Cholera in Haiti: How Many Ways Can Capitalism Kill?

PORT-AU-PRINCE, OCT. 28 — Cholera is making a comeback globally, with 100,000 deaths annually, in African countries, and in Pakistan after the floods. In the living spaces of the “wretched of the earth,” workers die all the time of completely preventable diseases. Under capitalism, workers are used only to provide the cheap supply of raw materials, assembled products, and labor power for the rich.

 We watch this with anguish today in the rural, rice-growing Artibonite region of Haiti, where cholera has killed around 300 people to date. The media give medical explanations of the epidemic focused on the contaminated Artibonite River, but never touch on the racism of capitalism which is the real explanation of such recurring, preventable epidemics.

The media blames “underdevelopment,” about which simply, tragically, nothing can be done. Nor can much be done, apparently (“it’s tied up in the Congress,” explained Bill Clinton), about the criminal, total non-delivery of promised U.S. government aid, which might have helped; nor about the thousands of undistributed rehydration kits CNN’s Sanjay Gupta found in a Port-au-Prince warehouse.

The Artibonite River, the largest in the island, is the heart of rich, irrigated  agricultural land long used for rice-growing. When the World Bank program (with Aristide’s agreement) pushed through the import of cheap U.S. rice (subsidized by the Clinton Administration), local production was crippled. On the Aeribonite River, Péligre dam is also the main source of electricity in Haiti.

The dam is now silting up and cutting the energy supply because of deforestation in the mountains. It is part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and therefore the site, like all capitalist nation-state borders, of state violence against workers trying to cross in both directions. The border was closed for a day by the Dominican authorities, who subjected Haitians trying to cross, to an absurd ritual hand-washing and other tests. On the Haitian side, MINUSTAH (UN) troops tear-gassed people fleeing the epidemic. Nothing new there: the border river has often flowed with the blood of workers on both banks.

And now it is the source of cholera, as its water poisons those it once nourished. The bacterial illness is transmitted when people drink water that’s been contaminated by the human waste of an infected person.

Haiti is a setup for cholera. The water purification systems are gone, so people go to the river for water. This is also where people dump their waste. The disease produces a toxin in infected individuals, who experience terrible diarrhea that can result in disabling dehydration in just a few hours. Dehydration is a death sentence for people with no access to good medical care. But it is easily treated with rehydration: you give people fluid through an IV and they will do just fine. 

But why is the river so contaminated, causing cholera?  And why is treatment so limited, causing further unnecessary deaths?  The media will tell us how Doctors Without Borders (Spain) staff a clinic in St. Marc and MINUSTAH troops built a new tent clinic next door. Those are very useful in preventing deaths, it’s true. But they won’t say why a system focused on profit never manages anything but makeshift, last-minute medical care instead of planning health care rationally. Forty percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and 80% lack proper sanitation, including toilets and soap.

The truth is that anything other than maximizing profit will always be secondary to capitalist ruling classes, which is why their responses to perfectly predictable disasters of their making are always so cruel and inadequate. That too is a preventable crime, as preventable as cholera. Unfortunately capitalism is not so easily treated. But we workers without borders are working on it.

Many studies are available which point towards a better understanding of such painful events. Eduardo Galeano (The Open Veins of Latin America) takes aim at flawed capitalist explanations of disease when he sarcastically recommends placing signs in the deadly areas of industrial pollution in Latin America: DO NOT BREATHE.

The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney succinctly punctured the racist myth that certain sectors of our class are doomed to underdevelopment in his much-loved book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which drew on André Gunder Frank’s concept of “the development of underdevelopment.” Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and Patrick Bond’s Global Apartheid show the consequences of modern imperialism to be nothing less than racism on a world scale.

The rural and urban working class of the Artibonite valley must return to the revolutionary history of their region enshrined in Crête Pierrot, where Dessalines in 1802 led African slave soldiers to crush the French army in the turning-point battle of the revolution. Then workers will give a different explanation of what caused so many deaths in so many generations.