Haiti Realities Interview Part 2

Haitian Realities Contrast With Stereotypes (Video) – Part 2
By Ish Theilheimer

Global Research, February 03, 2010

Last week, CBC’s Radio One’s The Current featured a panel discussion that included Ottawa-area resident Jean Saint-Vil, who is active with the solidarity network Canada Haiti Action. Afterwards, we invited him to visit at the Straight Goods News Ottawa bureau.

In 1805, the French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand wrote to the US president to help them crush Haiti because they said “the existence of the Negro people in arms is a terrible threat to all white nations”. The response of the Americans was to impose an embargo on Haiti that was renewed several times…

The whites returned and became the main merchants in the big cities, and every time there was some kind of event that threatened their existence, the Germans, for instance, would show up with their guns and their boats and they threaten to blow up the national palace in order to get ransom. A few weeks later, the Spanish show up and do the same thing.

Throughout the nineteenth century, you go and look in the history books and you will see eventually, you’d have countries like Denmark, Sweden, countries you’d never think about, were part of this…

Coup follows coup follows…

Finally a black leader named Dumarsais Estimé came to power in 1946. He built rural schools but was deposed by an American coup. Another democratic leader, Fignolé, came to power in 1957 just before Duvalier. “He lasted 19 days,” said Saint-Vil. “The Americans deposed him…

In 1990, “finally the Haitian population managed to get democratic elections organized and participated en masse and named a liberation theologian President. At the time George Bush, the elder, was the American President. Seven months later they deposed Aristide in a bloody coup using the Haitian military…