Touissant Louverture: A Black Jacobin

[Baddaz]

jawge, mi a try follow yuh reasoning... what is the point you are trying to make... innocent question, king son... enlighten this son of joshua, please...

[Gamma]

en el nombre de dios y el hijo y spirito santo.....vamos a rezar!

[Don1]

Will the Haitian elite for once step up for thier nation?

I for one am not holding my breath.

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Haiti's elite hold nation's future in their hands


A few businessmen like Gregory Mevs will decide how -- or whether -- Haiti recovers from one of the worst natural catastrophes in modern times

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - Gregory Mevs leaped from his armored silver Toyota SUV and marched past the guards and mango trees into what serves these days as the center of the Haitian government.

He was ready to dispense a million gallons of fuel to the earthquake-ravaged capital. But the paperwork was not in order. He needed the Haitian prime minister's signature.

Ten minutes later, he had it.

Mevs can do that. He has the prime minister's ear. He hobnobs with people like Bill Clinton, George Soros and the chief executives of the world's largest corporations. He is one of Haiti's storied elite, a member of one of the six families that control the Haitian economy and have essentially called the shots here for generations.

They are mostly light-skinned, multilingual entrepreneurs with a dismal reputation for profiting handsomely on the backs of the poorest people in the hemisphere. The actions they take now will prove decisive in how -- or whether -- Haiti recovers from one of the deadliest natural catastrophes in modern times.

"A lot of friends say, 'Get out, it's only going to get worse before it gets better.' But all of us have to be here," said Mevs, a solidly built, slightly balding man of 50. "We have to rebuild. There is no choice."

The rich do have a choice. They could easily pull up stakes and go somewhere else. The question is whether they will go, or whether they will decide to throw themselves into the business of reconstruction.

As of Wednesday, the majority seemed bent on the latter, pledging to do what it takes to get Haiti back on its feet.

Some have described Haiti's earthquake as "democratic" because it afflicted poor and rich alike. That would be an over simplificaon.

The rich are never hurt the same way the poor are. Their capacity for revival, thanks to resources, private planes and visas, vastly outdistances that of the poor and middle class.

Certainly, however, they are suffering too. Their houses and offices also collapsed. Few, if any, of their number died, but there were injuries and the loss of friends and employees.

It takes people with Mevs' skills and wherewithal to get much of anything done in Haiti these days. What's left of the government -- every major institution was pulverized -- has essentially ceded important sections of the recovery operations to the businessmen.

In theory, these businessmen report to a committee that includes members of President Rene Preval's administration, but most are acting independently. It has to be that way, they'd argue.

"We have, more than ever, a tremendous responsibility to help this country rebuild. We are needed," Mevs said. "I know people, I have access, I can get financing, I know how to negotiate."

Mevs' days are filled with all that and more. His BlackBerry buzzing incessantly, he rushes to hospitals to see how much gasoline they need, then gets it for them. He oversees the off-loading of tons of Dutch aid. He sets up computers for the provisional government, which is working out of a police station flying the Haitian flag at half-staff.

In Armani eyeglasses and Hugo Boss jeans, with a Mont Blanc pen in his shirt pocket, Mevs climbed into the armored SUV one day this week and escorted two reporters through some of the damaged parts of his empire.

The Mevs family owns all the petroleum storage facilities in the country, 30% of the Internet business, a 2.4-million-square-foot industrial park and a network of 50 warehouses for food and other material, among many other properties.

Mevs figures he lost as much as $40 million at the wharf his family owns, where most oil shipments are received. That's only a fraction of his financial losses, however. And when half the wharf fell into the sea, it took 54 workers with it.

Most of the elite are descendants of Europeans who in the mid- to late 1800s came to Haiti, a nation that had been founded largely as a slave plantation. (Mevs' grandfather came from Hamburg, Germany, in search of a rare breed of parrot.) They were -- and are, for the most part -- merchants. Their money is from commerce.

They control all the major sectors of the economy, from banking and telecommunications to apparel factories and food. They go to the French schools here, and they attend university in Miami. They vacation in Europe. They live farther up the hills that rise above the squalor of Port-au-Prince.

Haitians sometimes refer to them as the Bambam, each letter the initial of one of the six families. During tense times under populist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when politicians stoked class warfare and pointed to the nation's egregious income gap, they were called MREs. Not after the packaged military "meals ready to eat"; rather, the initials stood for "morally repugnant elites."

Patrick Elie, a leftist sociologist who has been extremely critical of Haiti's elite, said the magnitude of the disaster may shake the wealthy out of their complacency. Several have spoken of feeling "humbled" by the ordeal.

"This crisis will separate those who can pick up and go from those with real roots, who are heavily invested in Haiti and whose survival depends on the survival of the country," Elie said.

As if to suggest the beginnings of a new Haitian world order, Elie was sitting outside the government's refuge next to Mevs' brother, Fritz -- an ardent Aristide ally wearing a Che Guevara cap next to one of Haiti's wealthiest men. They embraced.

Gregory Mevs bristled when a visitor referred to him as part of the cabal of families running the place. It's an unfair and outdated image, he argued. Years of dictatorship stifled any sense of civic duty, he said, but today's globalized economy means that entrepreneurs can no longer cling to colonial ways.

"My generation is between two worlds," he said. "We had to learn how to reach out, we had to learn to work with social responsibility."

Mevs' house, next door to the prime minister's, was damaged, and he and his family have been camping at a friend's house, sleeping on their lawn. His children, who were at home when the quake hit, watched in horror as an exterior wall collapsed and crushed the family gardener to death. Mevs' niece was among the people trapped at the Hotel Montana, a legendary salon for the Haitian elite and visiting intelligentsia that pancaked into a concrete mountain. Rescuers pulled her from the rubble.

As Mevs traveled about Port-au-Prince, he bounced between eagerness to rebuild and despair over the devastation. His chauffeur has been so traumatized, he said, that he has been in two wrecks in the last few days.

Mevs noted that Haitian construction uses a lot of pillars and concrete slabs to withstand hurricanes. No one was thinking much about earthquakes, he said. The gorgeously quaint slat-wood house built in 1911 that serves as Mevs' main office endured the quake undisturbed.

He acquired the armored vehicle with darkened windows and diplomatic license plates four years ago at his wife's request, he said. He was working a lot in Cite Soleil, the enormous slum that abuts some of his commercial properties.

The license plates speak to another quirk of Haiti's elite: Most have finagled posts as honorary consuls of any number of countries. It's sort of a status symbol, like owning the latest iPod.

Mevs is the official consul of Finland.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...469,full.story

wilkinson@latimes.com

Herein lies the problem of Haiti...

[Baddaz]

mi aguh pray fi mi bredrin and all a mi black peeple dem...

[Jawge]

Boss what I'm really trying to say is that don't take an history that's presented where Africans or descendants of Africa were hapless victims.

Western Europe at one point was a place of suffering and exploitattion just the same. The Britons were enslaved by the Romans and treated as subspecies. My argument is that way prior to the above (3500BCE) Africa was in its prime and she did invade Europe and Asia. Asia wasn't even able to attack Africa until a 1500 years later, then 1200 years or so later Asia and Europe could subdue her. Africa then hit back in two major wars (punic) the last was an excuse to finally put an end to the African threat (believe me if they had nukes at the time they would have used it).

BTW it's easier to explain in terms of continents (this way I skip which race was ruling and so forth)

Europe's power base split into east and west; then came Africa again seeking to conquer western Europe, which was literally left in darkness. Africa was repulsed in that great battle in France (Poitiers 732) and finally driven out in 1492 to be exact. When I just started school, I had to do world history, in the text book (which I sold; not understanding the power of history at the time) there was an excerpt taken from a document where a Western European KIng was seeking Audience with a power from the Ottoman Empire. They called the euros dogs and refuse to even have them in court. The Author said had it been the 16th century on up that would have been a declarartion of war. Point is that these things are out there but one has to dig. I hate to see history presented as if Africa were just these sitting victims; it was not so. Africa was the one that kicked off the renaissance in Western Europe but the Euros got to the industrial age first and everyone was left behind in the dust.

Back to Haiti: Touissant saw that Haiti was rich because of trade; hence he tried to woo the Euros back on the diplomatic front. The Euros by then were seasoned warriors and statesmen;hence they would have none of it (knowing that Touissant was cut off and they controlled most of Africa then, why even negotiate). They pretended to agree to terms but they wanted Touissant's head to embarrass him and make an example. Check what I said: Britain ruled the seas at the time; they joined with France. The US did not see it in their strategic interest to support the revolution; hence it was doomed from the start. Haiti needed TRADE to remain viable.

This is why I said Ja need to have a college of History and political science. We seem to e making the same mistakes that were made 200 years ago. This in itself can have very grave consequences for the island.

Hope I'm much clearer above.

[Exile]

No comment about the Obama reference?

[Jawge]

Explain, not sure of what you are saying.

[Exile]

We now hear Barack Obama talk about the common history that joins Haiti with the United States. Am I the only one who sees a certain resemblance between Toussaint L’Ouverture, struggling for respectability, and the current US president who is so overly respectful in his relations with Wall Street and other rulers of the world? I suggest Obama, in addition to Eduardo Galeano’s The open veins of Latin America, handed to him by Hugo Chavez a few months ago, should also read C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins to remind him how lofty ideals were once translated into reality.

[Islandman]

I personally be surprised if Obama has not read The Black Jacobins yet or at least been exposed to it. I got the impression from his own book "Dreams from my Father" that he has a strong sense of history.