Pickets Unite Haiti’s Quake Victims with Egypt’s Masses

NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 4 — “Haiti, Egypt, USA: Workers’ Power Will Win the Day!”  At the moment Haiti marked the anniversary of its earthquake with hardly anything yet “reconstructed” for ordinary people, the working class in Egypt — youth and women workers joined by students and professionals — were taking a stand against the fascist regime of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.  Fifty picketers at the Haitian consulate in Manhattan took note of this moment, both condemning the Haitian ruling class and its imperialist overlords for their neglect, and cheering the power and resolve shown by the Egyptian demonstrators. 

Among our pickets were high school students embroiled in the struggles against school closings, against racist preferential treatment for charter and special middle-class schools, and against administration harassment of militant teachers who organize together with their students.  They vowed to join their own struggles internationally with those of other young people:  “Haitian students are under attack: what do we do?  Stand up, fight back!” 

One Brooklyn student led a chant for various demands for workers in Haiti, teaching us how to respond to each one in Haitian Kreyòl “Mwen dakò!” (“I agree!”).  We also taught ourselves Kreyòl versions of the great chants “The workers, united, will never be defeated!” (“Ouvriye ini pa pral jamè venki!”) and “Workers’ struggles have no borders!” (“Lit ouvriye pa gen fwontyè!”).

A recent CUNY graduate said it was the most spirited and powerful rally he’d been to in a while. A worker who has spent much of the year in Haiti spoke about her experiences working with friends there, teaching classes and organizing a conference together.  She drew inspiration from the understanding and solidarity with U.S. struggles shown by students, teachers, and other union workers in Haiti. 

Another speaker outlined some answers to the question “Who rules Haiti?”  He said that in addition to the Haitian consulate, we should picket Bill Clinton’s office in Harlem, since Clinton is at the heart of U.S. imperialist rule in Haiti.

Friends in Haiti asked us to include in our picket the demand for justice for the thousands of victims of the fascist Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, who had the gall to return to Haiti last month, apparently in a bid to clear his position with the Haitian courts so as to access millions in a blocked Swiss bank account. We added his name to the chant “Clinton, Préval, Duvalier, you can’t hide: we charge you with genocide!”

Members of PLP on the picket line stressed that “workers’ power” meant turning the guns around, winning soldiers in Haiti, Egypt, and the imperialist armies to join in a communist working-class revolution to smash capitalism everywhere.

This picket was one small step in a long march.  Like the demonstrators in Cairo we know that, in the words of a nineteenth-century Illinois coal miners’ anthem, “Step by step the longest march/Can be won, can be won,”  in Haiti, in Egypt, in the USA.  As we were leaving we crossed paths with the tail end of a march of more than a thousand people targeting the Egyptian Mission to the UN. Something is stirring in the international working class and revolutionary communists are in the mix.