WhileHaiti Freedom begins its 18th year of publication in the spirit of continuing not only to clearly denounce Western imperialism but also to defend the fundamental rights of people affected by unemployment, precariousness and poverty, two simultaneous facts have caught our attention just to remind us of the importance of getting more involved. This new multinational occupation mission in Haiti led by Kenya coincides with the uprising of the Kenyan people expressing their anger against the economic attacks of their own government recommended by capitalist institutions.
It is, however, comforting to note that imperialism has the same ugly face everywhere and uses the same score to tune its destructive violin in its struggle against peoples seeking change and improvement in their living conditions.
For two centuries, Western imperialism has oppressed and exploited the Haitian people. The poverty and misery of the working class are neither natural nor inevitable; they are the result of the plundering of yesterday’s colonization and the exploitation maintained today by the capitalist system through governments led by traitors, mercenaries imposed to establish its neocolonial policy. With the financial and diplomatic blackmail of Washington to organize puppet groups, parties and organizations in defiance of the most basic principles to abort any serious popular movement and break any process of real liberation of the Haitian people.
Capitalism is a system at bay, throwing millions of human beings into misery, unemployment, and sowing death day after day. It exists only to monopolize the wealth of the people, devalue the working-peasant class and oppress it to an extreme situation.
The events of recent days in Kenya and Haiti have aroused popular emotion that concerns us to the highest degree and calls for reflection. When the Kenyan forces on the fronts in Haiti are fighting against the insecurity caused by austerity measures, social inequalities, chronic unemployment and excessive exploitation, the Kenyan people, for their part, are taking to the streets of Nairobi and the rest of the country to demonstrate against the multiplication of neoliberal measures demanded by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. Does this not mean that the proletarians, whether Haitians, Kenyans, or of any other nationality, have the same demands and face the same oppressor, the same executioner? Hence, moreover, the cry of Flora Tristan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The imperialist enemy is the same everywhere. It has no color, no race, no borders, it has only its interests. While on the one hand it uses Kenyan soldiers in Haiti, on the other hand it oppresses Kenyan workers through their own government. This illustrates that in any capitalist type society, the privileges of exploitation of one class over another are not much different.
One of the global characteristics of capitalism is that it cannot admit the people the right to choose their own destiny. That is why it seeks everywhere to impose its diktat, even in a ridiculous and demagogic manner. Today in Haiti, everything is false, rigged, equivocal. The presidency is a chimera since it is only a simple Council of extras.
A government bearing the mark of infamy, state dignitaries without portfolio. The height of absurdity, it is a government made up of an alliance that would favor the strategy of domination and enslavement of the people. As usual, imperialism has found allies in the political class, henchmen and straw women of all sides ready to sacrifice the interests of the people with the obvious aim of consolidating American influence. These collaborators who have no concern for taking their orders from Washington, are tied up, hand and foot to validate this new multinational intervention and precisely hide their own failure and that of imperialism in Haiti.
It is on this contempt that this new regime of the Haitian State is based. A maneuver intended to move the center of gravity of the crisis to the source, in reality, of social inequalities and bad governance, real evils leading to symptoms such as gangs. What better in these conditions than to use Kenyan forces to try to hide or restore an image tarnished by a policy of atrocious repression and odious corruption that will not change in any way a situation already in putrefaction.
All our solidarity goes to the Haitian people in the same measure to the Kenyan people who are fighting against a common enemy: Western imperialism.
This system dominating the world has demonstrated that it must be overthrown and it is in this logic that the newspaper is part of Haiti Freedom throughout its existence so that another political and economic system is possible in Haiti. Capitalism harms the interests of impoverished countries. Until this system is ended and erased from the hemisphere, we will never be able to live in peace.
Haiti Freedom cannot fail to express its full and continued solidarity with the Cuban people, as well as with those of Venezuela and all the oppressed peoples of the world, especially the Palestinian people. We categorically reject and condemn the attempted coup d’état by Washington and its accomplices in Bolivia and support the popular mobilization to thwart this dirty trick and guarantee the defense of the democratic rights of the people, especially the Bolivian workers. No to imperialist intervention!
Haiti Freedom will remain a weapon of struggle for the national liberation of the peoples and the transformation of the world! Long live the popular struggle for a fundamental change of the workers of Haiti and those of the Kenyan masses to overthrow capitalism and put an end to exploitation, misery, unemployment and barbarism.
Haiti and Kenya, same struggle, same fight against the capitalist system!
