by Kim Ives (Haiti Liberte)
On Apr. 13,
2015, the influential Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, 74, died
of lung cancer in Montevideo. He wrote over 30 books, including the seminal “Open Veins of Latin America” (1971) and
the“Memory of Fire” trilogy, composed
of “Genesis” (1982), “Faces and Masks” (1984), and “Century of the Wind” (1986).
Haiti was a regular theme in
Galeano’s work, and he wrote an exceptional speech, “Haiti, Occupied
Country,” which he delivered at Uruguay’s National Library in
Montevideo on Sep. 27, 2011.
This week, we present a few excerpts
of Galeano’s writings on Haiti.
From “The Open
Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”
Three years
after the discovery, Columbus personally directed the military campaign against
the natives of Haiti, which he called Española.
A handful of cavalry, 200 foot
soldiers, and a few specially trained dogs decimated the Indians. More than
500, shipped to Spain, were sold as slaves in Seville and died miserably. Some
theologians protested and the enslavement of Indians was formally banned at the
beginning of the 16th century.
Actually it was not banned but
blessed: before each military action the captains of the conquest were required
to read to the Indians, without an interpreter but before a notary public, a
long and rhetorical Requerimiento exhorting
them to adopt the holy Catholic faith: “If you do not, or if you maliciously
delay in so doing, I certify that with God's help I will advance powerfully
against you and make war on you wherever and however I am able, and will
subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their majesties and
take your women and children to be slaves, and as such I will sell and dispose
of them as their majesties may order, and I will take your possessions and do
you all the harm and damage that I can.”
...
In the second
half of the [18th] century the world's best sugar was being raised
on the spongy coastal plains of Haiti, a French colony then known as Saint
Domingue. Northern and western Haiti became a human antheap: sugar needed hands
and more hands. In 1786 the colony brought in 27,000 slaves; in the following
year, 40,000. Revolution broke out in the fall of 1791 and in one month,
September, 200 sugar plantations went up in flames; fires and battles were
continuous as the rebel slaves pushed France's armies to the sea. Ships sailed
containing ever more Frenchmen and ever less sugar. The war spilt rivers of
blood, wrecked the plantations, and paralyzed the country, and by the end of
the century production had fallen to almost nothing. By
November 1803,
almost all of the once flourishing colony was in ashes and ruins. The Haitian
revolution had coincided – and not only in time – with the French Revolution,
and Haiti bore its share of the international coalition's blockade against
France: England controlled the seas. Later, as its independence became
inevitable, Haiti also had to suffer blockade by France.
The U.S. Congress, yielding to
French pressure, banned trade with Haiti in 1806. In 1825 France recognized its
former colony's independence, but only in exchange for a huge cash indemnity. General
Leclerc had written to his brother-in-law Napoleon in 1802, soon after taking
prisoner the slave armies' leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, "Here is my
opinion about this country: all the blacks in the mountains, men and women,
must be suppressed, keeping only the children under twelve; half the blacks in
the plains must be exterminated, and not a single mulatto with epaulets must be
left in the colony."
The tropics took their revenge on
Leclerc: "Gripped by the black vomit," and despite the magical incantations
of [Napoleon’s sister] Pauline Bonaparte, he died without carrying out his
plan.... But the cash indemnity was a millstone around the necks of those
independent Haitians who survived the bloodbaths of the successive military
expeditions against them. The country was born in ruins and never recovered:
today it is the poorest in Latin America.
...
In the first
years of our [20th] century the philosopher William James passed the
little-known judgment that the country had finally vomited the Declaration of
Independence. To cite but one example: the United States occupied Haiti for
twenty years and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first
victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed
1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate
investigation in 1922), and when the local government refused to turn the Banque Nationale into a branch of New
York's National City Bank, suspended the salaries of the president and his
ministers so that they might think again. Alternating the "big stick"
with "dollar diplomacy," similar actions were
carried out in
the other Caribbean islands and in all of Central America, the geopolitical
space of the imperial mare nostrum.
From “Memory of Fire: Genesis”
1459: La
Isabela
Caonabó
Detached,
aloof, the prisoner sits at the entrance of Christopher Columbus's house. He
has iron shackles on his ankles, and handcuffs trap his wrists.
Caonabó was the one who burned to
ashes the Navidad fort that the admiral had built when he discovered this
island of Haiti. He burned the fort and killed its occupants. And not only
them: In these two long years he has castigated with arrows any Spaniards he
came across in Cibao, his mountain territory, for their hunting of gold and
people.
Alonso de Ojeda, veteran of the wars
against the Moors, paid him a visit on the pretext of peace. He invited him to
mount his horse, and put on him these handcuffs of burnished metal that tie his
hands, saying that they were jewels worn by the monarchs of Castile in their
balls and festivities.
Now Chief Caonabó spends the days
sitting beside the door, his eyes fixed on the tongue of light that invades the
earth floor at dawn and slowly retreats in the evening. He doesn't move an
eyelash when Columbus comes around. On the other hand, when Ojeda appears, he
manages to stand up and salute with a bow the only man who has defeated him.
1496: La
Concepcion
Sacrilege
Bartholomew
Columbus, Christopher's brother and lieutenant, attends an incineration of
human flesh.
Six men play the leads in the grand
opening of Haiti's incinerator. The smoke makes everyone cough. The six are
burning as a punishment and as a lesson: They have buried the images of Christ
and the Virgin that Fray Ramon Pane left with them for protection and
consolation. Fray Ramon taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave
Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of
temptation, injury, and death.
No one has asked them why they
buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their
fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.
The fire adds warmth to the humid,
sticky heat that foreshadows heavy rain.
From “Memory of
Fire: Faces and Masks”
1758: The
Plains of Northern Haiti
Makandal
Before a large
assembly of runaway slaves, François Makandal pulls a yellow handkerchief out
of a glass of water.
"First it was the
Indians."
Then a white handkerchief.
"Now, whites are the
masters."
He shakes a black handkerchief before
the maroons' eyes. The hour of those who came from Africa has arrived, he
announces. He shakes the handkerchief with his only hand, because he has left
the other between the iron teeth of the sugar mill.
On the plains of Northern Haiti,
one-handed Makandal is the master of fire and poison. At his order cane fields
burn, and by his spells the lords of sugar collapse in the middle of supper,
drooling spit and blood.
He knows how to turn himself into an
iguana, an ant, or a fly, equipped with gills, antennae, or wings; but they
catch him anyway, and condemn him; and now they are burning him alive. Through
the flames the multitude see his body twist and shake. All of a sudden, a
shriek splits the ground, a fierce cry of pain and exultation, and Makandal breaks
free of the stake and of death: howling, flaming, he pierces the smoke and is
lost in the air.
For the slaves, it is no cause for
wonder. They knew he would remain in Haiti, the color of all shadows, the
prowler of the night.
1772: Léogane
Zabeth
Ever since she
learned to walk she was in flight. They tied a heavy chain to her ankles, and
chained, she grew up; but a thousand times she jumped over the fence and a
thousand times the dogs caught her in the mountains of Haiti.
They stamped the fleur-de-lis on her cheek with a hot
iron. They put an iron collar and iron shackles on her and shut her up in the
sugar mill, where she stuck her fingers into the grinder and later bit off the
bandages. So that she might die of iron they tied her up again, and now she
expires, chanting curses.
Zabeth, this woman of iron, belongs
to Madame Galbeaud du Fort, who lives in Nantes.
1791: Bois
Caïman
The Conspirators of Haiti
The old slave
woman, intimate of the gods, buries her machete in the throat of a black wild
boar. The earth of Haiti drinks the blood. Under the protection of the gods of
war and of fire, 200 blacks sing and dance the oath of freedom. In the
prohibited Voodoo ceremony aglow with lightning bolts, 200 slaves decide to
turn this land of punishment into a fatherland.
Haiti is based on the Creole
language. Like the drum, Creole is the common speech of those torn out of
Africa into various Antillean islands. It blossomed inside the plantations,
when the condemned needed to recognize one another and resist. It came from
African languages, with African melody, and fed on the sayings of Normans and
Bretons. It picked up words from Caribbean Indians and from English pirates and
also from the Spanish colonists of eastern Haiti. Thanks to Creole, when
Haitians talk they feel that they touch each other.
Creole gathers words and Voodoo
gathers gods. Those gods are not masters but lovers, very fond of dancing, who
convert each body they penetrate into music and light, pure light of undulating
and sacred movement.
1794: Paris
"The Remedy for Man is Man,"
say the black
sages, and the gods always knew it. The slaves of Haiti are no longer slaves.
For five years
the French Revolution turned a deaf ear. Marat and Robespierre protested in
vain. Slavery continued in the colonies. Despite the Declaration of the Rights
of Man, the men who were the property of other men on the far plantations of
the Antilles were born neither free nor equal. After all, the sale of blacks
from Guinea was the chief business of the revolutionary merchants of Nantes,
Bordeaux, and Marseilles; and French refineries lived on Antillean sugar.
Harassed by the
black insurrection headed by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Paris government
finally decrees the liquidation of slavery.
1794:
Mountains of Haiti
Toussaint Louverture
He came on the
scene two years ago. In Paris they called him the Black Spartacus.
He was a coachman on a plantation.
An old black man taught him to read and write, to cure sick horses, and to talk
to men; but he learned on his own how to look not only with his eyes, and he
knows how to see flight in every bird that sleeps.
1802: The
Caribbean Sea
Napoleon Restores Slavery
Squadrons of
wild ducks escort the French army. The fish take flight. Through a turquoise
sea, bristling with coral, the ships head for the blue mountains of Haiti. Soon
the land of victorious slaves will appear on the horizon. General Leclerc
stands tall at the head of the fleet. Like a ship's figurehead, his shadow is
first to part the waves. Astern, other islands disappear, castles of rock,
splendors of deepest green, sentinels of the new world found three centuries
ago by people who were not looking for it.
"Which has been the most
prosperous regime for the colonies?"
"The previous one."
"Well, then, put it back,"
Napoleon decided.
No man, born red, black, or white
can be his neighbor's property, Toussaint L'Ouverture had said. Now the French
fleet returns slavery to the Caribbean. More than 50 ships, more than 20,000
soldiers, come from France to bring back the past with guns.
In the cabin of the flagship, a
female slave fans Pauline Bonaparte and another gently scratches her head.
1803: Fort
Dauphin
The Island Burned Again
Toussaint
L'Ouverture, chief of the free blacks, died a prisoner in a castle in France.
When the jailer opened the padlock at dawn and slid back the bolt, he found
Toussaint frozen in his chair.
But life in Haiti moved on, and
without Toussaint the black army has beaten Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty thousand
French soldiers have been slaughtered or died of fevers. Vomiting black blood,
dead blood, General Leclerc has collapsed. The land he sought to enslave proves
his shroud.
Haiti has lost half its population.
Shots are still heard, and hammers nailing down coffins, and funeral drums, in the
vast ash-heap carpeted with corpses that the vultures spurn. This island,
burned two centuries ago by an exterminating angel, has been newly eaten by the
fire of men at war.
Over the smoking earth those who
were slaves proclaim independence. France will not forgive the humiliation.
On the coast, palms, bent over
against the winds, form ranks of spears.
1816:
Port-au-Prince
Pétion
Haiti lies in
ruins, blockaded by the French and isolated by everyone else. No country has
recognized the independence of the slaves who defeated Napoléon.
The island is divided in two.
In the north, Henri Christophe has
proclaimed himself emperor. In the castle of Sans-Souci, the new black nobility
dance the minuet – the Duke of Marmalade, the Count of Limonade – while black
lackeys in snowy wigs bow and scrape, and blacks hussards parade their plumed
bonnets through gardens copied from Versailles.
To the south, Alexandre Pétion
presides over the republic. Distributing lands among the former slaves, Pétion
aims to create a nation of peasants, very poor but free and armed, on the ashes
of plantations destroyed by the war.
On Haiti's southern coast Simón
Bolívar lands, in search of refuge and aid. He comes from Jamaica, where he has
sold everything down to his watch. No one believes in his cause. His brilliant
military campaigns have been no more than a mirage. Francisco Miranda is dying
in chains in the Cadiz arsenal, and the Spaniards have reconquered Venezuela
and Colombia, which prefer the past or still do not believe in the future
promised by the patriots.
Pétion receives Bolívar as soon as
he arrives, on New Year's Day. He gives him seven ships, 250 men, muskets,
powder, provisions, and money. He makes only one condition. Pétion, born a
slave, son of a black woman and a Frenchman, demands of Bolívar the freedom of
slaves in the lands he is going to liberate.
Bolívar shakes his hands. The war
will change its course. Perhaps America will too.
From “Memory of
Fire: Century of the Wind”
1937: Dajabón
Procedure Against the Black Menace
The condemned
are Haitian blacks who work in the Dominican Republic. This military exorcism,
planned to the last detail by General Trujillo, lasts a day and a half. In the
sugar region, the soldiers shut up Haitian day-laborers in corrals--herds of
men, women, and children--and finish them off then and there with machetes; or
bind their hands and feet and drive them at bayonet point into the sea.
Trujillo, who powders his face
several times a day, wants the Dominican Republic white.
1937: Washington
Newsreel
Two weeks
later, the government of Haiti conveys to the government of the Dominican
Republic its concern about the recent
events at the border. The government of the Dominican Republic promises an exhaustive investigation.
In the name of continental security,
the government of the United States proposes to President Trujillo that he pay
an indemnity to avoid possible friction in the zone. After prolonged
negotiation Trujillo recognizes the death of 18,000 Haitians on Dominican
territory. According to him, the figure of 25,000 victims, put forward by some
sources, reflects the intention to manipulate the events dishonestly. Trujillo
agrees to pay the government of Haiti, by way of indemnity, $522,000, or $29
for every officially recognized death.
The White House congratulates itself
on an agreement reached within the framework of established inter-American
treaties and procedures. Secretary of State Cordell Hull declares in Washington
that President Trujillo is one of the
greatest men in Central America and in most of South America.
The indemnity duly paid in cash, the
presidents of the Dominican Republic and Haiti embrace each other at the
border.
1943: Milot
Ruins of Sans-Souci
Alejandro
Carpentier discovers the kingdom of Henri Christophe. The Cuban writer roams
these majestic ruins, this memorial to the delirium of a slave cook who became
monarch of Haiti and killed himself with the gold bullet that always hung
around his neck. Ceremonial hymns and magic drums of invocation rise up to meet
Carpentier as he visits the palace that King Christophe copied from Versailles,
and walks around his invulnerable fortress, an immense bulk whose stones,
cemented by the blood of bulls sacrificed to the gods, have resisted lightning
and earthquakes.
In Haiti, Carpentier learns that
there is no magic more prodigious and delightful than the voyage that leads
through experience, through the body, to the depths of America. In Europe,
magicians have become bureaucrats, and wonder, exhausted, has dwindled to a
conjuring trick. But in America, surrealism is as natural as rain or madness.
1969:
Port-au-Prince
A Law Condemns to Death Anyone Who Says or Writes Red
Words in Haiti
Article One:
Communist activities are declared to be crimes against the security of the
state, in whatsoever form: any profession of Communist faith, verbal or
written, public or private, any propagation of Communist or anarchist doctrines
through lectures, speeches, conversations, readings, public or private
meetings, by way of pamphlets, posters, newspapers, magazines, books, and
pictures; any oral or written correspondence with local or foreign
associations, or with persons dedicated to the diffusion of Communist or
anarchist ideas; and furthermore, the act of receiving, collecting, or giving
funds directly or indirectly destined for the propagation of said ideas.
Article Two: The authors and
accomplices of these crimes shall be sentenced to death. Their movable and
immovable property shall be confiscated and sold for the benefit of the state.
Dr. François Duvalier
President-for-Life
of the Republic of Haiti
From “Haiti,
Despised by All,” an article for the Inter Press Service in September 1996
Haiti is the
poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It has more foot-washers than shoe-shiners:
little boys who, for a penny, will wash the feet of customers lacking shoes to
shine. Haitians, on the average, live a bit more than thirty years. Nine out of
every ten can't read or write. For internal consumption the barren mountain
sides are cultivated. For export, the fertile valleys: the best lands are given
to coffee, sugar, cacao, and other products needed by the U.S. market. No one
plays baseball in Haiti, but Haiti is the world's chief producer of baseballs.
There is no shortage of workshops where children assemble cassettes and
electronic parts for a dollar a day. These are naturally for export; and
naturally the profits are also exported, after the administrators of the terror
have duly got theirs. The slightest breath of protest in Haiti means prison or
death. Incredible as it sounds, Haitian workers' wages lost 25 percent of their
wretched real value between 1971 and 1975. Significantly, in that period a new
flow of U.S. capital into the country began.
Haiti is the country that is treated
the worst by the world's powerful. Bankers humiliate it. Merchants ignore it.
And politicians slam their doors in its face.
Democracy arrived only recently in
Haiti. During its short life, this frail, hungry creature received nothing but
abuse. It was murdered in its infancy in 1991 in a coup led by General Raoul
Cédras.
Three years later, democracy
returned. After having installed and deposed countless military dictators, the
U.S. backed President Jean Bertrand Aristide – the first leader elected by
popular vote in Haiti's history – and a man foolish enough to want a country
with less injustice.
In order to erase every trace of
American participation in the bloody Cédras dictatorship, U.S. soldiers removed
160,000 pages of records from the secret archives. Aristide returned to Haiti
with his hands tied. He was permitted to take office as president, but not
power. His successor, René Préval, who became president in February, received
nearly 90 percent of the vote.
Any minor bureaucrat at the World Bank
or the International Monetary Fund has more power than Préval does. Every time
he asks for a credit line to feed the hungry, educate the illiterate, or
provide land to the peasants, he gets no response. Or he may be told to go back
and learn his lessons. And because the Haitian government cannot seem to grasp
that it must dismantle its few remaining public services, the last shred of a
safety net for the most defenseless people on Earth, its masters give up on it.
The U.S. invaded Haiti in 1915 and
ran the country until 1934. It withdrew when it had accomplished its two
objectives: seeing that Haiti had paid its debts to U.S. banks and that the
constitution was amended to allow for the sale of plantations to foreigners.
Robert Lansing, then secretary of state, justified the long and harsh military
occupation by saying that blacks were incapable of self-government, that they
had "an inherent tendency toward savagery and a physical inability to live
a civilized life."
Haiti had been the jewel in the crown,
France's richest colony: one big sugar plantation, harvested by slave labor.
The French philosopher Montesquieu explained it bluntly: "Sugar would be
too expensive if it were not produced by slaves. These slaves are blacks ....
it is not possible that God, who is a very wise being, would have put a soul .
.., in such an utterly black body." Instead, God had put a whip in the
overseer's hand.
In l803, the black citizens of Haiti
gave Napoleon Bonaparte's troops a tremendous beating, and Europe has never for
given them for this humiliation inflicted upon the white race. Haiti was the
first free country in South America or the Caribbean. The free people raised
their flag over a country in ruins. The land of Haiti had been devastated by
the sugar monoculture and then laid waste by the war against France. One third
of the population had fallen in combat. Then Europe began its blockade. The
newborn nation was condemned to solitude. No one would buy from it, no one
would sell to it, nor would any nation recognize it.
Not even Simon Bolivar had the
courage to establish diplomatic relations with the black nation. Bolivar was
able to reopen his campaign for the liberation of the Americas, after being
defeated by Spain, thanks to help from Haiti. The Haitian government supplied
him with seven ships, arms, and soldiers, setting only one condition: that he
free the slaves – something that had not occurred to him. Bolivar kept his
promise, but after his victory, he turned his back on the nation that had saved
him. When he convened a meeting in Panama of the American nations, he invited
England, but not Haiti.
The U.S. did not recognize Haiti
until 60 years later. By then, Haiti was already in the bloody hands of the
military dictators, who devoted the meager resources of this starving nation
toward relieving its debt to France. Europe demanded that Haiti pay France a
huge indemnity to atone for its crime against French dignity.
The history of the abuse of Haiti,
which in our lifetime has become a tragedy, is also the story of Western
civilization's racism.
