Haiti: Capitalism, colonialism, and zombies -

Haiti: Capitalism, colonialism, and zombies. Reading notes on

Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst

Reading notes on

Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst (Reaktion Books, 2015)

2 Phantom Haiti

....This longer historical perspective on Haiti in the Western imagination offers the broader context for now concentrating on the crucial years in which the Caribbean zombi translated and transformed into the zombie in American culture.

.... Under slavery, Vodou operated secretly in defiance of the Code Noir. But even after independence, the ruling elite in Port-au-Prince tended to regard Vodou practices as a peasant superstition that blocked progress and development towards modern statehood, adopting a European Enlightenment model of the nation. It was only in the 1920s that leftist political intellectuals like the anthropologist Jean Price-Mars suggested that Vodou could form the basis of a new indigenous national identity in Haiti. Most anti-colonial thinkers – like Fanon – continued to regard superstitious belief as a regressive force, a marker of subjection, not liberation.

    Secret and disavowed before and after independence, Vodou steadily acquired a monstrous and phantasmal status in nineteenth-century travel writing. Vaudoux was an elusive cult mentioned only marginally before 1850 (and not at all in Thomas Madiou's four-volume history of the republic, published in 1848).3 Yet it started to be the defining element of the Haitian republic in the 1850s, when the politics of race and slavery became incendiary during the American Civil War. In this context, an independent black state only a little bit further away than the American slave states in the South required ideological demonization by the enemies of abolition. Black autonomy had to indicate depravity and credulity. When the ex-slave and soldier Faustin Soulouque became president of Haiti in 1847 and ruled as Emperor Faustin I between 1849 and 1859, Haiti was portrayed as returning to a savage African state of bestial cruelty and superstition. It was emphasized that Soulouque was a 'pure' black African who had massacred the mulatto ruling elite in Port-au-Prince on coming to power, eliminating the last traces of white influence. The scientific racism of Count Gobineau's notorious Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–5) used Haiti as the exemplar of race degeneration. A lurid depiction of this savage state, Soulouque and His Empire, was published by Gustave d'Alaux in French in 1856 and translated into English in 1861. Towards the end of the American Civil War, there was also propagandistic use of the Bizoton Affair, a trial in a place near Port-au-Prince that appeared definitively to link Vaudoux with human sacrifice and cannibalism, the basest marker of savagery imaginable in Western thought. This was hugely important in further darkening the reputation of Haiti.

    A detailed account of the Bizoton trial was published in English in Spenser St John's Hayti; or, The Black Republic in 1884, some twenty years after the fact, suggesting the story still carried a lot of cultural freight. St John was a career diplomat who had served as the British consul in Haiti from 1863 to 1875. Although when in the Far East he had scandalized his fellow colonial rulers by openly acknowledging his three children with his Malay mistress, his disdain for black Haitians was absolute. In his chapter 'Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism', St John suggests that the arrival of Soulouque made Vaudoux effectively the official religion of the rulers of the republic, and that this dark alliance was continued by Soulouque's successors after he was deposed. St John detailed rituals that included 'the adoration of the snake', sacrifices of animals and the 'goat without horns' (which St John understands as meaning the sacrifice of human children). The ceremony of the snake, St John asserts, using second- and third-hand accounts, 'is accompanied by everything horrible which delirium could imagine to render it more imposing',4 a formulation that has no content but positively invites the reader to fantasize horrific things.

    The Bizoton trial develops directly from these stories; the record of the law is again supposed to provide objective truth value of an horrific tale. In December 1863, the court heard, the labourer Congo Pellé had sought intercession from a Vaudoux papaloi, who had demanded a human sacrifice. Congo's niece was delivered; she was strangled, decapitated, her head cooked for soup and her flesh for a stew, with some body parts eaten raw, participants later confessed in court. The disappearance of another child in the area for a second sacrificial ritual had exposed the horrific plot.

    St John is contemptuous of the process of the court (modelled on the French, not British, system), where the fatal confession had obviously been beaten out of the defendants and testimony was whispered to the judge by those too terrified to attest in open court. Yet he points out with dogged empiricism that 'there, on the table before the judge, was the skull of the murdered girl, and in the jar the remains of the soup and the calcined bones.'5 Eight members of the honfort were condemned to death, and St John's account contains an intriguing last detail:

The Vaudoux priests gave out that although the deity would permit the execution, he would only do it to prove to his votaries his power by raising them all again from the dead. To prevent their bodies being carried away during the night (they had been buried near the place of execution), picquets of troops were placed round the spot; but in the morning three of the graves were found empty and the body of the two priests and the priestess had disappeared.6    Presumably, if the word had been available to him, St John would have said something about the zombi at this point, but his account never uses the term. St John rationally dismisses the story as an act of collusion with the gendarmerie, a further indication of how sunk in superstition Haiti has become. A few pages later, however, St John quotes from an official French report of 1867 about a disturbed grave and the occupant found 'killed' a second time, stabbed through the heart. The report hints at 'a sleeping potion' used to place victims in a drugged state that doctors mistake for death. After the funeral, the bodies are disinterred, killed and their body parts used in rituals. St John picks up the phrase li gagné chagrin, local Kreyòl for 'a sort of anaemia of the mind' that is affected by this drug. This is tantalizing, but St John offers no further details.7

....This paranoid vision of savage Haiti as a den of conniving cannibals was reproduced wholesale during the American occupation. Richard Loederer's Voodoo Fire in Haiti, for instance, published in New York in 1935, is breathless about 'secret cults, black magic, and human sacrifices'. These have been woven into the thread of the black republic from the beginning, Loederer claims, explaining that 'from out of these sexual orgies grew the atavistic impulse towards cannibalism.'24 A native informant has told him the story of the Bizoton Affair, now sensationally retitled 'the "Congo Bean Stew" trial'. This material is clearly just lifted from St John's 50-year-old book. Another invented informant is given the words of William Seabrook, which shows how quickly the older cannibal fantasy started to incorporate zombies in the 1930s where they had been entirely absent before: 'Voodoo is strong; stronger even than death. The Papaloi can raise the dead. He breathes life into corpses who get up and behave like men. These creatures are bound forever to their master's will. They are called "zombies."'25 From very early on in America's engagement, the depiction of Haiti is largely a palimpsest of recycled textual fantasy.

    Another example of this American view was John Houston Craige, a U.S. Marine who was transferred to train the Haitian police force for three years and published Cannibal Cousins in 1935. Rebellion and Vodou are as usual tied together in Craige's sketch of the republic, and Vodou is routinely associated with cannibalism from the earliest days of independence. Craige records a general disbelief of these stories among American Marines, but cites the legal case against Papa Cadeus, who had been an important figure in the Cacos Rebellion against the American occupiers, and a Vodou papaloi long rumoured to use cannibalistic rituals involving the 'Goat without Horns'. Craige reports (second hand) that human bones had been found buried around the Cadeus honfort, and that the priest had been sentenced to death by the court in the early 1920s, a judgement foolishly commuted at a time when the Americans were under scrutiny for their own alleged atrocities. In a later chapter titled 'Doctor Faustus, Cannibal', Craige charts the 'marvellous tale' of a lowly black peasant from Marbeuf who rises to become the chief of police in Port-au-Prince by virtue of his deal with a Vodou priest.26 It is said, Craige reports, that his rise came at the cost of the sacrifice of one baby a year for over 40 years. This is recirculated gossip: a patina of savagery rubs off, and even if untrue it serves to abject Haitians as credulous fools for believing such a story. It also deflected any critical attention from the organized political and guerrilla opposition to the occupation.27

    This demonization continued long into the post-occupation era, particularly under the dictatorship of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier (who came to power in 1957), in part because this brutal regime carefully cultivated fear and obedience among the population by associating Duvalier with Vodou and occult secret societies. Duvalier, who trained in medicine, was closely associated with the scholar of Vodou Lorimer Denis and they co-wrote the study The Gradual Evolution of Vodou. In the 1960s, when gruesome news of Duvalier's atrocities began to circulate (helpful material in an era of violent anti-colonial wars against Western powers), the details mixed atrocity, Vodou and supernatural doings in the presidential palace. After a failed rebellion in 1963, Duvalier was alleged to have ordered the leader's 'head to be cut off, packed in ice and brought to the palace in an Air Force plane. News spread around Port au Prince that Papa Doc was having long sessions with the head; that he had induced it to disclose the exiles' plans.'28 Through stories of sorcery, Duvalier became associated with the Guédé lwa, the Vodou spirits who preside over death and the cemetery, and he deliberately dressed to echo the signature style of Baron Samedi in a black hat, dark glasses and funeral suit: a figure to preside over a funeral. In an odd feedback loop, Duvalier survived by exploiting American fantasies of Haitian cannibalism and supernaturalism, reimporting them to terrorize his own population....

     In the 1980s, cannibalistic fantasies specifically about Haiti returned again, this time with catastrophic humanitarian consequences. In the very early years of the AIDS pandemic, it was a common speculation that the syndrome was invading American shores through African or Caribbean carriers. Signs of the syndrome were particularly rife in the immigrant Haitian population in New York. In 1982, AIDS was considered 'an epidemic Haitian virus' and a year later the association with 'Voodoo practices' was first made.32 In 1986, the august Journal of the American Medical Association published a letter from a doctor voicing the hypothesis that those attending Vodou rituals 'may be unsuspectingly infected with AIDS by ingestion, inhalation or dermal contact with contaminated ritual substances, as well as by sexual activity', citing Wade Davis as the sole authority. The journal titled the contribution 'Night of the Living Dead II'.33 The drinking of blood invoked four centuries of an association with the eating of flesh, cannibalism and magic. The high incidence of AIDS among Haitians, one reporter declared, was 'a clue from the grave, as though a zombie, leaving a trail of unwinding gauze bandages and rotting flesh' had appeared at the doors of the hospital.34 There was no recognition that it was sexual tourism between America and the Caribbean that was the most obvious source of infection.

    For the historian Laënnec Hurbon, Haiti and its Vodou practices have long been sites of American projection, places where travellers 'find in Vodou their own fantasies'.35 It is generally agreed that while ritual anthropophagy (the eating of human flesh) can occur in highly ritualized circumstances, the 'cannibal' is an invention of colonial discourse. What testimonies of Vodou rituals involving the eating of flesh are most likely to be are literalizations of highly metaphorical practices. Vodou is, after all, a practice of possession and dispossession, of roles and masks, where one thing stands in for or displaces another and the metaphysical transposition of identities is at the core of events (just as the transubstantiation of the 'body of Christ' is at the heart of Christian ritual). In a discussion of the Kreyòl term mangé moun ('eating man'), Erika Bourguignon noted its extremely flexible metaphorical range in Haiti, where greed and envy, domination and control were translated into talk of oral aggression or acts of devouring, and the metaphorical transpositions of animal and human flesh.36 Deftness in both language and ritual practice outwits leaden visitors, particularly if they filter what is witnessed through a pre-prepared grid of interpretations about 'savages', witch-doctors or cannibals....

Haiti: Capitalism, colonialism, and zombies

Reading notes:

Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst (Reaktion Books, 2015)

Introduction

....The zombies do not do the cultural work of monstrous others, slimy tentacular aliens or ancient cephalopodic gods raised from the deep. Instead, they are simply us reflected back, depersonalized, flat-lined by the alienating tedium of modern existence. They are the pressing problem of the modern world's sheer number of people, the population explosion, bodies crammed into super-cities and suburban sprawls, demanding satiation beyond any plan for sustainable living. Survival horror is the crisis of the last representatives of rugged Western individualism trying to wrest themselves from the unregarded life of the anonymized mass.

     It is then a short step to reading the zombie as the symbolic figure for contemporary capitalism. The zombie is 'the official monster of the recession', a relatively new addition to 'the capitalist grotesque', one shouty Marxist tome declares. 'What is striking about capitalist monstrosity', David McNally continues, 'is its elusive everydayness.'4 Karl Marx didn't have the zombie metaphor to hand, but he did sometimes write of capital as vampiric, sucking dead labour from living bodies. Now that contemporary capitalism has become both massively more extensive (reaching around the globe) and intensive (penetrating and commodifying body and mind), this seems to make the zombie horde the privileged emblem of globalized hyper-capitalism, a runaway world always on the brink of apocalypse. Zombiedom as contagion, as sparking off exponential viral vectors through the communication networks of the global village, is only another figure for representing the risky interconnection of the world's economy. The zombie is the Gothic version of the catastrophe that haunts what sociologists call 'the risk society'. 'The deepest pleasure of the zombie story', another radical critic declares,

"lies always in its depiction of the break, that exhilarating moment of long hoped-for upheaval: the fulfilment of a sometimes avowed, sometimes disavowed, desire to see power at last unmade, laid finally to waste and torn limb from limb – and our structures of dominion and domination replaced finally and forever with Utopia, if only for the already dead."

....while there is a familiar history of the emergence of the zombie, this needs to be situated in a host of other cross-currents. The zombie is in fact one of the most unstable figures in the panoply of the undead, and has never stayed fixed for long. This is not surprising when you realize that 'zombie' is a word that emerges from the grim transports of populations between Africa, Europe and the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South. The word originates from a belief system that is a product of the slave trade plied between Africa, Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards. The zombie is rarely stable because it is a syncretic object, a product of interaction, of translation and mistranslation between cultures. Possible African linguistic candidates for the origin of the world includendzumbi ('corpse' in the Mitsogo language of Gabon), nzambi ('spirit of dead person' in the Kongo language of the Congo) and zumbi (a fetish or ghost in the Kikongo and Bonda languages). In the Caribbean, speculations on the origins of zombi include sources in Arawak (zemi means spirit) or even a Kreyòl derivation from the French les ombres. It also bears some relationship to the words 'jumbee' and 'duppy', more familiar from Jamaican folklore as umbrella terms for a wide array of ghosts, spirits and changelings. The passage of the French Caribbean zombi to the North American pulp fiction zombie in the 1920s and '30s is also a complicated but crucial story to tell.9 The American zombie is a mistranslation and weird creative elaboration of the Caribbean zombi, yet all the time it keeps an undertow of violent colonial history in plain sight.

     The zombie, in other words, is a product of what has been called 'the circum-Atlantic world': 'Bounded by Europe, Africa, and the Americas, North and South, this economic and cultural system entailed vast movements of people and commodities to experimental destinations.' This created what the theatre historian Joseph Roach terms 'an oceanic interculture' marked by the hybridization of peoples and beliefs.10 It also creates a poétique de la relation, a cross-cultural poetics.11 A crucial part of the story, then, is that the zombie is a result of the Black Atlantic, 'a webbed network, between the local and the global', a dynamic interaction of far-flung points on the map, brought into contact through centuries of maritime trade and colonization that produces unpredictable forms of cultural mixing or métissage.12 The meaning of the zombie changes radically from point to point, time to time, twisting and turning, constantly subverting, reverting and inverting itself, sometimes a positive belief held in a magical or theological frame, just as often a negative projection of primitive superstition onto others.

     If the zombie emerges in the slippage between cultures, all the same this is not a preface to celebrating the zombie as some kind of sliding signifier that can mean anything we want it to mean. Wherever it comes to stop, the zombie is still branded by the murderous history of slavery and colonial dispossession that underpins its origins. It remains connected to the meaning of Haiti and the islands of the Antilles to the modern world, and the systematic violence, expropriated labour, rebellion and revolution in those areas, however far it travels. What is complex about the figure is often the way this atrocious undertow is at once avowed and disavowed as the zombie stumbles through very different cultures.

    

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1 From Zombi to Zombie: Lafcadio Hearn and William Seabrook

....Seabrook was immersed in that strand of Modernism that expressed its disgust of bourgeois civilization after the Great War by embracing what it perceived as the 'savage' vitality of the 'primitive' black world as an answer to Western decadence and decay. This 'negrophilia' stretched from Picasso's famous use of African masks in his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) after visiting the ethnographic display in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, to the craze around La Revue nègre in Paris in 1925, which made a star of the near-naked black dancer Josephine Baker. Paris in the 1920s was a city 'in the grip of a virus noir'.16 Michel Leiris delighted in another African American revue, Black Birds, declaring that it shattered the polite tedium of bourgeois art by reconnecting with 'our primitive ancestry', and exclaimed that the show was the perfect exemplum of 'why we have so little esteem left for anything that doesn't wipe out the succession of centuries in one stroke and put us, stripped of everything, naked, in a more immediate and newer world'.17 Seabrook was the same: he wished to 'escape modernity through initiation into blackness'.18

    

....Seabrook travelled the world in search of the wild savagery that would shake the prison of his white identity. Most often, though, he found this in the bottom of a bottle, and he wrote a remarkable memoir of his treatment for alcoholism, Asylum.

....It is only in later chapters [of The Magic Island, 1924] that Seabrook provides any proper context for his visit, when he travels to the island of La Gonave to meet its famous 'White King'. Faustin Wirkus was the American Marine Corps sergeant promoted to effective governor of this island in the Gulf of Gonave, 30 miles from Port-au-Prince. Wirkus 'ruled' this territory as the lone white American representative on the island. After Seabrook's visit, Wirkus became something of a celebrity in America, published his own memoirs and went on the lecture circuit with his 'exotic' films of Haitian life. Seabrook praises the Marine for weaving himself into peasant structures of belief and justice, rather than trying to impose foreign values: this is how Wirkus is crowned 'King', symbolic companion to the native Queen.

    The key point is that in visiting Wirkus, Seabrook's travelogue finally acknowledges that his whole trip is made possible by the occupation of Haiti by American forces in the period between 1915 and 1934. His impressions of Haiti are entirely dictated by this act of colonization, and this context is central to understanding how the Caribbean zombi made the leap to become the American zombie.

    The occupation of Haiti was part of a larger series of American interventions in the Pacific and Caribbean in the early stages of America's imperial expansion into its sphere of influence from the 1890s: the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898, the occupation of Cuba and Honduras, the creation of Panama, the troops sent into Mexico in 1914. Haiti occupied a unique position in the Caribbean in that it had been an independent republic since 1804, changing its name from Saint-Domingue to the indigenous Arawak name Haiti. It was the only state to be built from a successful slave rebellion at that time. This revolt began in 1791, started by a group of 'Black Jacobins' inspired by the rhetoric of universal liberty promised by the French Revolution; it had to defeat French, Spanish and English troops and a last Napoleonic attempt at reinvading the island before winning final independence.

    Saint-Domingue had been the most profitable colony in the French empire, pouring vast wealth into French port cities like Brittany and Marseilles from rich harvests of sugar and coffee. The wealth of a substantial portion of the French bourgeoisie depended on the output of this single colony. Its profits were so vast because the plantations exercised a brutal system of slavery that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of African slaves throughout the eighteenth century in the relentless pursuit of maximum return. The infamous newly independent black republic wrote a constitution outlawing foreign ownership of land. For this and other outrages, Haiti was demonized in white Europe and America for a century as an affront to benign accounts of the civilizing virtues of imperialism. The fledgling post-colonial state was virtually crippled from birth by the huge reparations of 150 million francs it was forced to pay in 1825 to foreign plantation owners for loss of income in return for limited trading deals. Haiti has been in debt dependency ever since.

    In July 1915, the U.S. intervened in Haiti, ostensibly to restore political stability and avoid civil war following the murder of the president Guillaume Sam, who had been torn apart by his own citizens. The Americans depicted themselves in paternalist terms, and Haiti as its savage, childish 'ward' requiring benevolent guidance. American capitalists had actually been steadily securing control of Haiti's Banque Nationale over the previous decade, and the finances of the country had effectively been taken over by the New York City Bank before the U.S. Navy arrived. Haiti was again a pioneer, this time in experiencing the neo-imperialism of global finance at the start of the twentieth century.

    American diplomats installed a new puppet president and forced the passage of a constitution which allowed for foreign ownership of land again. Much of the constitution was drafted by Assistant Secretary to the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. A $40 million loan secured from New York banks in 1919 further indebted Haiti. American capital then set about reconstituting large plantations. New business ventures, such as HASCO, were investment opportunities that promised large returns to their investors. Improvements in the infrastructure of the immiserated state of Haiti were funded by heavy taxes; most Haitians could not pay in cash and were forced to do so through the supply of their indentured labour. The return of the corvée gang within a year of American occupation, working on roads and railroads, was seen by many as the return of slavery.

    The Americans fought a long-term insurrection by guerrilla rebels (known as cacos) and also, alongside the Catholic Church and Protestant missionaries, a war against 'native superstition', which involved attempts to systematically dismantle any Vodou religious worship among the peasantry. This resulted only in a black-market trade in 'Voodoo drums' seized from honforts (ceremonial spaces) destroyed in police and army raids. In 1920, allegations about atrocities allegedly committed by Marines, reported by the black American journalist James Weldon Johnson in The Nation, resulted in an American Senate Committee inquiry that undermined the discourse of paternalism. Haiti became a political focus for black civil rights and Negritude movements across the interwar period. By 1922, HASCO was in financial collapse and had to be recapitalized. During this slump, tens of thousands of Haitians travelled to neighbouring Dominica; up to 25,000 of them were later slaughtered in the ethnic massacres of 1937 known as El Corte, 'the cutting', thousands of macheted bodies of Haitian workers flung into the Massacre River. There was also mass migration to find work in Cuba, some estimating that nearly a quarter of the male population moved in this period. A shift in American foreign policy after the election of 1933 ensured the end of the occupation in the context of non-intervention. The U.S. withdrew from Haiti on 15 August 1934.

    Seabrook's visit came towards the end of the occupation, at a time when the euphemistically named 'Hygiene Service' of the occupier was engaged in yet another major drive to disrupt an insurgency they closely associated with Vodou worship. They were being assisted by a very active Catholic Church campaign against peasant beliefs. The weirder and more sunk in superstition savage Haiti was, the more the language of Empire and Church as bringers of enlightenment justified intervention. Seabrook's Modernist primitivism clearly disliked any pious Christian interference with savage energies (his rejection of Christianity was wrapped up in his rejection of his father's evangelical ministry). This is why he approved of the king of Gonave's decision to merge with local customs rather than try to eradicate them, and why he embraced with typical colonial melancholy what he believed were the last traces of authentic rituals and customs before modernity swept them away.

    But Seabrook was also blind to the conditions that created his 'dead men working in the cane fields'. The cultural resistance to slave plantations, from a century of building nationalist myths commemorating the violent refusal of the white masters, meant that the large HASCO plant in Cul-de-Sac found it very difficult to find labour for its revival of large-scale harvesting. Gang bosses brought in outsiders under duress; they were referred to locally as zombis. If slavery is, as Orlando Patterson has evocatively put it, a form of social death, to be returned to slavery by the American occupiers was an uncanny return after a century of freedom: no wonder the 'undead' roamed the HASCO fields. 'The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular. Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the boundaries with social and supernatural impunity.'33 So the imbecilic state Seabrook diagnosed could just as well have been the exhaustion of corvée work, and the shuffling gait might have come either from being in chains or from a distinctive way of moving that slaves developed to conserve energy. There is a reason why so many African American dances are based around ideas of 'the shuffle'. What Seabrook thinks he sees as a savage survival is actually a product of the very industrial modernity he believes he is leaving behind. 'Could there have been a more fitting image of and inclusive commentary on the proletarianization of the displaced Haitian peasant sharecropper than a crew of zombies toiling in the HASCO cane fields?' one historian asks.34

....The Haitian zombi has accrued a much more fixed set of cultural identifications and meanings. As my reading of William Seabrook's The Magic Island has begun to suggest, this is down to the very specific role that the black republic of Haiti has played in the colonial imagination of Europe and America since independence in 1804.

     Seabrook's sensational story of the zombie needs to be understood as the story of a creature emerging from a long history of demonization of Haiti, which was focused for decades on overheated fantasies of Voodoo, cannibalism and black magic. Once this sense of historical undertow is in place, we can begin to place Seabrook as merely one voice in the cacophony that unleashed the zombies that poured into American popular culture in the last years of the colonial occupation in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

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Imperialist scorn, Cuban solidarity on display after earthquake in Haiti – The Militant

Imperialist scorn, Cuban solidarity on display after earthquake in Haiti

BY SETH GALINSKY

Vol. 85/No. 33

September 6, 2021

BRIGADA MÉDICA CUBANA EN HAITÍVolunteer Cuban health workers treat earthquake victims, other patients outside hospital in Corail, Haiti, Aug. 24. Cuban internationalists have worked continuously in Haiti for 22 years.

With more than 2,100 dead, over 12,000 injured and an estimated 136,000 families left homeless after an Aug. 14 earthquake that ravaged southwest Haiti, the trickle of international aid is nowhere near what is needed.

Just like in previous disasters there — including the 2010 earthquake that left about 300,000 dead and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 — the grossly inadequate aid shows that working people in Haiti don’t count for much in the eyes of the capitalist rulers in Washington and other imperialist powers. Despite the death toll from previous disasters, Washington and the succession of Haitian governments it has dominated haven’t improved the utterly inadequate health care available on the island.

The sharp exception is the internationalist aid from revolutionary Cuba, whose medical workers have provided care and health education in Haiti continuously since 1998, when it sent 350 volunteers in the wake of Hurricanes George and Mitch. To combat the spread of cholera introduced in Haiti by U.N. troops in 2010, the Cuban health care workers went house to house in the most isolated mountain regions, educating people about the necessary measures to prevent the spread of the disease.

Among thousands of Cuban medical volunteers providing health care all over the world, there are currently 253 doctors, nurses and other medical workers in Haiti, who will remain there as long as they are needed. This is a significant contribution in a country where there are at best 2,500 doctors, most in private practice and concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods.

Cuban internationalist medical workers already in the hardest hit earthquake zone began setting up makeshift hospitals and operating rooms. At the same time, they continue treating and aiding people across the country. Some of the volunteers are “sleeping in tents, like the more than 130,000 families who lost everything on Aug. 14,” reported Trabajadores, the weekly newspaper of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers.

For the last 22 years, these medical volunteers have collaborated closely with their Haitian colleagues and working people, including giving classes in the health centers and individual homes to raise consciousness about preventive medicine and sanitation.

Proud of Cuba’s socialist revolution

While the Cuban volunteers are scrupulous about not interfering in the internal politics in Haiti, they are proud of representing their socialist revolution.

We are “showing in practice the values of solidarity and humanism that the heroic guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara has bequeathed to us,” reads a post on the Facebook page of Cuba’s mission in Haiti. Guevara was part of the Marxist leadership in Cuba that led workers and farmers to take power and subsequently served on internationalist missions to Congo and Bolivia.

The U.S. rulers and other opponents of the Cuban Revolution have been trying to stir up divisions in Cuba over the challenge the revolution faces in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the tightening of the U.S. embargo. It’s a struggle for Cuba to get raw materials and syringes it needs to produce and administer its own vaccines.

Despite these obstacles, the Cuban government reported Aug. 24 it has now obtained supplies needed to inoculate everyone on the island and expects to have done so by the end of November.

“You are keeping medical brigades in other countries, as if there were doctors and medicine to spare” in Cuba, complained the editors of CiberCuba, a Spanish-based website, Aug. 23. “Everything is for propaganda, isn’t it?”

These counterrevolutionaries, who defend the dog-eat-dog morality of the capitalist market, are incapable of understanding that such solidarity is not “for propaganda,” but is in fact a product of working-class values that are the bedrock of a living socialist revolution. “We don’t offer what we have left over,” Cuban volunteers often explain. “We share what we have.”

What a difference from the so-called nonprofits, nongovernmental agencies and private companies that use the disaster in Haiti ostensibly to provide aid, but in fact to legitimize their operations and line their own pockets.

Working-class solidarity

In addition to the aid from the Cubans, workers and farmers in Haiti have turned to each other’s solidarity to get through the current crisis. “I have a friend who came from Port-au-Prince to bring me water and food and I shared that with my neighbors,” Marcel Francois told the press.

Dominican journalist Deisy Toussaint, who traveled by land from Port-au-Prince to Les Cayes, told channel 24 TV that she saw areas with homes totally destroyed, where five days after the quake no aid or rescue crews had arrived. “People told us they could hear people still alive under the rubble, and all they had were their hands to try to get them out.”

In the absence of any serious government response to the disaster, a handful of recent graduates from Haiti’s public medical school pooled their money for supplies and set up a clinic in Marceline.

More than 100 years of U.S. imperialist domination and superexploitation are perpetuating the miserable conditions working people confront in Haiti, ensuring natural disasters rapidly become social catastrophes.

Imperialist scorn, Cuban solidarity on display after earthquake in Haiti – The Militant

Earthquake, decades of US plunder brings social catastrophe in Haiti – The Militant

Earthquake, decades of US plunder brings social catastrophe in Haiti – The Militant

Presidential election in Peru reflects rising class tensions – The Militant

Pedro Castillo, Peru’s newly elected president, took office July 28 in the midst of sharp political polarization and rising class tensions fed by a deepening economic and social crisis. Castillo, the candidate of Peru Libré (Free Peru), a party on the left of capitalist politics, defeated conservative Keiko Fujimori in a run-off by a razor-thin margin of 44,000 votes.

Fujimori and her ruling-class allies sought unsuccessfully to get the election results overturned. They and their imperialist allies in Washington claimed Castillo’s government was Marxist.

The change in government follows the deaths of more than 187,000 people from coronavirus, the world’s worst per capita death toll. Protests broke out in February after revelations that politicians and their relatives were given the COVID-19 vaccine months before the government began a public vaccination program.

Cuts on spending and the privatization of health care by previous governments have left working people with little or no access to medical care. In a country with a population of 32 million, there are only 276 mechanical ventilators, which are key to treating seriously ill coronavirus patients.

A quarter of Peru’s population lacks running water. Three out of four workers are self-employed in the “informal economy.” Many lost their family’s only source of income during strict COVID-related government lockdowns. While these forced many workers out of their jobs, it failed to contain infections. Some 10% more Peruvians now live in poverty than before the pandemic.

Castillo claims to be an ‘outsider’

Castillo, a former schoolteacher, union activist and small farmer, capitalized on long-simmering anger among working people. His campaign slogan, “No more poor people in a rich country,” helped him win votes, especially in the resource-rich southern Andes, where his promises to nationalize gas deposits and the mining industry got support.

Peru is one of the world’s top producers of copper, zinc, silver and gold, and has significant oil and natural gas resources. Around the world, mining companies are having some of the most profitable years on record, according to the Wall Street Journal. Profits for the top 40 mining companies are projected to be $118 billion in 2021 — up from $70 billion in 2020 and $61 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, governments in semicolonial countries like Peru, where mining is a key industry, face mounting debts to imperialist banks.

Under the government of Alberto Fujimori, conditions more favorable for capitalist investors in mining, oil, and logging operations were put in place in the 1990s. His regime suspended the constitution, tossed aside civil liberties and used brutal repression against its rivals. It also carried out widespread privatizations of banking and health care, cut subsidies and lifted price controls on basic necessities, ravaging the living standards of working people. These economic policies have been continued.

Top officials from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund lavished praise on Fujimori and every Peruvian government until now for managing the growth of the country’s capitalist economy at the expense of working people.

These policies also helped spawn a terrorist Maoist guerrilla force known as Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. This counterrevolutionary group was responsible for 12,000 killings, leading to brutal repression by the regime and further impoverishment of workers and peasants.

Alberto Fujimori, the father of Keiko Fujimori, is currently in prison after being convicted on corruption and murder charges. Largely supported by record high prices of commodities, Peru’s gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 5.6% between 2001 and 2016. But conditions for the majority of working people have been devastating.

Castillo is not the first bourgeois presidential candidate to run as an “outsider.” Nor is he the first to tap the hopes of working people, including indigenous populations long subject to discrimination, for greater control of the country’s resources. Ollanta Humala, elected in 2011, vowed to nationalize some industries, fight endemic corruption and excoriated the “neo-liberal model.”

Castillo’s campaign claims — touted in the capitalist media as a radical “socialist” agenda — rattled national and foreign investors. The value of the country’s currency, the sol, plunged after the election and inflation has risen. Since then, Castillo has reassured mining bosses that their interests are safe. He says he now favors “prudent” tax reforms instead.

“We are not Chavistas, we are not communists, we are not extremists,” Castillo said last month.

His government has taken Peru out of the Lima group of Latin American nations over that group’s calls for intervention to overturn the government of Venezuela. Peruvian Foreign Minister Héctor Béjar called July 30 for an end to Washington’s sanctions targeting the Nicolás Maduro government.

Castillo has backed off from his campaign call for a constitutional assembly to rewrite the 1993 charter written under Alberto Fujimori.

The need to replace the current constitution is presented by those on the left of capitalist politics in Peru as the main task ahead. They offer no program for mobilizing working people to fight for jobs, universal health care, greater control of production to protect land and labor, and other demands that can improve conditions.

These are the kinds of struggles, organized against the employers and their capitalist government, through which workers and farmers can chart a course forward. The best guide is the example of the Cuban Revolution, where Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement led working people to take political power into their own hands and carry through a socialist revolution.

Presidential election in Peru reflects rising class tensions – The Militant

Defend, emulate Cuba’s socialist revolution! End US embargo! – The Militant

NEW YORK — Why does Cuba’s socialist revolution continue to live, fight and set an example worldwide more than 60 years after workers and farmers there took power? What makes class and social relations in Cuba so different from anywhere else in the world today?

Because 62 years ago the working people of Cuba were led by a Marxist leadership to make a socialist revolution, Martín Koppel and Róger Calero told a Militant Labor Forum here Aug. 14. Both are members of the Socialist Workers Party; Calero is the party’s candidate for mayor of New York.

“The revolutionary government was a new state power — workers power — that organized workers, farmers, youth and others,” Koppel said. “A socialist revolution is marked by a different kind of social relations, based on working-class solidarity, not capitalist competition.”

“There were two great socialist revolutions in the 20th century, one in Russia, the other in Cuba,” Koppel said, quoting from a letter sent by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes to Cuban President Raúl Castro in November 2016 after the death of Fidel Castro (reprinted in this issue). In it Barnes noted that Castro’s “highest achievement was forging in struggle a revolutionary cadre, a communist cadre, capable of leading the workers and farmers of Cuba to establish the first free territory of the Americas and successfully defend it for more than five and a half decades” — now more than six! — “against the determination to destroy it by the mightiest and most brutal empire the world has known.”

The Cuban Revolution has been distinguished from the start by its proletarian internationalist record  — sending volunteer combatants to aid anti-imperialist struggles, or doctors and nurses to respond to earthquakes and hurricanes, and to combat Ebola and COVID-19.

“The U.S. rulers fear that workers and farmers around the world, including here in the United States, will follow the living example of Cuba’s socialist revolution,” Koppel said.

Transformation of social relations

The leadership of the Cuban Revolution instilled in working people confidence in their own capacities to transform and lead society, Koppel said. This transformation began during the revolutionary war itself, as the Rebel Army began to organize working people in liberated regions to take charge of health care, education, justice and agriculture.

In the days following the Jan. 1, 1959, popular insurrection that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the Rebel Army crossed the island and in every town along the way Castro spoke with crowds of workers and peasants to explain what they were fighting for.

Peasants were led to carry out a sweeping land reform. Workers “took more and more control of job conditions. They expropriated the capitalists’ factories, banks and big landholdings, and began to organize the economy to meet the needs of the majority, not the profits for a small exploiting class,” Koppel said. “Decisive steps were taken to outlaw racist discrimination, and to draw millions of women into economic, social and political activity.”

In 1961 an army of volunteer teachers, largely teenagers, spread across the countryside and wiped out illiteracy in a year, which also helped break down divisions between working people in city and country, Koppel said. That April the Cuban people defeated a U.S.-organized mercenary invasion in less than 72 hours.

As they were doing this, Koppel said, the Cuban leadership set out to “lend support to those around the world who were fighting to be free of imperialist oppression — from Algeria to Angola, a course of international solidarity that continues to this day.”

It’s these class relations, based on the expropriation of the capitalist exploiters and built over decades of promoting working-class consciousness, that make Cuba’s revolution different. This is why the U.S. rulers are determined to destroy it. And why it’s so important for working people the world over to defend it.

Cuba, like the rest of the world, is affected by the world capitalist economic crisis, Koppel said. The embargo imposed by Washington, and enforced on other countries, sharply limits Cuba’s access to the hard currency needed to buy food, fertilizer, fuel, medicine, spare parts, and other necessities. The embargo is compounded by the pandemic, which has decimated tourism, a major source of hard currency.

“Despite these challenges the Cuban government has sought to guarantee medical care and basic necessities to the population and to involve it in the process,” Calero said.

In response to a question from the audience, Koppel noted the collective response of the Cuban people to the pandemic. “No one has been left to fend for themselves,” he said. “And Cuba has now fully vaccinated a quarter of the population with their own extremely effective vaccine. They’ve done this while maintaining nearly 30,000 volunteer medical personnel around the world.”

On July 11 protests took place in Cuba “orchestrated by groups and individuals opposed to the revolution that receive funds from the U.S. government,” Calero said. “These groups took advantage of the hardships and effects of Washington’s sanctions that have been building up. Many people, including some who support the government, were drawn into the protests because they see no end to the difficulties they face.”

This is compounded by shattered illusions among some Cubans who had hoped that President Joseph Biden would reverse some of the most draconian restrictions of Washington’s punishing embargo.

But seeing the pressures in Cuba that are building up, the U.S. rulers have no intention of backing off their bipartisan effort to tighten the economic squeeze aimed at overthrowing the Cuban Revolution — an effort carried out by the previous 12 U.S. administrations since 1959.

Both open enemies of the revolution as well as liberals and “socialists” are part of the current political offensive against the Cuban Revolution, Calero said. He gave the example of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party socialist congresswoman from New York, who calls for an end to the embargo while backing the recent U.S.-provoked protests in Cuba, repeating “the timeworn slanders that the Cuban government is a dictatorship that violates human rights.”

In the discussion one participant noted that among many in the U.S. who oppose the embargo there are those who say we should downplay the socialist revolution. They say this is the best way to win “progressive” politicians and businesses who might join in calling for ending aspects of the embargo for their own reasons, a strategy they argue is more likely to succeed. Behind this is their prejudice that “backward U.S. workers” can never be won to support a socialist revolution.

“The stronger the revolution is, the better the chances to force the U.S. rulers to back off their attacks on it,” Koppel said. “That’s the lesson of history.”

Defense of the Cuban Revolution is part of advancing the class struggle here, he said. “The best aid we can give to the Cuban people is to advance working-class struggles in the U.S.,” Calero said.

“The lessons of the Cuban Revolution and its Marxist leadership can’t be separated from the task of building a communist party here to lead the working class to power in the United States.”

“For young people and workers who are waking up to the crisis of capitalism today and want to do something about it, taking the time to study, absorb and use the lessons of the Cuban Revolution will prove decisive in who will win the class battles to come — the working class or the fascist thugs the capitalist rulers will unleash,” Calero said. That’s why the Socialist Workers Party spends so much time publishing and promoting study of books by leaders of the revolution.

Calero pointed to the efforts by the Cuban government and mass organizations to enable every Cuban — including those with physical and other disabilities—to participate actively in society and realize their full potential.  This includes everything from film programs for the blind to special steps, in face of the embargo, to ensure hearing aids and other equipment for those with special needs.

Human solidarity vs. barbarism

“It is the deeply ingrained sense of social solidarity and internationalism that underlies the Cuban people’s determination to defend the conquests of the revolution and to advance the social and political aspirations of working people around the world,” Calero said.

“Socialist revolution draws on human diversity. It seeks to provide human beings with the scientific and cultural advances that have accumulated over centuries of human activity, to allow for the development of every person to their fullest potential. This has been a guiding principle of the Cuban Revolution from the beginning.

“These values can only be produced by a socialist revolution. Values that millions of working people in the United States can recognize and be won to fight for,” Calero said.

Economic instability, war crises and class battles of major proportions lie ahead, he said. Pointing to midtown Manhattan with its boarded-up stores and thousands of homeless workers, he said, “That’s what Cuba was like for working people before the revolution, and what capitalism has to offer today.

“The Socialist Workers Party sees building a revolutionary working-class party in the United States as the central task in defense of the Cuban Revolution. We invite you to join us.”

Defend, emulate Cuba’s socialist revolution! End US embargo! – The Militant

‘Fidel belongs to the working people of the world’ – The Militant

The following letter was sent by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes to Raúl Castro Ruz, first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, on Nov. 27, 2016, after the death two days earlier of Fidel Castro, his brother and central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

There were two great socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, one in Russia, the other in Cuba. Neither was the product of a single individual. Both were the result of the operations of capitalism itself. But without the presence and political leadership of Vladimir Lenin and of Fidel Castro Ruz at decisive moments in those historic battles by working people, there is no reason to believe either revolution would have been victorious.

Apart from Lenin and Fidel, the history of the twentieth century — and the twenty-first — is unthinkable. Both of them, Marxist students of science and history, gave their lives to uprooting the dog-eat-dog exploitation, oppression and compulsion on which the capitalist world order depends and replacing it with a workers state, with new social and economic relations based on the liberating capacities of working people and the youth they inspire.

Fidel belongs to Cuba first and foremost, to the men and women of José Martí and Antonio Maceo. His highest achievement was forging in struggle a revolutionary cadre, a communist cadre, capable of leading the workers and farmers of Cuba to establish the first free territory of the Americas and successfully defend it for more than five and a half decades against the determination to destroy it by the mightiest and most brutal empire the world has known.

But Fidel belongs to the working people of the world as well. From Latin America and the Caribbean, to Africa and Asia, to North America and Europe, he showed us in action what proletarian internationalism means. During Cuba’s historic sixteen-year mission aiding the people of Angola and Namibia against apartheid South Africa and its promoters in Washington, Fidel demonstrated his unmatched political leadership on a world scale. He also proved, as the Rebel Army combatants of the Sierra knew well, that he was one of the toilers greatest military commanders ever.

All this is why Fidel became the most loved as well as the most hated, the most slandered man of our lifetimes.

As Fidel said in his farewell words to the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in April, “We all reach our turn.” He cannot be replaced, but his life work, Cuba’s socialist revolution — its example, and above all its ongoing march — stand as his monument. He needs no other.

For our part, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists will continue to do everything in our power to publish and spread the truth about the Cuban Revolution and Fidel’s leadership, to make it known to working people in the United States and throughout the world. With unshakable confidence in the working class and its allies, we will continue to organize and act on the course Fidel uncompromisingly presented to the world in 1961, a month before the victorious battle of Playa Girón: “There will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.”

‘Fidel belongs to the working people of the world’ – The Militant

History of the Chinese CP: From revolutionary party to Stalinist betrayal to anti-working-class regime today – The Militant

....After Mao’s death, and a new round of purges, Deng Xiaoping emerged as CCP leader and charted a course to expand capitalist market relations in the 1980s. This led to a rapid expansion of Chinese industry, a huge growth of the working class and mounting conflicts between Beijing and Washington for markets and trade.

Deng, and Xi after him, maintained a dictatorial grip on power. Xi exalts the rule of the Han majority over China, running roughshod over national minorities like the Uyghurs. Union and other mass organizations are tightly controlled as agents of the regime.

The government has systematically crushed political rights in Hong Kong — as it has done for decades in the rest of China, including the slaughter of workers and youth demanding political rights in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Xi and other CCP leaders fear the example of the protests in Hong Kong could spread among workers and farmers in China.

Working people there are a powerful social force that will make their mark on history. They will have the opportunity to build a party of their own — a party that merits the name communist — in the course of deepening class-struggle experiences and in response to advances in revolutionary struggles elsewhere in the world.

It will be forged in combat against the ruling Chinese “Communist Party” and the exploiting classes it defends.

Full:

History of the Chinese CP: From revolutionary party to Stalinist betrayal to anti-working-class regime today – The Militant

Historical materialism is under ferocious attack today

Excerpt:

“Historical materialism is under ferocious attack today,” said Waters, “even though you may never hear that world outlook — one of the cornerstones of Marxism — mentioned by name.” The attacks are spearheaded not by the traditional centers of reaction, she added, but by privileged middle-class layers that many consider to be the “progressive” wing of liberal bourgeois democracy.

There is a concerted attempt to negate the scientific world outlook that has guided the revolutionary vanguard of the working class for 150 years and in its place to advance creation myths, fables, conspiracy theories, contempt for science and rejection of the cumulative cultural patrimony of humanity. This is what underlies much of what we know today as “culture wars,” Waters said.

“Culture wars are at bottom class wars, and they are deepening today above all because the class struggle is sharpening as the crisis of the world order brought into being by the workings of capitalism in the imperialist epoch advances — now accelerated by the COVID pandemic.”

This is the context within which communists carry out our political work today, Waters stressed, and that won’t change substantially until there are new labor struggles of a size and social weight that can demonstrate a different class road forward.

Citing Frederick Engels’ graveside tribute to Karl Marx in 1883, Waters noted, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact … that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.”

When Waters’ generation joined the SWP, she said, veterans of the communist movement “urged us to read and study, including works such as Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. They led us to become citizens of time and the world, to understand the ‘long view of history.’” Whatever our backgrounds, “we came to recognize and appreciate the diverse cumulative gains of humanity and to understand that communism will be built on the best of that culture.”

The New York Times  1619 Project was one of the examples of the political war on historical materialism addressed by Waters, as well as “cancel culture” and the counterrevolution on women’s rights represented by the campaign to deny the biological reality of two sexes.

The 1619 Project’s principal author, journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones, turns on its head the entire 500-year history of what is today the imperialist United States of America. At the center of her lead article she asserts the “belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day.”

In other words, Waters noted, “she asserts that our history has been driven by an idea.” It has nothing to do with the fact that “the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved.” 

Waters noted that the entire piece by Hannah-Jones is a hymn to bourgeois democracy as embodying the highest of human “ideals,” which she claims Black people believe in more than any other segment of U.S. society.

Many of the facts of U.S. history referred to by Hannah-Jones, especially the meaning of the bloody counterrevolutionary crushing of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction, are things the Socialist Workers Party has educated working people on for decades.

“Our job,” Waters said, “is to raise the discussion to a higher level and explain the unique character of black chattel slavery in the Americas, which didn’t arise out of pre-class society. On the contrary, it was grafted onto U.S. capitalist production for the world market and became a bigger and bigger obstacle to capitalist development, which depends on free wage-labor as the basis of capitalist production.”

Capitalism is the root of “systemic racism” in the U.S., not “white supremacy.”

Full:

SWP conference: Leading the working class to take power – The Militant