Boston meeting shows solidarity with Haiti

A multinational standing-room-only crowd packed the Action Center office in Boston for a Workers World forum entitled “Solidarity With the People of Haiti — U.S. Imperialism: Humanitarian Aid or Military Occupation?”

WW photo: Liz Green

The meeting was chaired by Miya Campbell and Lila Goldstein, members of Fight Imperialism, Stand Together and the Women’s Fightback Network. Featured speaker Larry Hales of FIST and Workers World Party exposed the lie of U.S. imperialism’s “compassionate invasion.”

Hales traced the history of U.S. involvement in repression and impoverishment of the Haitian people, including the two coups and kidnapping of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertand Aristide. Hales pointed out that the military units the U.S. sent are all combat units, and the $100 million pledged by the U.S. is what is spent in five hours on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He saluted Haiti as the only successful slave revolution and exposed the racist vitriol of right-wing hate mongers like Pat Robertson.

The other featured speaker, Claude St. Germain of the Interim Coordination Committee of Fanmi Lavalas of Boston, thanked Workers World, United Steelworkers Local 8751 and the International Action Center for their solidarity with the Haitian people. He described the Fanmi Lavalas movement and its leader, former President Aristide, as the true representatives of the poor and working people of Haiti. He spoke of how the U.S. and French imperialists united against Aristide in response to his demand that the French pay reparations owed the Haitian people.

Germain described the hostility of U.S. corporations to a peoples’ government led by Aristide that prioritized the needs of the poor. He read Aristide’s statement from South Africa declaring his readiness to return to work side-by-side with the people and condemned the U.S. and the Rene Preval government in Haiti for keeping him out of the country. He condemned the U.S. for forcing Preval to sign over control of the airport in Port-Au-Prince and the security of the country as a whole to the U.S. military. He saluted the Cubans, Venezuelans and Chinese, who were there on the ground the first day with hundreds of doctors and rescue workers, not a military occupation.

After a spoken-word presentation by Miya Campbell, long-time Puerto Rican political activist Alberto Baretto expressed the solidarity of the Puerto Rican people. Moving testimony was given by young Haitian activist Cindy Printemps, who spoke of the beauty of her homeland and appealed for volunteers and architects to go to Haiti to rebuild.