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<h1 class="reader-title">Black Internationalism and the Colonial
Challenges Facing Haiti and Venezuela</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Jeanette Charles - Oct
18th 2018</div>
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<p><em>Protests in Haiti over the misuse and pocketing
of copious amounts of Petrocaribe funds stemming
from Venezuela have turned violent this week, with a
number of deaths being <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/haiti-protests-erupt-politicians-misuse-petrocaribe-funds-181018074636173.html">reported</a>. </em></p>
<p><em>In this piece, originally published before the
protests by Haiti Solidarity, VA's Jeanette Charles
looks at some of the historic challenges facing both
Haiti and </em><em>Venezuela,</em><em> and the
Petrocaribe relationship which Hugo Chavez
established between the two nations.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Solidarity as defined by President Aristide takes
root in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, <em>Umuntu
ngumuntu ngabantu:</em> “<em>a person is a person
through other human beings. A person becomes a
person through the community. A person is a person
when she/he treats others well….Ubuntu is the source
of all philosophy grounded in solidarity,
cooperation, unity, respect, dignity, justice,
liberty and love of the other</em>.” –
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haïti-Haitii?: Philosophical
Reflections for Mental Decolonization</p>
<p>“<em>Haiti has no debt with Venezuela, just the
opposite: Venezuela has a historical debt with that
nation, with that people for whom we feel not pity
but rather admiration, and we share their faith,
their hope.</em>” – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
upon absolving Haiti of all financial debt in the wake
of the 2010 earthquake</p>
<p>After 35 years of incarceration, political prisoner
and freedom fighter Oscar López Rivera was released in
2017. One of his revolutionary lessons urges us to
recognize that “colonialism is the problem” we
continue to face today. While he specifically referred
to Puerto Rico and its colonial status, his reflection
is applicable to anywhere in the world devastated by
exploitation, occupation, and invasion at the hands of
European colonialism and US imperialism. As such, we
can examine the current and historical challenges
facing both Venezuela and Haiti, as well as their
complicated relationship, as cases that expose the
open wounds and lasting effects of colonialism and
counter-revolutionary attacks against revolutionary
processes committed to liberation and the
reconfiguration of global power.</p>
<p>Colonialism explains why United Nations forces
implicated in mass rape, human trafficking rings, and
the cholera epidemic continue to occupy Haiti.
Colonialism is the driving force behind former US
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s spring 2018 tour
throughout the Caribbean, intimidating, threatening,
and bribing states to vote at the Organization of
American States (OAS), in favor of foreign
intervention in Venezuela. Colonialism has cultivated
the root of complex political, economic, and
sociocultural relationships between the states,
peoples, and grassroots movements of Venezuela and
Haiti.</p>
<p>The most recent US efforts to isolate Venezuela from
the region, demoralize its people through a concerted
economic war, and intervene in its political
process—by working with international collaborators to
ultimately punish its black majority revolutionary
process—have their historical precedents in Haiti.
Haitians experienced these counter-revolutionary
attacks as they fought to defend their own
revolutionary process under the leadership of Fanmi
Lavalas President Jean Bertrand Aristide and earlier,
throughout the era of Haitian Independence.</p>
<p>“Haiti represents a moral and political reference.
Chávez once said, you cannot pay back a moral debt,
and what Haiti gave us is unpayable,” explains Jesús
“Chucho” García—Afro-Venezuelan historian and Consul
General for the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela in
New Orleans—with respect to Haiti’s critical role in
Venezuelan independence. The bridges that Africans,
and later Haitians, built with pre-independence
Venezuela throughout the 18th and 19th centuries took
on multiple dimensions, including material aid,
strategic development, spiritual force, and principled
political vision. Haitians’ intentional support of
abolition throughout the Americas ensured South
American independence and sowed the roots of the
Bolívarian Revolution, which began in 1998 and
continues today.</p>
<p>As such, Venezuela’s Bolívarian Revolution has
attempted to return this “historical debt” with Haiti,
rectify the harms of colonialism, and consolidate a
Caribbean and Latin American united front against US
imperialism, by extending its reparations model of oil
wealth redistribution beyond its borders and by
exercising a diplomatic model rooted in regional
integration and cooperation. “Beyond Venezuela, I’m
thinking about the integration of Latin America, this
Afroamerica that is scattered throughout all these
lands and all these waters,” Chávez voiced on May 8,
2005 on his television program Aló Presidente,
speaking to the legacy of black liberation in the
Americas and identifying Haiti. His call compelled
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Venezuelans
to direct their moral and political compass toward the
first black republic of the Western Hemisphere.</p>
<p>Subsequently, Venezuela has provided funds and
subsidized oil for Haiti as well as other Caribbean
nations through its program PetroCaribe. In the case
of Haiti, Venezuela has also ensured additional
disaster relief humanitarian aid and dissolved all
loans. However, these significant gestures have
facilitated contradictory results. Instead of reaching
the people and improving economic conditions for the
majority Haitian poor, these initiatives have lined
the pockets of Haitian Duvalierist elites. Recent mass
mobilizations and legislative accounts have denounced
corruption of PetroCaribe funds and the displacement
of Haitians across the island of Ile-à-Vache, both
cases tied to the Haitian government’s misuse of
Venezuelan aid. In October 2017, news surfaced after
years of concerns from Haitian grassroots about the
PetroCaribe program, after five Haitian senators who
commissioned an audit of the international program
publicly released the report. The audit attested to
the corrupt use of funds and cited payments to private
corporations. High level officials in the Haitian
Government under then President Michel
Martelly—supporter of current President Jovenel
Moïse—were implicated. Months prior, in February 2017,
to the disappointment of Haiti’s grassroots movement,
the Venezuelan Government immediately recognized the
illegitimate (s)election of Moïse, closely associated
with Martelly and the Duvalier dictatorship, at the
very moment when mass demonstrations were continuing
to protest the fraudulent election that installed him
as president.</p>
<p>These contradictions, while contemporary examples,
speak to the unresolved consequences of the
independence era and colonialism’s impact. Similarly,
they correspond directly to Venezuela’s attempt to
return this “historical debt,” via the shared
resources of oil wealth without an intentional
political orientation and management oversight, which
has caused harm and exacerbated the economic and
political crisis in Haiti.<br>
In order to understand today, we must look into the
more than two centuries of interwoven histories
between Haiti and Venezuela. These histories offer a
window into understanding the challenges found in
building regional integration and promoting a black
internationalist solidarity model that is under
constant siege by imperialist powers. Today, it’s
necessary for us to uncover, explore, and act on these
histories in order to evade damaging historical
cycles.</p>
<h3>The ripple effect of the first Pan-Africanist and
Black Internationalist Revolution</h3>
<p>“Black internationalism” in this article refers to
the solidarity expressed between oppressed nations
focused on the liberation and interests of
African/black peoples from the continent and
throughout the Diaspora. Haiti’s founding is exemplary
of a successful black internationalist and
pan-Africanist revolutionary process whose solidarity
with African peoples and independence forces in
Venezuela made shockwaves throughout history.</p>
<p>Chávez was the first president in Venezuelan history
to identify with his African and indigenous descent,
as a feminist, as well as an anti-imperialist. He was
also the first president to declare Venezuela’s
historical debt to the island nation. Yet in spite of
these critical testaments, Chávez often referred to
criollo Independence leaders such as Simón Bolívar and
Francisco de Miranda’s relationships to Haiti,
shadowing accounts of Venezuela’s African and African
descendant leaders and their connections to the
Haitian Revolution.</p>
<p>Historian Gerald Horne attests to the uncontainable
impact of the Haitian Revolution, initially marked in
1791 by the Bois Caïman ceremony led by resistance and
spiritual leaders Cecile Fatiman and Dutty Boukman.
The ceremony inspired a wave of successful
pan-African-led rebellions on the island against
mainly French colonialism. Horne attests, “Haiti,
which was not opposed to extending aid to the
neighboring enslaved, was invoked even when it was not
directly involved in spurring unrest. Haiti, the
island of freedom, mocked the pretensions of
slaveholders—those on the mainland not least—and
inspired the enslaved to believe realistically that
their plight was not divinely ordained, nor perpetual,
but could be overcome.”</p>
<p>The rapidly spreading rebellions from Martinique to
Barbados were inspired by and aligned with the Haitian
revolution and its call for an end to colonialism.
Venezuelan Consul General and historian García
explains, “[Haiti was] an indisputable reference in
the early nineteenth century to all oppressed peoples
across Latin America and the Caribbean….Haiti was the
Cuba of the 19th century [which] spread solidarity to
our country [of Venezuela] as well as the nations of
Colombia, Ecuador, Panamá, Bolivia, and Peru, while
bearing in mind liberation projects of Cuba, Santo
Domingo, and even Mexico.”</p>
<p>One such instance involved African-Indigenous leader
José Leonardo Chirino, who orchestrated a maroon
rebellion in the Venezuelan Caribbean coastal township
of Coro, Falcón in 1795. Venezuelan historians suggest
that Chirino frequently travelled to Curacao and Saint
Domingue as part of his enslaved work. This led to his
exposure to African anti-colonial and abolitionist
struggles. While records of who he met and who he may
have trained with or received direct material support
from are difficult to secure or may not exist, there
are clear accounts that after these travels, Chirino
launched a rebellion on May 10, 1795 alongside
hundreds of enslaved and free blacks as well as the
Jirahara, Ajagua, and Caracas Indigenous peoples.
Records indicate they launched attacks on Macanillas
Hacienda, which spread to El Socorro, Varón, Sabana
Redonda, La Magdalena, and haciendas in other regions
of Venezuela. It’s still undetermined whether or not
Africans from Saint Domingue were directly involved in
Chirino’s maroon forces as they were across the
Americas from the US South to islands stretched across
the Caribbean.</p>
<p>Upon the arrival of Chirino’s forces to the central
square of Coro, the criollo slave-owning elites
arrested one hundred black maroons and executed 86
others by firearm. Subsequently, Spanish colonial
forces captured Chirino several months later on August
1795. He was publicly executed and dismembered. His
wife and children were separated and sold to different
haciendas.</p>
<p>For Venezuelans, this African-Indigenous insurrection
represents one of the first political movements that
voiced the demands of the independence era and chipped
away at colonialism’s stronghold in South America. The
launch of the rebellion is commemorated every year
during Afro-Venezuelan history month. Chirino’s
rebellion is one of potentially hundreds more examples
where Haitian struggles inspired or accompanied
revolutionary acts in Venezuela.</p>
<p>Today, Afro-Venezuelans have addressed the omission
of Haiti in their nation’s founding by exploring
documented accounts and oral histories of often
anonymous Haitian maroon leaders and warriors and
their efforts to topple Spanish colonization across
Latin America. Haitians’ historical actions solidified
the foundations for Venezuela’s future international
solidarity efforts, support for Caribbean-wide
reparations campaigns, and the very establishment of
cumbes (societies founded on the principles of
self-determination by self-liberated Africans and
indigenous people), which continue to exist as
revolutionary organizing spaces.</p>
<h3>Miranda, Bolivar, and Venezuela's unfulfilled
promise to Haiti</h3>
<p>The names most often mentioned in official Venezuelan
accounts on anti-colonial struggle across the Americas
are Europeans and their American-born descendants. In
the case of Venezuela, this includes Simón Bolívar and
Francisco de Miranda. Both travelled to Haiti seeking
refuge, to enrich their ideological vision, and to
develop their military might against Spanish
colonialism in South America. Perhaps the most pivotal
to understanding Venezuela’s complicated relationship
with Haiti today can be seen through the lens of
Bolívar’s voyages to Haiti.</p>
<p>Bolívar initially sought support from Haiti in 1815,
eleven years after the triumph of the Haitian
Revolution, after his troops lost to Spanish forces in
Cartagenas, present-day Colombia. Southern Haiti’s
President Alexandre Pétion provided food and shelter
for Bolívar and his company as well as material aid,
financial support, and military strength ahead of his
upcoming independence battles. Pétion explicitly
extended Bolívar solidarity during one of Venezuela’s
most dire moments in its independence struggle, on the
condition that Bolívar abolish slavery in any
territory his forces liberated. According to some
scholars, Bolívar departed from Haiti with
approximately 4000 rifles, gunpowder, a small fleet,
printing press, food, and at least 250 Haitian
veterans who fought in the revolutionary wars.</p>
<p>Despite this incredible show of support, after
another bout of defeats, Bolívar returned to Haiti to
recuperate, re-arm, and regroup. In one of his letters
written December 4, 1816 before sailing back to South
America, Bolívar etched into historical memory
Venezuela’s debt to Haiti: “If men are bound by the
favors they have received, be sure, General [Marion],
that my countrymen and myself will forever love the
Haitian people and the worthy rulers who make them
happy.”</p>
<p>On this voyage, after his exchanges in Haiti, Bolívar
was victorious in South America. Bolívar along with
African and indigenous forces succeeded in liberating
Venezuela from Spanish control. The independence
forces also freed today’s Brazil, Guayana, Ecuador,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Bolivia, northern
Peru, and Panama.</p>
<p>Upon this incredible feat, Bolívar declared slavery
abolished in these territories and issued the first
decree in Venezuela on June 2, 1816. Bolívar himself
had already freed enslaved Africans associated with
his family’s properties earlier in 1813. However, it
wasn’t until thirty-eight years later on March 24,
1854 that slavery was officially abolished in
Venezuela, under President Jośe Gregorio Monagas.
Despite Bolívar’s greatest efforts, he faced fierce
resistance by other slave-owning independence generals
and high-level authorities in the new South American
republic. Consul García reminds us that even General
Miranda stood against abolition and advocated that
enslaved Africans serve thirty years in the Venezuelan
military before granting their freedom. This
contradiction left lasting effects on the relationship
between Haiti and Venezuela and speaks volumes to the
engrained nature of white supremacist slave economies
in the Americas.</p>
<p>Moreover, in addition to the aforementioned delay on
abolition, while Bolívar held Pétion and Haiti with
the utmost respect, he did not formally recognize
Haiti or establish official diplomatic relations once
Venezuela became independent. Consul García as well as
historical records remind us that this decision was
significantly informed by external intimidation from
imperialist forces, including the US which feared the
implications of recognizing the Black Republic. Haiti
represented to the US and its colonial allies—and what
they have declared Venezuela since 2015—“an unusual
and extraordinary threat to [US] national security.”</p>
<p>Perhaps a strategic decision, yet undoubtedly one
that undermined Haiti’s unwavering commitment to
regional liberation, Bolívar also excluded Haiti from
the first regional gathering of independent states in
the Americas—the Congress of the American States in
Panama in 1826. Today, we find Venezuela facing the
similar exclusion at the hands of OAS Secretary
General Luis Almagro and the Lima Group, namely
rightwing states from Latin America and the Caribbean
in alignment the US, calling for intervention in
Venezuela’s domestic affairs. Overwhelmingly, however,
progressive states have stood beside Venezuela in
these trying times.</p>
<p>Bolívar’s unfortunate decision to omit Haiti played a
role in the French and US’s racist
counter-revolutionary backlash against the nation that
persist to this day. France devastated the Haitian
economy, demanding financial restitution for sugar
industry losses after the Revolution, further exposing
the French state’s racist notions concerning their
control over African life. Threatening military
intervention and surrounding the island, Haiti paid
France 150 million gold francs, the equivalent of $22
billion in gold, lumber, and other resources until
1947, under-developing its infrastructure—as we have
witnessed occur with other majority African and
indigenous nations.</p>
<h3>We must center black internationalism and
reparations</h3>
<p>These histories touch the surface of what we need to
know to understand the layers involved in Venezuela
and Haiti’s contemporary relationship and the dilemmas
they face together and independently at this present
conjuncture.</p>
<p>How does Venezuela return the historical, moral,
political, material, and spiritual “debt” of Haiti’s
hand in its independence? And how do Venezuelans
repair harms caused by the decisions their founding
leaders made in the 19th century? What measures can be
taken by Venezuelan grassroots movements to demand
that the Bolivarian Revolution also responds to
concerns raised in light of cases like the Haitian
Government’s mismanagement and corruption of
PetroCaribe funds? How can Venezuelans stand in
solidarity with Haiti’s majority poor? And how can
Venezuelans’ actions and strategic interventions to
rectify these contradictions serve as examples for
grassroots movements around the world?</p>
<p>Haiti’s deeply abolitionist, black internationalist,
and pan-Africanist solidarity model were critical and
necessary to defeat occupying colonial forces in South
America. Given this, it is critical that Venezuela, as
a majority black nation, as well as other black
nations and those around the world fighting for
liberation, study Haiti’s historical internationalism
and commit their struggles to active solidarity now
with the Haitian people.</p>
<p>Our solidarity must follow earlier models of
anti-colonial struggles as manifested in Haiti’s
example as well as the Cuban revolutionary model which
has transformed over time, from direct military
support in anti-colonial struggles in Africa and
internationally, to present-day medical training for
youth from majority poor nations. Our revolutionary
work with Haiti should emerge in our collective
efforts to accompany the people’s grassroots movement
and inherited revolutionary process: <em>Fanmi Lavalas</em>.</p>
<p>The Bolivarian Revolution should be directly tied to
the Haitian grassroots movement. There are historical
and, at present, intentional imperialist reasons
intervening and preventing this relationship from
taking shape. However, ensuring that this relationship
flourish would encourage steps toward a reparatory
approach to this historical debt. The Bolivarian
Revolution is facing the same global confusion
campaign, media smear tactics, economic strangulation,
and racist attacks—not only experienced by Chile’s
Salvador Allende—but also experienced by Fanmi
Lavalas. There are countless lessons to learn and
share between these two nations which will contribute
to all our movements moving forward.</p>
<p>Until such a black internationalist relationship is
forged, we will continue to witness inefficient,
unsatisfactory, and contradictory results in the
solidarity model Venezuela and other international
movements apply to Haiti.</p>
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