive in U.S. territory, which starts three miles off the Florida coast.

Once Haitians or others get into U.S. territory, "you have an opportunity to string it out endlessly - and that was the reason interdiction was invented in the early 1980s, to prevent this endless process," Jervis said.

*

In the world of refugee policy, Cubans are a prominent exception. So far this year, 912 have survived the 100-mile, shark-infested crossing to the Florida Keys; experts guess that half as many may die en route. More arrive by plane, overstaying tourist visas, which Castro recently made easier to get.

Nearly all Cubans are allowed to stay. Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Research Institute for Cuban Studies at the University of Miami, said the steady influx could be "a preview to another Mariel."

The Mariel boat-lift occurred after Castro made it clear that he would look the other way if Cuban-Americans came to the port of Mariel to claim relatives and friends. When they showed up en masse, their boats were loaded with the people they came for - and with strangers of all stripes. More than 125,000 Cubans left.

Eleven years later, the latest exodus comes as Castro is easing restrictions again and the Cuban economy is faltering - with the fall of Eastern European communism crippling its trade, with the Soviets reducing aid to Cuba, and with prices dipping on the world market for Cuba's major exports.

Many of the Cubans who arrive talk of the freedom they imagine in the United States, but are at least as vocal about how much poorer Cuba has become during the last two years. Bread and eggs are now rationed. Rice has been cut back. Meat and fruit are scarce.

Eulalio Munoz, 25, a Cuban refugee who arrived in an inner tube last week, said hunger in Cuba was a daily sensation. "Siempre," he said. "Always."

The appeal of America is not very different for Haitian refugees.

In Florida, Haitians say they do not want Cuban refugees to lose asylum privileges; they simply want equality. They also want reforms at the Krome Avenue Detention Center, where many Haitian refugees await asylum decisions for months, or years. Allegations of physical and sexual abuse and mistreatment at the center have already prompted an investigation by the FBI.

"This country calls itself a democracy," says Rolande Dorancy, executive director of the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami's Little Haiti section. "But how can it be a democracy when it is not fair? To me, it's because Haitians are black. It has to be."

Among Haitian refugees, Immacula Jacques, 44, was one of the lucky ones. Her group made it to shore before being sighted - and thus had the right to pursue, and appeal, asylum claims.

Still, the odds are not in Jacques' favor: During the 1990 fiscal year, only two of 370 Haitians were granted asylum.

Jacques said immigration officials did not believe her story that, as a single mother and fruit merchant in Port-au-Prince, she was threatened repeatedly by the tontons macoute, Duvalier's hated secret police, who finally killed one of her sons. She said she feared for her life and those of her other children when she set out for the United States in September 1989.

Since then, she has lived with a friend in Miami, hoping that she may be allowed to stay in America and send for her children, who are with her 70- year-old mother in Haiti.

Sometimes, she said, she thinks about how different it might be if she were Cuban.

"I am sad," she said, "and frustrated. I have not seen my children for two years."

Haitian Boat People Ask Why U.s. Bars Them If They Were Cuban, They'd Be Welcomed By The Coast Guard, Not Taken Back Home.

 

[loyola llothta]

Puerto Rico, "protest against"(picket) Haitian and Cuban refugees, 1980-1981: "I came to Juana Diaz Haitians"

That was the expression of many of eachother in Puerto Rico when in 1981 landed at Ponce Mercedita airport the first Haitian refugees. So government plans of the United States to bring our island hundreds of Haitians who had reached the shores of Florida will materialize.These were fleeing poverty in their country and the bloody dictator Duvalier.

In Puerto Rico this whole issue generated much discussion in the political world and the people. various groups were organized against the island is conviertiese in a refugee center both for political reasons and out of respect for the human rights of these people. Fort Allen in Juana Diaz was where the Haitians were housed in conditions of deprivation, in tents at the mercy of the sun and the hellish temperatures south of the island. Many of them intentarn suicide, others involved in frustration called for the return to Haiti.



For this his story I obtained photos of the historical archives Digitization Project at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras Campus and administrators Digital Collections Bienvenidos . All the pictures I got the have placed in
Refugiados haitianos en PR: 1981 .

Plus an interview conducted Angel Collado Schwarz, interviewer La Voz del Centro ( http://www.vozdelcentro.org ) Dr. Paul Latorture and Lic. Esther Vicente ( audio file ).

This chapter of our Island is one of many that remain hidden in our history books and classes of Puerto Rico. I hope that this paper contribute to new generations of Puerto Ricans know the truth of this borincana history.

1981: “Ya llegaron los haitianos a Juana Díaz”

 

[loyola llothta]

FIRST HAITIANS TAKEN TO PUERTO RICO

By GREGORY JAYNES, Special to the New York Times
Published: August 13, 1981

JUANA DIAZ, P.R., Aug. 12— An Air Florida DC-9 brought 125 Haitian refugees from an overcrowded detention center in Miami to a former United States Navy Base here before dawn today, the first of several planeloads expected in the next week.

Puerto Ricans who had expressed fear that the Haitians would bring disease, crime or more employment pressure on the island had threatened to demonstrate, but there were no demonstrations. Paul La Tortue, a member of an organization seeking legal aid for Haitians, said the word had got out that the refugees needed to be pitied more than anything and that, in any event, they would be shipped home within a year.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, apparently expecting trouble on arrival here, announced that the first planeload would leave Miami at 4 this morning, then quietly put the refugees aboard a plane at 4. There were no protesters, but several Puerto Ricans presented themselves at the gate of the new refugee center to apply for jobs.

The Carter Administration had proposed using Fort Allen here to divert 5,000 Cuban and Haitian refugees in the wave of immigration that hit the United States last year. Washington spent $10 million preparing the fort, but the Puerto Rican Government, unions and local residents sued to block the plan. Then, last month, President Reagan and Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo agreed that 800 Haitians could be detained here, but for no more than a year and only after the Immigration and Naturalization Service certified the illegal aliens' health and investigated them for histories of crime or mental illness. A Lawsuit in Florida

Meantime, Florida sued the Federal Government to relieve the congestion at the Miami detention center, called Krome North. The center, a former missile base designed to accommodate no more than 815 people, has at times held as many as 1,500 Haitians. This morning's lift of 125 men reduced the number at Krome to 992.

Exclusion hearings, begun at Krome North, are expected to continue at Fort Allen. The United States contends that the Haitians, most of whom were picked up on the water, never technically entered the country and thus can be ''excluded,'' a legal process swifter and simpler than deportation.

Tonight a local group known as the United People's Committee called a demonstration outside Fort Allen, not to protest the Haitians' presence but what it termed the ''inhumane'' way in which they were being treated. The hot, treeless 10-acre plain on which they are to live, in tents surrounded by barbed wire, makes Puerto Ricans feel as though Washington is using Puerto Rico to do its dirty work, the committee said.

This morning, in the shade of a mimosa tree outside Fort Allen, Robert L. Bowen, a spokesman for the immigration service, defended the new holding center and spoke of the amenities. ''There will be TV in each compound,'' he said. ''Soccer. Basketball. Baseball. Gloves. You name it, we've got all kinds of recreational equipment in there.''

In the shade of another mimosa barely five feet away, Mr. La Tortue was bellowing for all to hear: ''Conditions here are worse than Krome. The heat is more intense. There is no ventilation. This is definitely worse.''

FIRST HAITIANS TAKEN TO PUERTO RICO

 

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Puerto Ricans welcome Haitians despite economic hardships

JUANA DIAZ, Puerto Rico -- Two elderly men, Juan Lopez Sambran and Earasmo Santiago Martinez, were patiently waiting in line for foodstamps by the side of a dusty country road when the first planeload of Haitian boat people landed in Puerto Rico.

Their government once fought to keep out the Haitians but the 72-year-old Lopez echoed the sentiments of men and women on the foodstamp line when he said, 'For humanity's sake we should let them in.'

'They're poor devils,' said the 67-year-old Santiago.

The U.S. government spent millions of dollars preparing the refugees' camp and fighting 10 months in court with Puerto Rico's government, which initially opposed the transfer of refugees from Miami's crowded camps to the island. Puerto Rico's per capita income is half as much as Mississippi's and it has been singled out for larger cuts in foodstamps and other social programs than any state on the mainland.

In spite of economic hardships, Puerto Ricans have welcomed the Haitian boat people, and some promised to help them fight deportation to their impoverished homeland.

Puerto Rico's unemployment rate is 20 percent, nearly triple the mainland's. Yet callers flooded a radio talk show in the city of Ponce, offering to sponsor some of the 800 Haitians being transferred to nearby Fort Allen.

Hundreds of Puerto Ricans waiting to apply for jobs as caretakers in the abandoned U.S. Navy base where the Haitians were transferred cheered and applauded the first arrivals. By the time the second planeload of refugees arrived, thousands of people waited along the sugar cane-lined road to the fort to wave hello.

Ponce Bishop Juan Fremiot Torres Oliver, who held a mass for the Haitians at Fort Allen under a broiling sun, has offered the church's help to those who wish to stay in America.

And Justice Secretary Hector Reichard has warned the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that his officers 'will remain alert to ensure that the rights of these people under the U.S. Constitution are respected.'

The Inter Regional Council of Haitian Refugees, which is hiring lawyers to fight deportation, has received offers of help from the Catholic University of Ponce's law school.

Council members were pleasantly surprised by the compassion Puerto Ricans have shown.

'It wasn't the same' when the boat people arrived in Miami, said council head Juan Claude Bajeux.

Puerto Rico's warm reception silenced members of the Committee of the People United, who had led protests against refugee transfers last year.

Thousands of Puerto Ricans originally marched in protest when the Carter administration originally announced the transfer of thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees last year.

But this time was different, perhaps because only 800 refugees are involved and there are no Cubans, seen as competition for jobs.

'Those were people from the outside protesting,' said Luis Angel Marques Colon, owner of the Anaida Santiago bar and pool hall, housed in a faintly pink woodshack just outside Fort Allen.

'(The Haitians) aren't bothering me. They aren't going to take away my daily bread.'

Puerto Ricans welcome Haitians despite economic hardships

 

[loyola llothta]

Gloria Rolando’s Documentary Film, Reshipment, Recalls a Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History

By Nicole Crawford-Tichawonna

Afro-Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando is best known for her documentaries on the African diaspora in the Caribbean, and her latest film, Reshipment (2014) continues this theme.

It reveals the complex story of Haitians lured by the tens of thousands to work in Cuba’s sugarcane fields during World War I. These early 20th century immigrants were enticed to leave their island nation—home of the only successful slave revolt in the Americas—for the promise of a better life. Some of them were fleeing the oppressive U.S. occupation. Others were seeking better economic conditions. But what awaited most of them in Cuba was racism and strife.

After the sugar industry experienced a market crash in the 1930s and Haitian labor was no longer needed, an unspeakably inhumane tragedy befell these immigrants and their descendants. In 1937, Cuba began its policy of “reshipment.” Haitians were boarded onto ships returning them to Haiti, forcibly and sometimes so abruptly that family members were left behind.

Reshipment (in English subtitles) captures the resiliency of the Haitian returnees and their relatives left in Cuba. It also documents Haitians’ enduring contributions to Cuban culture. On Fri., March 27, 6:30 p.m., Reshipment will have a free screening in New York City at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, as part of the “Women in Film” series of the African Diaspora International Film Festival. ADIFF will also show Rolando’s film,Oggun, about the Yoruba Orisha, during its Candomble & Santeria Program (click link for cost), Fri., March 27, 8:00 p.m.



This writer interviewed Rolando during her fall 2014 U.S. tour of Reshipment. Here, the Havana-based filmmaker discusses the importance of preserving history and her commitment to telling stories showing connections among African descendants in the Americas.

Nicole Crawford-Tichawonna: How have audiences responded to Reshipment?

Gloria Rolando: Well, some people were a little familiar with the work that I have been doing before, and they [were looking forward to my next documentary on the topic of migration of the Caribbean… I am really happy with the response. [Viewers] understood my intention: to [pay] tribute to those who migrated to Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century with many hopes and how terrible a situation they had as poor, black foreigners [who] arrived to make some money and then go back home and improve their lives.

NCT: Many of your films explore inter-Caribbean migration. What are a few others?

GR: I made Cherished Island Memories: A History of Cubans and Cayman Islanders about the people of the Cayman Islands who migrated to Isle of Pines in Cuba and My Footsteps in Baragua about the people from Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad who migrated to Cuba.

NCT: Are you finding that audiences are generally familiar, or not, with Reshipment’ssubject matter?

GR: When we talk about the African diaspora, sometimes people don’t know very much about what happened in the history of the Caribbean—and Cuba is a Caribbean island that shared many destinies with other Caribbean countries. Even if we speak Spanish and others speak French or English, we have many things in common. So I think that the expectation, the interest and the reaction that I see [in U.S. audiences] are because people want to know what happened with the rest of the blacks in the continent.

Normally, they say, “We didn’t know anything about this; we didn’t know anything about that.” Through my films, they get a little bit. I cannot cover in a documentary of one hour the whole complexity of the history of the Caribbean countries, of our history as black people. But at least people [can] get some elements that allow them to continue studying or [doing more] research, especially the young generation.

NCT: What are a few of the highlights from the tour?

GR: Most important for me is [learning] how much we need [films about] our history. There are so many chapters that we don’t know between each other. This surprised me. [Then again, it did] not surprise me because I know that sometimes, in official history, we don’t appear.

I [also] like the contact with the young generation—to open their eyes and to see how much they want to learn. My English [is] not so good, [but] I try to give them what I know. Also [through] the questions that they [ask] me, I learn about the necessity to explore a certain aspect [of history] that I didn’t realize before.

NCT: How did you learn about this chapter in Cuban history?

GR: Through the literature—a filmmaker needs to get in touch with literature, with other films and with history. …I am not the only or the first Cuban filmmaker to talk about Haiti. Many others before me did the same in fiction, documentaries—docudramas more recently—or old, Cuban films.

NCT: Can you give examples?

GR: The Spanish translation of Haitian writer Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew [was an inspiration to Rolando]. And in Cuba, we have a beautiful feature film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea based on Roumain’s novel: The name of the film is Cumbite (1964).

So what I am doing is a continuation of their work, especially now that many years have passed and the generation that grew up inside that Haitian community is getting old. [The descendants] are Cuban now, but in the past, when they were children, they had the same life, the same destiny as their parents.

NCT: The music in the film is at times hauntingly beautiful, especially the opening song. Was it hard or easy to find songs that would complement the story?

GR: In the case of the choir—the vocal group Dessandan—they are Haitian descendants [who live] in Camaguey. I knew about them because sometimes they have presentations in Havana. I could not exclude them from a film like this, because it was an important voice, and they are the people who maintained this tradition.

And the song, “From Haiti to Cuba,” by Ebenezer Semé, [that opens and closes the film] was made before the film. … Semé played that song in one cultural activity [that she attended] in Camaguey. And when I listened to that song, I jumped from my chair and said, “This is the theme for the film.”

NCT: Why have you made documenting African descendants’ contribution to Cuban society your mission?

GR: It’s part of the Cuban history. It’s part of [what Black people] living in the African diaspora need to do. We have many, many faces; we [must] try to present our contribution to the history and the religion and the spirituality. And I am fascinated by it.

Q&A with Gloria Rolando on her film Reshipment Recalls Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History

 

[BigMan]

Is it just me or me or did pre Earth quake Hiati(Port au Prince in particular) poverty as a whole exaggeratedr? excluding the shantytowns it seems like there were alot of decent relatively modern housing structures which were presumably filled with while probably on the lower end of the spectrum middle class Haitians.

if I'm not mistaken, richer folks lived on the outskirts of PAP and the north is pretty calm

However I visited Haiti in 2012


I do believe that Haiti and Cuba were the richest Caribbean islands in the 50s I'll see if I can find the statistics

 

[BigMan]

Gloria Rolando’s Documentary Film, Reshipment, Recalls a Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History





Q&A with Gloria Rolando on her film Reshipment Recalls Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History

Nice

I need to watch her films

 

[loyola llothta]

The Clintons’ Haiti Screw-Up, As Told By Hillary’s Emails
The family still doesn't know how to wield its own power.

It’s hard to find anyone these days who looks back on the U.S.-led response to the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake as a success, but it wasn’t always that way. Right after the disaster, even as neighborhoods lay in rubble, their people sweltering under tarps, the consensus—outside Haiti—was that America’s “compassionate invasion” (as TIME Magazine called it) had been “largely a success” (Los Angeles Times), offering further proof that “in critical moments of the history of mankind … the United States is, in fact, the indispensable nation” (Expresso, Portugal).

As the latest release of Hillary Clinton’s personal emails by the U.S. State Department Monday revealed, that perception was not an accident. “We waged a very successful campaign against the negative stories concerning our involvement in Haiti,” Judith McHale, the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote on February 26, 2010. A few weeks before, the public affairs chief had emailed newspaper quotations praising U.S. efforts in Haiti to Secretary Clinton with the note “Our Posts at work.” Clinton applauded. “That’s the result of your leadership and a new model of engagement w our own people,” she replied. “Onward!”


But one person even closer to the secretary of state was singing a different tune—very, very quietly. On February 22, after a four-day visit to the quake zone, Chelsea Clinton authored a seven-page memo which she addressed to “Dad, Mom,” and copied their chief aides. That informal report tells a continuing story of the unique brands of power and intelligence wielded by the Clinton family in Haiti and around the world—and of the uniquely Clinton ways they often undermine themselves.

First off, there was the secrecy. The memo—by a Clinton, with a master’s in public health from Columbia University, pursuing a doctorate in international relations from Oxford and with a prominent role at her family’s foundation—would have obliterated the public narrative of helpful outsiders saving grateful earthquake survivors that her mother’s State Department was working so hard to promote. Instead, like so much of the inner workings of the Clintons’ vast network, it was kept secret, released only in an ongoing dump of some 35,000 emails from Hillary’s private server, in response to a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit wrapped up in the politics of the 2016 presidential election.

Chelsea Clinton was blunt in her report, confident the recipients would respect her request in the memo’s introduction to remain an “invisible soldier.” She had first come to the quake zone six days after the disaster with her father and then-fiancé, Mark Mezvinsky. Now she was returning with the medical aid group Partners in Health, whose co-founder, Dr. Paul Farmer, was her father’s deputy in his Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti. What she saw profoundly disturbed her.

Five weeks after the earthquake, international responders were still in relief mode: U.S. soldiers roamed Port-au-Prince streets on alert for signs of social breakdown, while aid groups held daily coordination meetings inside a heavily guarded UN compound ordinary Haitian couldn’t enter. But Haitians had long since moved on into their own recovery mode, many in displacement camps they had set up themselves, as responders who rarely even spoke the language, Kreyòl, worked around them, oblivious to their efforts.

“The incompetence is mind numbing,” she told her parents. “The UN people I encountered were frequently out of touch … anachronistic in their thinking at best and arrogant and incompetent at worst.” “There is NO accountability in the UN system or international humanitarian system.” The weak Haitian government, which had lost buildings and staff in the disaster, had something of a plan, she noted. Yet because it had failed to articulate its wishes quickly enough, foreigners rushed forward with a “proliferation of ad hoc efforts by the UN and INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations] to ‘help,’ some of which have helped … some of which have hurt … and some which have not happened at all.”



The former first daughter recognized something that scores of other foreigners had missed: that Haitians were not just sitting around waiting for others to do the work. “Haitians in the settlements are very much organizing themselves … Fairly nuanced settlement governance structures have already developed,” she wrote, giving the example of camp home to 40,000 displaced quake survivors who had established a governing committee and a series of sub-committees overseeing security, sanitation, women’s needs and other issues.

“They wanted to help themselves, and they wanted reliability and accountability from their partners,” Chelsea Clinton wrote. But that help was not coming. The aid groups had ignored requests for T-shirts, flashlights and pay for the security committee, and the U.S. military had apparently passed on the committee’s back-up plan that they provide security themselves. “The settlements’ governing bodies—as they shared with me—are beginning to experience UN/INGO fatigue given how often they articulate their needs, willingness to work—and how little is coming their way.”

That analysis went beyond what some observers have taken years to understand, and many others still haven’t: that disaster survivors are best positioned to take charge of their own recovery, yet often get pushed aside by outside authorities who think, wrongly, that they know better. Her report also had more than an echo of the philosophy of her Partners in Health tour guides. More than five years later, her candor and force of insight impress experts. “I am struck by the direct tone and the level of detail,” says Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development

But then came the recommendations—and a second classic pitfall. Far from speaking uncomfortable truths to her parents’ power, Chelsea was largely agreeing with their own assessments. At a March UN donors’ conference for Haiti over which Bill and Hillary Clinton presided, the secretary of state would tell the assembled delegates that the global community had to start doing things differently. “It will be tempting to fall back on old habits—to work around the [Haitian] government rather than to work with them as partners, to fund a scattered array of well-meaning projects rather than making the deeper, long-term investments that Haiti needs now,” she said, nearly repeating her daughter’s dismissal of the “ad hoc efforts” that had defined the early response.

Bill Clinton had also long been scathing in his assessments of aid work there. As the Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince before, during and after the quake, I’d followed him on his visits since becoming UN Special Envoy in mid-2009. In public, the former president called for better coordination between NGOs and donors. In private, after long, frustrating days in the Caribbean heat, he’d sometimes just go off, lighting into the nearest staffer about partners’ missed meetings and broken promises. The former president also loved to apologize for his own past actions—destructive food policies which flooded the Haitian market with cheap Arkansas rice, and ordering a crippling embargo that destroyed the Haitian economy during the reign of a 1990s military junta (some of whose members had been on the CIA payroll).

Yet those introspections rarely extend to the present. As anyone who’s covered the Clintons can tell you, they armor themselves with staffers who hit back against almost any hint of criticism—especially when an election is near. The one thing the Clintons never seem to question is the idea that they, personally, should remain in charge. And that is precisely what Chelsea recommended in her report:

“The Office of Special Envoy—i.e., you Dad—needs authority over the UN and all its myriad parts—which I do believe would give you effective authority over [the NGOs].” Her father, the former president, should be a “single point of authority,” she said—overseeing a replacement for the organizational system of government agencies, militaries and NGOs.

The truth is that Bill Clinton was already by far the most powerful individual in this flawed system, with Hillary close behind. She was guiding the U.S. response as secretary of state. He was already UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy for Haiti, head patron of the Clinton Foundation and co-leader of the newly formed Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. Weeks later the couple would share the dais at the donors conference, where governments and aid groups pledged some $10 billion for Haiti’s recovery. Her father would soon accept the co-chairmanship of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the quasi-government body charged with allocating many of the funds. (“Finally,” chief of staff Cheryl Mills wrote to the secretary in a March 29, 2010, email, when news of the appointment leaked to the Haitian press.)
The irony is that, after pages of scathing analysis about the failure of international responders to understand and respect ordinary people in Haiti, Chelsea Clinton’s plan would have created an even more powerful foreigner operating at an even greater remove. She did call on this new Super Clinton-led structure to “support the Haitian government,” but noted that it could only build “local capacity and capabilities, where feasible”—a logical loophole the U.S. government would fall back on time and again as it kept to old habits after all, including refusing to provide Haiti’s government with direct budget support.

As it was, that personality-driven leadership style meant the response to the Haiti quake would focus on priorities set by those surrounding them, rather than those of majority of Haitians. The new email tranche shows how quickly the construction of low-wage garment factories and prioritizing exports to the U.S. market came to the center of the U.S.-led response in Haiti. That strategy, authored by economist Paul Collier, was what Bill Clinton had come to Haiti to promote as special envoy before the quake. Little more than two weeks after the disaster, Mills, a former Clinton White House counsel who became her point woman on Haiti, forwarded the secretary a New York Times op-ed by Collier and consultant Jean-Louis Warnholz rebranding the pre-quake strategy as a form of post-quake reconstruction.

“He now works for us,” she noted for her boss, referring to Warnholz.

The new emails also show how Hillary’s staffers brought former Liz Claiborne Inc. executive Paul Charron into the fold to collaborate with Hillary Clinton and Warnholz on helping to make the garment factories a reality. “As I communicated to Jean-Louis, I am happy to be helpful to you and the State Department on this project,” Charron wrote Mills in August 2010. Around that time, Charron made a key phone call to a former Liz Claiborne colleague now working as an advisor for the South Korean garment giant Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., to encourage that company to come up with an investment plan in Haiti, the New York Timesreported two years later.

In 2012, Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the opening of the brand-new, $300 million Caracol Industrial Park in northern Haiti, with Sae-A as the anchor tenant.

Today, there has been little reconstruction in Port-au-Prince. Most quake survivors have moved back into precarious homes, hoping another disaster doesn’t strike. The country is still being ravaged by a cholera epidemic that began nine months after the earthquake and has killed nearly 9,000 people. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have publicly acknowledged this epidemic, unrelated to the quake, was caused by United Nations peacekeepers—who in turn, as Chelsea correctly foresaw, have been able to avoid any semblance of accountability. President Michel Martelly, who Hillary Clinton helped put in office as secretary of state, is struggling to hold the country’s first elections since he took power, with observers watching warily to see if he will leave office next spring.

As for Caracol, the northern industrial park has created just 5,479 out of a promised 60,000 jobs when I visited in the spring, as workers complain about the long hours and low pay. Farmers who once tended land on the property complain they were pushed off without proper compensation (a claim the park’s boosters deny). Many of those living around the park now see it as the embodiment of the powerful Clintons’ disconnect. “They go to the park, but they don’t come to our village, because they care more about the park,” said Cherline Pierre, a 33-year-old resident who signs up would-be laborers near her home, a few miles from the park’s high gates.

All a reader plowing through the email tranche can do is wonder, what might have gone differently had Chelsea Clinton’s insights reached more people in real time, and if the Clintons had applied more of them to themselves. “I wish this had been made public when it was sent,” Ramachandran said of the report. “It might have helped.”

 

[Bawon Samedi]

if I'm not mistaken, richer folks lived on the outskirts of PAP and the north is pretty calm

However I visited Haiti in 2012


I do believe that Haiti and Cuba were the richest Caribbean islands in the 50s I'll see if I can find the statistics

Interesting that you say this because you are right. Haiti and Cuba in the 40s and 50s were quite affluent islands to live on. Heck i think I even stated this in the Op.

 

[ZoeGod]

Gloria Rolando’s Documentary Film, Reshipment, Recalls a Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History





Q&A with Gloria Rolando on her film Reshipment Recalls Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History

My grandpops on dad's side worked in Cuba for 24 years with his 5 or 6 brothers. Thing is he came back to Haiti with 3 of them when the revolution in Cuba just started. He then met my grandma in Haiti and married her. I believe he was 12 when he went to Cuba. Anyway the other brothers got stuck in Cuba and never went back to Haiti. That is why my pops could potentially have cousins in Cuba he don't know about. My grandpops was a chill dude,spoke Spanish fluently. My grandma who married my grandpops was born in Cuba. My great grandparents went to Cuba for work. My great grandmother was pregnant and gave birth to her in Cuba. But they went Haiti immediately after. My dad used to joke around saying she is Cuban but she would yell at him. The reason was that at the time Duvalier was ruling Haiti and a harsh anti communist stance.

 

[loyola llothta]

 

[Biscayne]

Gloria Rolando’s Documentary Film, Reshipment, Recalls a Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History





Q&A with Gloria Rolando on her film Reshipment Recalls Little-Known Chapter of Haitian-Cuban History

My late grandmother was actually born in Cuba and lived there for a bit. But I had no ideal about the connections between the two nations outside of that.