Notes on Haiti

© 18 January 2010, The Griot Poet

Despite Rush Limbaugh’s and Pat Robinson’s insistence:

Haiti as a nation did not pray to Satan for assistance in their war of independence from the French and the most powerful army of its day, led by Napoleon Bonaparte.

After all, Rush and Rev: “The thief comes to kill, steal and destroy.” (John 10:10)

The slaves fought against Louis XIV and his Code Noir, according to certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to their masters: to feed, clothe, and sanctioned corporal punishment, employing brutal methods to instill docility, while ignoring human rights and decency.

Henry Christophe’s personal secretary chronicles the true curse: “Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, and crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?” [1] 

In truth: a one-armed slave named François Mackandal prayed only that the Haitian warriors fight bravely, his association with the occult the result of his knowledge of herbal poisons and remedies and being neither Christian nor Muslim… [2]

So much for Rev and Rush’s command of historical facts and data.

But the Haitian’s insistence on human decency freed them and was the catalyst for the Louisiana Purchase being…so cheap for America’s Manifest Destiny and expansion to Western territories.

They have cousins… in New Orleans.

If there is a curse, it is the result of a system that dehumanizes them and makes light of their deaths. Tears shed more for dogs electrocuted than “bodies marred by dogs and crocodiles, piled in stairwells like logs…floating downstream!” [3]

But that is Haiti and was… New Orleans.

The French insisted that the Haitians pay them reparations for the loss of their former contribution of “free labor”: $21 billion dollars until 1947.

Couple that with a few coups and corrupt governments and you have the recipe to bankrupt a republic... before Richter 7.0. Cubans make landfall and have immediate asylum and Haitians under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations…are turned back!

If there is a curse, it is reciprocity, karma, reaping what you sow: sow mercy and flowers to obtain mercy when the disaster is ours!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti, [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mackandal, [3] “Near the Levy” (author)