The Time for Haiti’s National Awakening Has Finally Come

(Français)

Before a television audience of 67.1 million viewers, former U.S. President Donald Trump uttered racist, shameless lies against Haitian immigrants living in Ohio, accusing them of stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, labeling them as “criminals” and “terrorists.”

On Sep. 12, two days after the Sep. 10 presidential debate between Trump and his Democratic Party rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, the thinly-veiled racist threats sparked bomb threats against Springfield, Ohio companies where the workers are predominantly Haitian. The same day a bomb threat closed down Springfield’s City Hall, where the mayor calls the Trump campaign’s assertions baseless. On Sep. 14, bomb threats also put into lockdown two Springfield hospitals.

Haitians are now organizing their response. Migrant defense organizations like the Haitian Bridge Alliance have begun to raise their voices. Haitians rallied on Sep. 12 in the heavily Haitian town of Elmont, Long Island, just east of New York City, in protest against Trump’s false allegations and those of Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

On Sep. 17, about 60 Haitians and their supporters, as well as New York City Councilwomen Mercedes Narcisse and Farah Louis, rallied in front of St. Jerome Catholic Church at the corner of Nostrand and Newkirk Avenues in Brooklyn, NY. Organized by Children for Change International, the rally was titled “Immigrants United Against Hate.”

The largest mobilization is planned for Sep. 18 at the Nassau Coliseum at 1255 Hempstead Turnpike in Uniondale, NY on Long Island, where Trump will be holding a campaign rally. The Haitians, other immigrants, and their supporters will hold a  counter-demonstration that will gather at 3 p.m. at 1110 Hempstead Turnpike in Uniondale, at the corner of Uniondale Avenue.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, politicians and the corrupt bourgeoisie are doing everything to maintain their class privileges and keep the popular masses in the most abject misery. This is our best opportunity to organize ourselves to be better able to respond to these false allegations which, once again, besmirch our dignity and belittle us like old clothes worn out by misery. They try to make us forget our ancestors’ glorious anti-colonialist and anti-slavery struggles.

We must not surrender our struggle to the hypocritical, two-faced half of the U.S. capitalist duopoly, the Democrats. We can only count on ourselves!

Those nostalgic for the slave system want to erase from the humanity’s history the strong Haitian people’s example which inspires us to be resistant, human, good, free, generous, altruistic, and socialist.

The time has truly come for us to organize ourselves in Haiti and North America to have our rights respected and stop being treated as pariahs. We Haitians, the children of Dessalines, Capois La Mort, Christophe, and Pétion, cannot hand over our destiny to the hypocritical politicians of the U.S.’s Democratic Party. We must build our own autonomous and independent organizations to fight against both flavors of racism: Republican and Democrat. We must not surrender our struggle to the hypocritical, two-faced half of the U.S. capitalist duopoly, the Democrats. We can only count on ourselves!

There is a dictum: States have no friends, only interests, to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, among others. Fortunately, people do have friends, who help them defend their interests. A rainbow of peoples around the world have brought their active solidarity to the Haitian people in the face of mankind’s great enemy.

Let’s stop being afraid! Let’s organize ourselves to better defend our interests and our country! We are more than what we have become today. We are the true freedom fighters; we were the first to abolish slavery; let us continue in the footsteps of our ancestors, to fight against exploitation and capitalist domination. These racist actions and remarks degrade those who carry out and utter them. Let us not submit to either of the two parties which just represent the two tactics of the U.S. capitalist system. The Republicans are openly racist, while the Democrats are just as racist but it is only revealed in their practice by their slyness and hypocrisy.

Let us organize ourselves by ourselves and for ourselves! Let us not be manipulated by the bigwigs of U.S. politics. Our most basic rights are flouted. We are the first victims of U.S. racism, of economic hyperinflation, of all kinds of discrimination (both racial and social). We are paid the lowest wages because of our social origin. We are victims of police brutality. We pay high prices for rent without subsidies. The cost of living increases at a rate significantly higher than the increase in our salary. We pay more for the purchase of a car and vehicle insurance premiums. Our wages are lower than any other category of immigrants, and we pay more than them for all our needs.

Nonetheless, we must win over and join with other immigrant workers as well as U.S. workers in our common class struggle.

The time to revolt has come both in Haiti and in the USA. After these malicious remarks from Donald Trump and JD Vance, if we do not rise up, it will be unforgivable. We must rise up against intervention, corruption, and insecurity in Haiti and against racial and social discrimination in the U.S..

Let us organize our forces everywhere to better fight against the capitalist system with its scourges of racism and sexism and the package of “identity politics” that liberals and Democrats use to hide this monstrous system of war, oppression, and exploitation.

Haitian progressives, let us unite to struggle for Haiti’s national liberation.

Liberty or Death! Homeland or Death!