Port-au-Prince, September 7 — It’s 10:30 am and a tire is still burning in front of the gate of the Medical School of the State University of Haiti (UEH). Today is the day of the competitive entrance exam. As many as 11,000 students are set to take the test for 170 to 200 seats in the incoming class. But this test will not take place!
A PLP member at the medical school found out about a fraud corrupting the exam. Certain privileged students had been given advance copies to guarantee their success. The PL’er alerted other students of this plan to keep the sons and daughters of the working class from gaining admission.
The Medical School has been in crisis since the turn of the new century due to conflicts between working-class students and the administration, which is closely tied to the bourgeois elite of Haiti. One administrator declared he was “ashamed” to see medical students take a “tap-tap” (public bus) to and from the Marché Salomon, a nearby market where students share transportation with the street vendors. He said he remembered when medical students came to class in their own private cars!
In Haiti, riding a tap-tap is a sign of belonging to the working class. Owning a car signals membership in the middle class or the bourgeoisie.
The UEH has a long history of struggle between the working masses, both urban and rural, and the light-skinned bourgeoisie and their henchmen. For several decades now, the UEH has mostly enrolled children of workers, who are mainly black. The bourgeoisie and middle class send their children either to the few private universities in Haiti or to the Dominican Republic, the U.S., Canada and France. This is a consequence of a racial hierarchy and racist policies dating from the periods of slavery and post-independence.
Education to Advance, Not Escape, the Working Class
Students from different branches of the UEH, following the leadership of comrades in PLP, have stopped the entrance exam from taking place. They are also demanding that the dean throw out the disputed test and start over. Many times, the comrades recall, the college administration has tried to disadvantage workers’ children in favor of more bourgeois children. This reflects the ruling class’s effort to deny workers access to knowledge, in order to
better dominate and exploit them. This racism and elitism will stop only when workers understand the class nature of capitalist society and rise as one to smash it. We must struggle for more children of the working class to gain access to higher education. Then we must use that education to advance the working class, rather than trying to escape it.
The applicants quickly adopted this position and began chanting their refusal to take the fraudulent exam. Meanwhile, applicants at other locations, unaware of what was happening at the Medical School site, were waiting for their exam to arrive. To their surprise, the students marched to tell them about the exposed fraud and that there wouldn’t be any test that day. These applicants became even angrier when pro-administration students threatened that the SWAT police would be called in, just as they had in 2009, when the heavily armed cops brutally occupied the Medical School for several months. At that time the medical students were engaged in several struggles: against special treatment in training for those related or connected to the bourgeoisie; a demand for more seats for children of the working class; and a campaign to support an increase in the minimum wage.
With the support of communists and the solidarity with the applicants, the students have won this skirmish. The role of Progressive Labor Party is to give leadership to the class struggle on all fronts. We must win the masses to understand why this double-dealing exists, and how the bourgeoisie uses class and race to super-exploit the vast majority of the population. Most of all, we must tell people the only way this hell will end — with communist revolution, the destruction of capitalism, and the creation of a new system of equality.