Alissa Trotz is Director of Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto and editor of the In the Diaspora Column
Sunday’s newspapers carried a letter by Christobel Hughes that drew attention to our moral responsibility to assist Cuba and Haiti in the wake of the recent hurricanes that have swept across the region, and called for an organized relief drive that involved the government, opposition, trade unions, private sector and other organizations. Ironically, and as if to drive home the point, the front page of the Guyana Chronicle boasted a picture with the caption ‘Cuban doctors hold clinic outside Guyana stores.’ As Christobel Hughes says, we have been benefiting from Cuban generosity for decades in Guyana, so ‘when will we tek shame out we eye and respond’ now that our support is needed?
Earlier last week there was – finally – a small report that CARICOM has rallied to help, with CARICOM’s Secretary-General Edwin Carrington saying he was heartened by the response of member countries to their neighbours. It seems we have to take his word for it, since there has been no information on how much aid has been sent, on what the people of Haiti and Cuba need, no appeals to the public, no details on damage assessment or medium- and long-term disaster relief plans. Moreover, outside of urgently needed short-term aid, what kind of solidarity does the situation call for?
Consider Haiti, where four consecutive storms have left a death toll estimated at over a thousand, and where reports say that nearly 12 per cent of the population has been displaced. This in a country which according to the hypocritical assessments of the US and its allies who occupy it today, has been restored to ‘democracy’ following the removal of the democratically elected Aristide administration in 2004. In fact, Haiti did not even have a government for months, since the food riots in April led to the removal of the government of Jacques Edouard Alexis, only replaced in the last three weeks by Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis. In a recent interview, Paul Farmer, co-founder of international health and justice organization Partners in Health, referred to this unstable political situation, what he called the hollowing out of the Haitian state, in partly accounting for the overwhelming lack of resources and absence of an infrastructure to cope with the threats of natural disasters and their aftermath (see http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/10/haiti_struggles_with_humanitarian_disaster_i).
Haitian and other support groups have pointed to the deadly debt trap that has crippled the country’s ability to respond, and have drawn our attention to the ridiculously small amounts available for disaster relief compared with the monthly sums (by some accounts estimated at between US$5 and 6 million dollars) that even now have to go to service the foreign debt (currently over a billion US dollars). Notwithstanding the need for immediate help, there have been numerous calls for the unconditional cancellation of Haiti’s debt, and for the payments to be used to provide immediate relief to Haitian victims of the floods and for long-term reconstruction.
Or consider Cuba, where damage to physical infrastructure ranges in the billions of dollars. It is significant that so few lives were lost (reports are of between four and seven dead) in a country where days after Gustav, Ike travelled across the full length of the island. This in a country consistently described by the US (in contrast to the characterization of Haiti) as undemocratic and totalitarian. The minimal loss of life shows that even faced with crippling US sanctions and severe economic constraints, a well organized infrastructure that includes effective disaster preparedness programs and evacuation procedures was able to move swiftly into action to save lives. Moreover, the successful movement of between 2 and 3 million people simply could not have happened without a strong and well-established base of grassroots community support. I am told that Cubans living in stronger homes, on higher ground and in safer areas readily opened their doors across the island to take families in, and that this made all the difference. In the wake of hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans three years ago, and now Ike which has subjected the people of Texas and Louisiana to such misery, there is a lot that Cubans can teach Americans about prevention and response. Shamefully, this is not the lesson the US administration seems to have learned. The Bush administration initially offered Cuba the insulting sum of US$100,000, raising this to five million after being ridiculed in editorials and elsewhere across the United States. This money came with conditions, requiring for instance teams of experts to visit the island to make their own damage assessments (and one wonders what else).
Offers of help from other places – such as the European Union – were without any such strings attached. The Cuban government, in a principled stance, refused the offer as well as donations directly from the US government, and identified the major issue – exacerbated now by the need for food and materials to repair infrastructure, homes, downed power lines – as the ongoing US embargo against the island. Their position is simple; it’s not about giving us handouts, we want to be able to buy the things we need like everyone else. For those who are not aware of the embargo, until recently Cuba could not buy anything from the United States. About five years ago this was adjusted to allow the country to purchase medication and food, but only with hard cash.
Cuba is not permitted to purchase anything on credit, even with US farmers and other companies prepared to offer commercial credits, as they do in relation to most other countries. An appeal that circulated on the internet last week demanded an immediate end to the criminal blockade imposed on Cuba by the US government. Signatories have so far included well known Cuban public personalities like the President of Casa de Las Americas Roberto Fernandez Retamar, musicians Omara Portuondo and Chucho Valdes and poet Nancy Morejon. Various diaspora groups (including second-generation Cubans, Jewish and other organizations in the United States) have begun a variety of initiatives, including calling for an end to the embargo, opposing the limits on visits to Cuba by family members living overseas and the amount of assistance they can send home, and organizing donations that are people to people and that bypass the US administration’s hardline and immoral stance.
A humanitarian act in the current situation requires not just an immediate response, but an awareness of the larger picture that shapes the reality of people’s lives in Cuba and Haiti. In addition to organising relief efforts and asking for more comprehensive information on what CARICOM member states are doing, we could and should be adding our voices to the calls for an end to US sanctions against Cuba and for a cancellation of Haiti’s foreign debt, a country that has been paying back since it won its independence over two centuries ago.
We should call on our leaders take a regional position on these two demands, and one easy way to get this going is to send a short letter to CARICOM. I’d suggest you send it to CARICOM, c/o P.O. Box 10827, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown Guyana, or send an e-mail to osg1@caricom.org
