.
An
astonishingly brave and brutal, tender and undeniably truthful
account of (relatively modern day) Haiti, this book is an altogether
heartbreaking account of the country’s past events, which place its
recent events into even more painful perspective.
Originally
published in 1990, the book reads as if it might have been written
yesterday; such is the relentless cancer of the country’s endemic
political corruption and sheer force of the authors words: ‘’Starving
men will vote in exchange for a plate of rice or a glass of rum or a
can of concentrated milk.’’
Clearly
telling it, as it still needs to be told – Aristide’s words read
like a simplistic dissertation on the common sense of humanity. A
dictum in which the Vatican readily professes to preach – yet by
way of silent, subliminal and misanthropic persuasion, is as ever, in
cahoots with the contagiousness of the corrupt. El Salvador comes to
mind. So too does Nicaragua and Guatemala and the list is
unsurprisingly endless.
Writing
in the book’s Forward, Amy Wilentz substantiates just some of the
reasoning behind why the Catholic Church (still) remains reluctant to
infiltrate the killing machine of Haiti’s spurious powerful elite:
‘’As Father Aristide said later about another deposed head of
state: ‘The Driver is gone, but the car is still here, loaded down
with weapons of Duvalierism.’ Indeed, the structure of the society
remained unchanged. The Tontons Macoute, for example, were still
abroad, and a brief and violent attempt on the part of the people to
bring these men to a swift, street justice was understandably quashed
by some well-chosen words from the Haitian bishops. Yet the bishops
offered no alternative to the street tribunals and put no serious
pressure on the new government to prosecute criminals from the old
regime.’’
So
what’s new?
Whenever
someone comes along, whose words emphatically resonate with the
downtrodden and the dispossessed (Jesus Christ, Mahatma Ghandi,
Martin Luther King) they are irrevocably tarnished and immediately
done away with by the powers that unfortunately be. Luckily for
Aristide, he wasn’t (quite) done away with. And luckily for the
Haitian people, neither were his words: ‘‘to my sisters and
brothers who have worked for so long… Alone we are weak. Together
we are strong. Together we are the flood…’’
An
important thesis on the manifestation of Vatican ordained greed and
corruption.
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