PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As we entered the city we found it to be remarkably calm, especially at night. Many people sleep in the streets; some do this because they have lost their homes, others because their homes are presently unsafe, and because they fear there will be another earthquake. Workers here have built tent cities to live in. Despite the poor conditions, there is order and community. People arrange their tents into straight lines, leave spaces for public use, and organize a security crew to watch over them at night and to ensure that cars do not trample the tents.

I have not seen any evidence that people are hijacking cars on the roads and stealing provisions, as friends and the media had warned us. This trip has provided me with insight into many ways that the mass media misrepresents the current situation in Haiti. Their portrayal of Haiti is sensationalist because major corporations need to make a profit. Advertising dollars flow with images of “looters,” destruction, and social disorder. Thus, the media’s profit motives contribute to the misleading portrayal. The primary reason, however, is racism.

The idea that Haiti is filled with “robbers” and “rapists” is one that fits into the racist ideology that we are all fed. The idea that workers in Haiti are actually working together to survive under very difficult conditions or that people are organizing themselves into orderly tent cities — and that the major role of the United States has been to patrol with soldiers and guns — is not one that fits the image of Haiti or of the U.S.’s role there. In fact, there are a lot of soldiers all over the city. It is unclear what their function might be. They patrol the streets with big guns at the ready, yet I have not seen any soldiers engaged in the clean-up effort.  (Ed. note: see previous issue of CHALLENGE, and this issue’s front page, for analysis of the U.S. military’s role in Haiti)

Food For Profit, Not For Need

As we drove around Port-au-Prince we saw plenty of evidence of people looking for food. At several junctions, we saw people crowded outside of places where aid was being distributed. I have heard time and time again that there is plenty of food and water in Port-au-Prince, but that it is not reaching the people it needs to reach. The distribution effort is too slow and not systematic. 

We met several pastors outside one of the UN military bases who were soliciting food for their congregation. They complained to us about the lack of food and the poor nutritional quality of the food available — mostly white rice and sardines. There were long lines at places where water was available. Many people walked around with buckets and jugs looking for water to fill them. The situation is so critical that we saw a man drinking water from a puddle on the ground.
There are markets; supermarkets, restaurants and roadside stands that are open and sell food. This food is only available to people who have money to pay for it. There are private companies that sell water that can fill up your buckets or tanks with just a phone call. If you have the money you can survive here. If not, you are forced to search for food and water and hope that you are lucky enough to be close by when the distribution effort begins.

In the newspapers, I have read that there are security concerns with regard to food distribution. I saw people from the World Food Organization delivering food to an orphanage; armed guards accompanied them.
The only guns I have seen in Port-au-Prince, in fact, are those that belong to people in uniforms. The city is crawling with U.S. soldiers and UN soldiers. Although people surely are desperate for food, I have not seen evidence of attacks or violent robberies. Instead, I have seen lines of people waiting for food and water, and people using their creativity to look for food anywhere they can find it.

When we entered the city of Croix-de-Bouquet we saw many destroyed buildings, and a lot of people in need. There are little signs of how the city will begin to rebuild itself. One image I can’t get out of my mind is a destroyed school. It was a seven-story building. During the earthquake, it shook so hard that it completely crumbled. The walls disintegrated and each floor fell on top of the other. People say that there was a room full of students in the basement, and that they likely have died slowly of thirst and hunger, as no one came to clear the building and rescue them.

The loss of life in that one school is a clear example of the fact that many lives were lost, not just because the earth shook, but also because Haiti is a poor country. The incredibly poor quality of the seven-story building meant that the walls crumbled under the weight of the ceilings. The lack of sufficient heavy machinery meant that there were not enough trucks to come and remove the rubble and potentially save the lives of the children and teachers in the basement.

The accumulated human suffering in Haiti is unfathomable to me. Although I have now left Haiti, images of destruction run like a slideshow through my mind. The fact that many of these deaths were preventable makes it worse.

 A friend

In Obama’s State of the Union address, he grossly insulted the earthquake-stricken working class of U.S.-occupied Haiti. He talked for over an hour, mainly about domestic issues, concentrating on restoring U.S. bosses’ profits amid workers’ misery, while completely ignoring the more than 200,000 deaths — a toll vastly multiplied by the poverty U.S. capitalism forces on Haiti. (See CHALLENGE, 2/3) He passed over the millions more now suffering injuries, disease, homelessness and hunger under the guns of well-cared-for U.S. troops.

This attitude mirrors the racism that U.S. imperialism spreads worldwide, having super-exploited the overwhelmingly black population of Haiti for over a century, making it the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

The fact is, each dollar of U.S. government assistance includes “33 cents for U.S. military aid,” but only “nine cents for food.” (Associated Press, 1/27/10) This paltry “aid” fronts for stepped-up coercion. While the quake has Haiti’s workers down, U.S. bosses step on their backs. This lays bare capitalism’s utter unwillingness to relieve distressed workers.

Obama, however, did note an opportunity to convert the catastrophe into building U.S. imperialism. He praised “Americans who’ve dropped everything to go someplace they’ve never been and pull people they’ve never known from the rubble, prompting chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A! from people in Haiti. Obama and his ruling-class masters hope their half-baked aid can legitimize a full-fledged military presence.

U.S. Rulers Seek To Rescue Image, Not Haitian Workers

Some U.S. “relief” workers are openly patriotic and paramilitary like the NYPD-FDNY team that put in a brief, highly-publicized appearance in Haiti. But the most committed volunteers are genuinely compassionate people in groups like Doctors Without Borders (DWB). These sincere doctors are being mis-led by war-making bosses with an imperialist agenda. Unfortunately, all these groups ultimately serve the same U.S.-flag-waving purpose.

DWB’s actual leaders plan and carry out even greater assaults on the working class that would disgust most DWB doctors, if they were aware of them. DWB’s advisory (financial, that is) board boasts heavyweight U.S. imperialist credentials. (See box, page 2)

New York City’s police commissioner Ray Kelley, who sent in the cops and firefighters, is continuing his career in making Haiti a pro-U.S. police state. In 1994-1995, Kelley was training Haiti’s police as Director of the International Police Monitors of the multi-national force in Haiti. For this, then President Clinton awarded him a commendation for “exceptionally meritorious service.”

No Honor Among Thieves — U.S. Uses Disaster to Beat Rival
Capitalists and Trash
International ‘Law’

Obama & Co. pounced on Haiti to execute unilateral military action under humanitarian cover, infuriating French-, Russian- and Chinese-allied Venezuelan competitors for cheap Haitian labor. Led by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), (see box at right) liberal U.S. strategists have been cooking up such an operation for some time. An October 2009 CFR report, “Interventions to Stop Mass Atrocities and Genocide” called for the U.S. to “break the law” regarding national sovereignty and UN strictures, when overriding U.S. imperialist interests demand.

The paper cited war zones Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. But U.S. rulers grafted the phony humanitarian rationale onto Haiti. It read in part: “Force or threat of force may be used in cases of genocide and mass atrocities to, among other things, protect vulnerable populations, guard relief efforts, degrade perpetrators’ capacity for repression, and signal a willingness to escalate further if necessary.”

The U.S. has even invented Haitian “perpetrators” in the form of thugs hoarding relief supplies. But, to the contrary, workers in Haiti are collectively organizing food distribution. Even the NY Times reported (1/26) that, “New rules of hunger etiquette are emerging. Stealing food, it is widely known, might get you killed....No matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.” This working-class “communal rationing” contradicts the media’s demonization of young workers in Haiti. (See
article below). The main hoarders are, in fact, the U.S. military, who —  wielding police power — effectively control the bulk of supplies.

We must unite with Haiti’s workers and report their class solidarity in our shops, unions, barracks, community organizations, churches and schools, while organizing direct working-class relief, as best we can, to the workers on Haiti’s streets, by-passing the U.S. imperialists who have looted the country for over 100 years.

The profit system not only magnifies natural disasters’ effects on workers but uses them to further exploit our class. Our Party’s long-term goal is the earthquake of communist revolution that will bury the murderous billionaire class in the rubble of capitalism once and for all. 

• Doctors Without Borders (DWB) Chairman (and Exxon Mobil and JP MorganChase heir) Richard Rockefeller, M.D. heads the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the main bankroller of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank. Rockefeller’s CFR has helped guide every U.S. military invasion since World War II — massacring millions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan while training death squads in Latin America.

• DWB board member Robert van Zwieten toils for the Asian Development Bank (ADB). U.S.-dominated ADB provides the main funding for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project, a chief objective of Obama’s deadly Afghan surge.

• DWB board member Elizabeth Beshel is global treasurer of Goldman Sachs, which, while it doles out multi-million-dollar bonuses to its officers, serves Obama’s job-destroying regime as an unofficial Treasury Department aide.

• Victoria Bjorklund, also on DWB’s board, is a partner at Wall Street law firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. In a typical deal, Simpson greased a $2-billion loan from JP Morgan to Shell Oil and the Saudi national oil company, both major beneficiaries of U.S. war-making in Iraq, Pakistan and now Yemen.

• Partners in Health (PIH) is another relief operation in Haiti that betrays sincere activists. It is the founded and funded creation of Harvard University which functions as the U.S. rulers’ leading ideology factory. Imperialist blueblood James Houghton, director at Exxon and JP Morgan, leads Harvard’s governing body. In liberal guise, the university’s Kennedy School fine-tunes government schemes for wars abroad and police crackdowns at home.

PL’ers must work in these bosses’ “aid” organizations and win the many honest people within them to understand that while they are already making very positive contributions to the working class, the ruling class wants to use these groups to further their imperialist interests.

NEW YORK CITY, February 3 — “We will have to rebuild Haiti all over again. Maybe this time we should make it communist,” exclaimed a student. “What do you guys think?” she asked. This occurred at our emergency student government forum last week in a local high school about the crisis in Haiti

Thirty students attended to hear a report from a high school student and a staff member who had just returned from Haiti. Representatives from two local student governments and their advisors also came. The students and staff were extremely inspired by the moving account of how working-class people are dealing with the horrors of capitalism and imperialism.

One speaker explained how his family organized food for their neighbors and tried to help everyone in the community. He then related the chaos, disorganization and long lines at the U.S. Embassy. People were exhausted, hungry and thirsty. They were forced to sign promissory loans to repay the U.S. government for their return flight to the U.S. which really angered the audience.

A staff member who went to Haiti to see her family and help out explained how she got there — riding a horse from the Dominican Republic for the last leg of her journey! She brought nutrition bars and water to give out to everyone she saw. She described how so many buildings were destroyed but that the U.S. Embassy remained intact. If the recently rebuilt embassy could withstand the quake, why weren’t workers’ homes, schools and hospitals built with the same care?

Students raised many important issues connected to the earthquake: was U.S. imperialism or Haiti’s history of dictatorships mainly to blame? How the media is using racism to further attack Haiti’s working class; and what we can do to support the people there.

We also reviewed some history, pointing out how U.S. bosses, including Disney, have long reaped profits there. In 1993, Disney chairman Michael Eisner made $203 million while workers sewing Mickey Mouse pajamas made 12 cents an hour. We said students and staff should take matters into our own hands and organize relief and solidarity activities that are not micro-managed by supervisors and principals. One student suggested organizing walkouts and protests against the U.S. military occupation which defends U.S. corporations that pay Haiti’s workers starvation wages.

We understand the desperate situation in Haiti and were very thankful that these two friends could share what they saw and did. But students and teachers did leave with a feeling of optimism, that we must be involved in everything, from fund-raising to solidarity trips, to support our working-class brothers and sisters in Haiti.