PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 19 — At a three-day teachers’ union forum here about the government and imperialist donors’ reconstruction plans for Haiti, teachers and students blasted the plans to “reconstruct” neocolonial capitalism in Haiti. The forum was organized by UNNOH, the National Union of Teachers’ College Graduates of Haiti, along with CTSP (Confederation of Workers in the Public & Private Sectors).
The participants denounced the military occupation by UN troops in MINUSTAH (United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti) and by 1,000 U.S. troops, remaining from a much larger force.
About 130 teachers from K-12 schools and colleges attended, along with students and trade unionists from CTSP. In panels, workshops and passionate debates, we discussed what kind of country/state should be rebuilt; the role of education; the role of women; the role of the university; military occupation; a critical analysis of the Haitian government’s Plan of Action; alternative politics in Latin America and the Caribbean; and plans to mobilize citizens for genuine reconstruction.
A U.S. professor described the model of reconstruction in New Orleans, which serves as a parallel to the situation here: racist policies turning natural disaster into unimaginable catastrophe followed by even more racist reconstruction plans.
This was an impressive and moving event — a great outpouring of Haitian teachers’ grief, anger, and political thinking, a moment of solidarity and resolve. Several expressed parts of a communist analysis and a communist spirit of revolt. Capitalism and imperialism were roundly condemned by almost every speaker. But most ideas for action are still confined within prevailing liberal, nationalist and reformist norms. Organized communism has faded from the Haitian scene, but there is some openness to considering views such as those of PLP which propose to rebuild an international revolutionary communist movement and party, taking account of the errors of previous revolutions.
Racist Attacks on Haitian
Workers and Students
Five days after the Forum, MINUSTAH troops entered the campus of the Faculty of Ethnology to harass activist students, confiscating computers and arresting one student. Two students had delivered militant speeches at the forum against the military occupation and phony reconstruction. The troops arrived with photos of students taken at the forum, apparently the motive for their crude attempt at intimidation. The imperialists are very afraid of working-class anger in a country born from slave rebellions. After students quickly organized a protest and sought support, including from PLP, their arrested comrade was released late the same day.
Passing the rotting, stinking camps like the one in the Champ de Mars, the main square of Port-au-Prince, you could certainly understand why revolution was in the air for some. How can we let our class brothers and sisters rot in these fascist camps under the shadow of UN and U.S. troops, there to enforce the 18-month Emergency Law just passed to allow the president to rule by decree? And the reconstruction plans envision Haiti only as a low-wage platform of production for export (e.g., textiles under the no-tariff HOPE laws passed by the U.S. Congress, or mangos and avocados for the U.S. market). Impoverished Haitian workers can now be used as a reserve army of labor to help hold down wages in the whole region, including the U.S. and Canada. With the threat of moving jobs to Haiti, the U.S. bosses can use racism to build discord among workers and prevent them from banding together in international unity.
Caught between the present of the camps and a future of industrial and agricultural sweatshops or migration into the anti-immigrant U.S., Haitian workers and students are beginning to think hard about their situation, imagining how to put our class to work producing the food and other necessities of life for workers and farmers right here. PLP in Haiti is suggesting to our friends that workers need state power to do that, and to win state power we need a communist party and a red army. Those ideas once flourished in Haiti, and will again!
Can the Unions Serve the Workers?
A central question in Haiti is unionism. There is “dual unionism” here: on one side are the “yellow” unions like CNEH, the National Confederation of Haitian Teachers, in favor with the government, affiliated with the big international union federations like Education International (EI), doing nothing for their inactive members. They are “unions in a briefcase” as workers here say, with nothing on the ground. CNEH soaked up all the money teachers around the world contributed to EI, thinking they were giving to fellow teachers after the catastrophe.
On the other side are the seemingly more honest unionists who joined electrical, transport, telephone, teachers, nurses and other workers together in the CTSP federation. Many of the leaders and delegates of these unions are unemployed, fired from good jobs for organizing. They have led very militant reform struggles. The bus drivers in the SESP union, for example, were ALL fired and replaced by scabs when they successfully organized the SESP.
One discussion started at the forum on the limits of unions in anti-capitalist struggle. Can there be red unions, or red-led unions, under capitalism? The Haitian state has “good” labor laws on the books, for example, but breaks them all the time, as when they fired all the bus drivers. They enable the private employers, notably in the textile and other assembly industries for export, to do the same thing. Organizing in textiles is a clandestine operation.
PLP is presenting the idea that a revolutionary party is a necessity within unions and also to link the few unionized workers with the vast masses of the unemployed (70%). We speak of unions as possibly “schools of revolution,” in Lenin’s phrase, but only if there are communists working in them. We know that without communists working within them, unions are often turned into tools of the ruling class rather than the honest advocates for workers they may start as.
The Real Solution for Haiti:
Communist Revolution
It will take a prolonged ideological struggle to bring the ideas of communism back to Haiti. PLP is in that struggle with our friends among unionized workers and students, inspired by their indomitable spirit. “There is no more social sap in Haiti,” a student said, his image deriving from the deforested and eroded countryside. And yet his speech was undefeated, full of juice, full of radical thought and deeply felt. When he and his comrades deepen their already existing alliance with organized workers and go to the unorganized masses, the sap will rise and the trees will return to the hills where the slave revolt was born.
The crowning insult in the bosses’ reconstruction plan is to promote a tourist industry (like the resort at Labadie where the Clintons, who “love” Haiti as vultures love their prey, spent their honeymoon). A tourist park in the mountains where the first revolution to destroy slavery was born, where Charlemagne Péralte’s guerrillas fought off the U.S. marines in the 1920s? What a future!
The bosses have the government, MINUSTAH, the pirate crew of “donors” who formed the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, with Bill Clinton and prime minister Bellerive as co-chairs and the World Bank as a dominant force. But Haitian workers and students have the courage, intelligence and the history of our whole class. And soon — together we are working for it and will bring it into being — they will have and will build to new heights an international revolutionary party, the PLP. J