And the system does not forget such boldness.
“By the end of the 18th century, there are half a million Black people and barely thirty thousand white people in Haiti. For each white person looking at them with a whip, there are ten Black people working. The Blacks unload the ships, sweep their masters’ houses, bring cane to the mill, produce sugar, all the chocolate that is drunk in France, coffee, and six million pounds of cotton. A Black person means wealth, another animal. The ships bring the Black people and take away the cacao produced by these slaves. In the streets of the Paris of the Antilles they are flogged publicly. If a female slave burns the food, her destiny is among the embers. In the fields, after small faults, Black people are buried alive with their heads out and honey is thrown on them so that the ants can finish the job,” says Alberto Morlachetti, speaking about the two hundred years of Haitian independence, the first American independence.
Thus the permanent condemnation of the Haitian.
Two centuries later, in the land that first rebelled against the usurpers of almost everything and everyone, there is no food for thousands of Haitians anymore.
The information coming from the heart of America says: “More and more of those excluded by the rising price of food -- and desperate from hunger -- cook mud with oil and salt. Extreme poverty attacks the Caribbean countries, the lack of food caused by the production of biofuel,” the mass media inform us.
They eat dirt because they were left with nothing to eat.
Centuries of punishment for having been the first to ignite the flame of liberty in the several times plundered continent.
The report states that “the greater demand for biofuel means fewer fields are dedicated to food harvesting, which, in time, causes less supplies and higher prices.”
Meanwhile, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has launched a “plan to fight these price increases, which includes the distribution of vouchers for seeds and fertilizers among landworkers in the developing countries. In the Caribbean, food prices have gone up by forty percent in some of the islands. In Haiti, the scarcity is threatening the weak stability of the country, and mud cookies are one of the few options the poor have in order not to die,” according to the report some of the networks reproduced.
In some markets of the capital city Port-au-Prince, “two cups of rice are sold for sixty cents of a dollar, ten cents more than in December and a hundred percent more than a year before. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at similar rates, and edible clay went up to almost a dollar and a half. Enough mud to cook a hundred cookies costs five dollars.”
The UN warns: “Earth contains lethal parasites and industrial toxins, but it can also provide calcium for pregnant women. To depend on cookies to survive carries the risk of malnourishment,” the organization’s specialists note.
Militant poet Morlachetti says: “In 1802, Napoleon sends General Leclerc with 86 ships and 30,000 men in order to restore power on the island and silence its Black population. French troops are defeated for the first time. But they succeed in taking Toussaint L’Ouverture prisoner, who dies a year later in France. His prison warders hardened his torture and did their very best so that the man who could not be beaten by England, Spain, France or Napoleon died in less than a year. Jean Jacques Dessalines takes the place of Toussaint L’Ouverture and in 1803 he defeats a new French expedition led by Rochameau. The beaten French lose 60,000 men. Since the beginning of their struggle, the Haitians have lost 150,000 lives. Black people’s tribute to freedom, the song that wins people’s hearts and makes them sing. After Dessalines’ death in 1806, the country is divided into two regions; in the south, Alexandre Petion establishes a true democratic republic, taking into account that the USA and France kept slavery and colonialism. Petion distributes the land among the old slaves and for over a decade -- until his death in 1818 -- he governs with the consensus of his people and in a peaceful atmosphere. That democracy and its leader later have a decisive influence on the struggles and ideas of Simon Bolivar,” his chronicle ends.
There lies the reason the Haitians are so despised, and the reason for mud cookies.
(www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar)
(March 4 Tehran Times Opinion Column, by Carlos del Frade)
PA/HG
END
MNA
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