What’s Next for the Haitian Liberation Movement After the Moïse Assassination?

Correction: The definition of Haitians of Dominican descent has been clarified. The length of the constructed portion of the border fence has been corrected. The name that Dominican officials had given for a victim has been updated, based on newly obtained information.

Whenever Malena goes to work or heads out to study, she tries to leave her home very early and return after dark. The 33-year-old mother of five does so for fear of being detained by the Dominican Republic’s immigration agents, even though she is Dominican.

Born and raised in a batey, a settlement around a sugar mill in the San Pedro de Macorís province, Malena is the daughter of Haitian sugar cane workers who arrived in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, during the U.S.-backed Dominican dictatorship of Joaquin Balaguer.

Malena now lives in La Romana, also in the eastern part of the country. She has three sisters, two of whom have an identification card, acquired through a regularization plan for foreigners. Meanwhile, she and her other sister don’t have any documents. Close encounters with immigration authorities are normal.

“On a trip to the capital, Migration [officers] stopped the bus,” Malena recounted. “They said to a young man: ‘Papers, moreno!’ And since he only had a Haitian ID card, they took him off the bus. They only look for Black people. Luckily, they didn’t look at me. Sometimes by WhatsApp, I’m warned not to pass through some place because Migration is there. It’s always a danger.”

Malena and her sisters are some of the more than 200,000 people affected in the last 10 years by Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, according to estimates of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This ruling deprived Dominicans of Haitian descent who had been born after 1929 of their citizenship. As such, the impacts of statelessness are rampant.

“My children have no papers,” Malena said. “Without papers, you can’t have health insurance. You can’t have a good job. I had to repeat 8th grade because I couldn’t take the national test. The same thing happened to my son.”

Mass Deportations

Since 2021, the government of Luis Abinader has been promoting a campaign of mass deportations of the Haitian immigrant community. This also affects Dominicans of Haitian descent. Those are people who were born in the Dominican Republic, have Haitian parents or grandparents, and often are stateless, as in Malena’s case. The head of the General Directorate of Migration, Venancio Alcántara, declared recently that between August and April, more than 200,000 Haitians had been deported. “A record in the history of this institution.”

This statistic shows its true dimensions when contrasted with the size of the Haitian migrant community and the population of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Although no recent official figures exist, Dominican Ambassador to Spain Juan Bolívar wrote an opinion piece in June that estimated both populations, when counted together, at less than 900,000 people, or about 8 percent of the country’s population of 10.6 million. Bolívar’s estimation is based on the 2017 National Immigrant Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office.

That means 22 percent of Haitians had been deported between August and April.

This is why Dominican and Haitian organizations have warned of the danger that the mass deportation campaign could turn into a process of open ethnic cleansing and consolidate an apartheid regime, as previously reported in Toward Freedom.

Extortions, Theft and Violence at the Border

One of the flagship projects of the Dominican government is the expansion of a border fence. Previous governments built the first 23 kilometers (14 miles). Now, fence construction is continuing, so it can cover 164 kilometers (101 miles).  The Abinader government insists in forums, such as the United Nations, on the need for the “international community” to militarily occupy and “pacify” Haiti, complaining about the “burden” the neighboring country represents for the Dominican Republic.

However, the violence of the Dominican state has crossed the border into Haiti.

On March 19, members of the Dominican military attacked the Haitian border village of Tilory in the north, killing two people—Guerrier Kiki and Joseph Irano—and wounding others in their attempt to suppress a protest. According to a statement signed by Dominican and Haitian organizations, the Dominican military regularly engages in extortion and theft, including the seizure of motorcycles and other property, which led to the protest.

This is not the only recent cross-border incident. On August 5, an agent of the Dominican Directorate General of Customs (DGA) shot and killed 23-year-old Haitian, Irmmcher Cherenfant, at the border crossing between Pedernales and Anse-A-Pitres, in the southern end of the north-to-south Dominican-Haitian border. Dominican officials identified Cherenfant as Georges Clairinoir. The DGA and the Dominican Ministry of Defense justified Cherenfant’s killing as an instance of self-defense. Dominican social organizations questioned this version, pointing out contradictions in the official communiqués.

A human rights defender from Anse-A-Pitres who spoke with witnesses said the conflict began when the victim refused to pay a customs guard to be allowed to transport a power generator purchased in the Dominican Republic. After Cherenfant was killed, a struggle ensued, in which the guard was disarmed by Haitians. Subsequently, the Dominican military fired weapons of war indiscriminately into Haitian territory, injuring two people. The human rights defender, who works for a local organization, asked not to be identified for security reasons.

The Dominican government paid a compensation of 400,000 pesos (approximately $7,200) to Cherenfant’s wife the following week. But when the community mobilized on August 12 against military violence and in memory of the victim, the Dominican military threatened some of the protest organizers that they would be prohibited from entering Dominican territory.

‘A Vibrant Democracy’

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Santo Domingo on April 12 and met with Abinader. According to State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, they discussed their “deep ties” and “shared democratic values,” as well as regional security issues, including the “urgent situation in Haiti.”

During her visit, Sherman recorded a video message in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, extolling the country as a tourist attraction and calling the political regime a “vibrant and energetic democracy… a strong and exceptional partner with the United States of America.”

In her tour of the colonial zone, Sherman can be seen escorted by the mayor of the National District, Carolina Mejia, a member of the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), and by Kin Sánchez, a guide of the Tourism Cluster. Significantly, Sánchez was part of a mob led by the neo-fascist organization, Antigua Orden Dominicana, which attacked and shouted racist slogans against a cultural activity held on October 12 that was intended to commemorate Indigenous resistance. The complicity of the National Police caused nationwide repercussions.

After Sherman’s visit, Republican U.S. Congressmember Maria Elvira Salazar and Democratic U.S. Congressmember Adriano Espaillat, announced the U.S. State Department would withdraw a November 19 travel alert warning Black tourists of racial profiling by Dominican immigration authorities. The April 17 travel advisory only mentions risks related to criminality. Dominican Tourism Minister David Collado welcomed the move as a “very positive and appropriate” measure, describing the U.S. as a “strategic partner.”

Meanwhile, two days after Sherman’s visit, Haitian driver Louis Charleson was shot and killed by a military officer in the Dominican border town of Jimaní following a traffic altercation. A young Haitian man was wounded, too. The Haitian Support Group for Returnees and Refugees (GARR) denounced the impunity that covers the Dominican military and police in the border area. The agent who murdered Irmmcher Cherenfant last year in Pedernales continues to hold the same position at the Directorate General of Customs. He has not been dismissed or prosecuted.

“As always, Dominican officials present the simplistic argument of self-defense to comfort the offending soldiers with impunity,” GARR stated.

Vladimir Fuentes is the pen name of a freelance journalist based in the Dominican Republic.

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 

Author Sudhir Hazareesingh is a native of the Indian Ocean island and former French colony of Mauritius, once known as Ile de France. Drawing upon a lifetime of research in the French, British and U.S. archives, the Oxford scholar and expert on French history unearths until-recently untapped primary sources and correspondence, which provide a deeper look at the legendary anti-colonial Haitian figure Toussaint Louverture and his worldview.

Black Spartacus is a rigorous history of Louverture’s undying spirit and prodigious work for his people’s emancipation. A stranger to sleep and personal comfort, everyday the former slave-turned-general and leader of a burgeoning nation, dictated and wrote 200 letters to allies and enemies alike, covered 120 miles on horseback, and convened meetings with dozens of leaders and their communities (page 213). The first chapter examines his coming of age as a slave on the Breda plantation, from which he received his slave name, and the influence of Catholicism and Vodou. He later earned his name Louverture, meaning “The Opening,” on the battlefield inspired by “one of the most revered vodou deities, Papa Legba, the spirit of the crossroads”; a popular kreyol chant at the beginning of ritual ceremonies was “Papa Lega, open the gates for me” (43).

The middle chapters cover his time as a “general in the Spanish auxiliary army [where] he commanded a force of 4,000 men, as a French general who defeated the English invasion of San Domingue and his writing of the 1801 constitution, which outlawed slavery on the island for eternity” (58). A diplomat, he had to maneuver between warring empires with superior armies and navies hell-bent on re-enslaving “the pearl of the Antilles.” Hazareesingh evaluates Louverture’s role in the June 1799 “War of Knives” against André Rigaud and the Generals of Color (the “mulattos”). Supported by the British through their colonial administration in Jamaica, this intermediary class sought to wipe out the white planters and re-enslave Black people. Thoroughly opposed to “the relentless ethnic cleansing,” Louverture dreamed of and fought for a San Domingue for all classes. While protecting the lives of the white propertied class, he returned to rally his base on the plantations with his rallying cry: “I took up arms so that you may be free… and like you I was once a slave.” The battered, oppressed masses of former slaves were always his true source of power.

All books on the Haitian revolution must be held up to C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. The 1938 classic of the historical materialist method continues to be the magisterial account of how the masses of Haitian slaves mobilized themselves into a people’s army and blow by blow, setback after setback, treachery after treachery and massacre after massacre, defeated Napoleon’s sanguinary French empire. 

Hazareesingh’s main critique is James gives too much credit to French Republicanism’s influence on Louverture. Yet, throughout the 427-page book the author himself constantly reminds the reader of Louverture’s loyalty to France. Both James and Hazareesingh agree on the essential components of Louverture’s personality: He never forgot his roots, he was a devout Catholic, a stickler for military and social etiquette and order, and was “incorruptible” (193). 

An admirer of French culture, language and history, Louverture felt San Domingue—the former name of the island now inhabited by Haiti and the Dominican Republic—could never make it on his own. Louverture had a type of neocolonial view that the Mauritian author interrogates. Without returning the former slaves to a bondage they so violently feared, the reader may be surprised to know their very liberator bound them to the plantations in order to continue producing the enormous wealth of the past decades and centuries. The workers in return received one-fourth of their harvest. Aware of the brutal, dehumanizing effects of the slave system, he saw the plantation economy as a necessary evil until the formerly enslaved people could build up their own sense of economy and culture. He saw France as the indispensable mother country that would instill a “Republican” spirit in “her children.” 

Surrounded by assasination plots and having been deceived from all sides, Louverture “was extremely reluctant to communicate his intentions even to his leading military officers, or to share power with them in any meaningful way” (291). Again, the Haitian general did not have the insights of future revolutionary cadre. Amilcar Cabral’s maxum, “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…” was all too relevant. The cultivateurs (former slaves) must have wondered why their shining prince disciplined them while giving free reign to the colons (the white planters and former slave owners). It was as if Louverture thought he could win over the antagonistic classes and wish away a class conflict based on the enslavement of millions of abducted Africans. 

While in retrospect we can call Louverture idealistic it is important to remember he did not have the advantage of drawing on the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Vietnamese’s popular resistance to the French and later to U.S. imperialism, or the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Unlike Haitian revolutionaries François Makandal, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Kapwa Lamò, Moyse—an adopted nephew Louverture ultimately executed—as well as other Haitian generals of the people’s war, Louverture was not willing to go all the way. Hazareesingh contrasts the Makandalist vs Louverturian vision for Haiti. Ultimately, Dessaline was the man for the historical job carrying the Makandalist project to its ultimate “No Sellout, No Compromise” conclusion. The scorched earth strategy of “Koupe tèt Boule kay” (Cut off [the masters’] heads Burn down their mansions) was all the invading troops could understand. As 20,000 of French General Charles Leclerc’s soldiers occupied Cap Haïtien in the north, Dessalines and his generals burned down the entire city and retreated to the mountains, so the invaders would have no base to call home.   

While “his capacity to straddle divides across the ideological spectrum” within the anti-colonial camp was a great asset, it was also his hamartia, or flaw fatale (357). Like James, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture, even as he died away in the infamous French dungeon at Fort de Joux in 1803, never lost hope that colonial France would live up to the 1789 creed of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Louverture remained a true Jacobin as France devolved again into a slave-holding empire. While revolutionary leadership through the ages will continue to debate whether his “non-racialist” view of humanity and progress was correct, they surely agree that his faith in his class and colonial enemies was his downfall. (39)

In a polemic against apologists for colonialism, Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney states what Louverture’s humanism, non-racialism and unbounding faith in human nature never allowed him to reach:

“They [defenders of colonialism] would then urge that another issue to be resolved is how much Europeans did for Africans, and that it is necessary to draw up a ‘balance sheet of colonialism’. On that balance sheet, they place both the ‘credits’ and the ‘debits’, and quite often conclude that the good outweighed the bad… It is our contention that this is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand—it was a one-armed bandit.” (205)

Louverture’s tragic fate re-confirmed two classes, with entirely antagonistic class interests, could not co-exist. Napoleon’s deception, kidnapping, torture, imprisonment and murder of Louverture was a most undignified ending for the most upright of men.  

Hazareesingh’s final chapter, “A Universal Hero,” examines the vast array of future revolutions’ tributes dedicated to the Haitian people’s general through art, film, literature and theater. Facing death in a prison cell in 1954, Fidel Castro wrote the Cuban revolutionaries were inspired to “revolutionize Cuba from top to bottom by the insurrection of Black slaves in Haiti, at a time when Napoleon was imitating Caesar, the France resembled Rome, the soul of Spatacus was reborn in Toussaint Louverture.” 

Black Spartacus is a motivating read and its examination of letters and documents from the Haitian revolution compliments the foundational work of C.L.R. James. 

A slightly different version of this review appeared in Haiti Liberté.

Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels to Haiti to stay with the mass anti-imperialist movement. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.

This webinar took place December 2, 2021.

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Toward Freedom has 69 years of experience publishing independent reports and analyses that document the struggles for liberation of the majority of the world’s people. Now, with a new editor, Julie Varughese, at its helm, what does the future look like for Toward Freedom and for independent media? Join Toward Freedom’s board of directors to formally welcome Julie as the new editor. She will be reporting back on her time covering Nicaragua’s critical presidential election. New contributors Danny Shaw and Jacqueline Luqman also will speak on their work for Toward Freedom as it relates to the value of independent media. Danny will touch on the rising Pink Tide in Latin America while Jacqueline will discuss an increase in films that have documented the Black struggle in the United States.

Toward Freedom tiene 69 años de experiencia en la publicación de informes y análisis independientes que documentan las luchas por la liberación de la mayoría de la población mundial. Ahora, con una nueva editora, Julie Varughese, a la cabeza, ¿cómo se ve el futuro para Toward Freedom y para los medios independientes? Únase a la junta directiva de Toward Freedom para darle la bienvenida formal a Julie como nueva editora. Ella informará sobre su tiempo cubriendo las elecciones presidenciales críticas de Nicaragua para Toward Freedom. Los nuevos colaboradores Danny Shaw y Jacqueline Luqman también hablarán sobre su trabajo para Toward Freedom en lo que se refiere al valor de los medios independientes. Danny tocará sobre la creciente Marea Rosa en América Latina, mientras que Jacqueline hablará sobre un aumento en las películas que han documentado la lucha negra en los EEUU.