Launch of Carifesta
The Gardens of the MUPANAH were the showcase last Thursday evening, at an official welcome reception organized by the Ministry of Culture in honor of the main delegations already in Haiti to participate in the 12th edition of the CARIFESTA. The cocktail took place in the presence of the Prime Minister Evans Paul, in the presence of Minister of Culture Ditney Johanne Rateau and of Minister of Tourism Stéphanie Balmir Villedrouin. The director of the Mupanah, Michèle Frish, was the host of the evening which ended in the middle of the night.
Then the next day, August 21st, it was "CARIFESTA XII. “Let the party begin" proclaimed President Michel Martelly at the kiosk Occide Jeanty, to officially open the XII edition of this cultural festival. The president addressed in English the guests coming from the Caribbean “who had believed in Haiti and accepted its application to organize the festival.”
The day before, the Prime Minister, Evans Paul, also thanked the guests who helped Haiti organize this big cultural party.
Friday afternoon began with an artistic parade in the streets of Port-au-Prince; a parade rich in the colors of the various Caribbean nations. As for the kiosk Occide Jeanty, many saw it for the first time in the magnificence of the renovation. The kiosk was the final destination of the parade.
This ceremony was a display of the arts and colors. As for Haitian culture, it was represented by greatly renowned Haitian artists: Mikaben, J-Perry, Renette Désir, and Rutschelle Guillaum. They interpreted the hymn of the festival, a composition by Junior Hantz Mercier and Mikaben who surpassed themselves.
A show of sound, light, artistic parade and folk dances made up the opening of the ten days of festivities, with artists coming from various nations of the Caribbean community,
A parade of nations followed. It included delegations carrying their respective flag, as well as taptaps decorated in the colors of 22 nations and symbolically representing a Caribbean known for its diversity.
Unfortunately the rain came along and ended the evening prematurely, just as icons of Haitian music had taken the stage of the kiosk Occide Jeanty: Emeline Michel, Edy François and James Germain to name a few. All of whom had come to participation in the concert. The rain also forced the cancellation of a performance by the group “Taboo Combo.”
But in spite of the rain, as well as technical difficulties, the beauty of the show created immense enthusiasm and the Caribbean started to dance even in the rain!
US senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul trades suits for scrubs on Haiti mission to fight cataract
Presidential candidate and ophthalmologist visits western hemisphere’s poorest country to restore vision to hundreds as he acknowledges political struggles.
Mathieux Saint Fleur has been virtually blind for two decades. In less than 24 hours, he will see again. As the 75-year-old Haitian patient lies on an operating table, a US eye surgeon turned politician reassures him, in broken Creole that the surgery is almost over.
“People need to be encouraged it’s not much longer,” said Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist by training, without taking his eyes off Saint Fleur.
As many of Paul’s competitors courted voters in Iowa and New Hampshire over the last week, Kentucky’s fiery junior senator joined a team of eye surgeons on a four-day mission to Haiti, giving vision to nearly 200 who would not have been blind if they lived in the US. Here in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, “curable blindness” from common ailments such as cataracts is the norm.
But despite the humanitarian focus of the visit, Paul’s precarious place in the 2016 presidential contest was never quite forgotten.
Paul acknowledged his recent struggle during an interview at a Cap-Haitien hotel, where razor wire protects the outer walls and raw sewage flows into the nearby ocean.
“It’s sort of like a schoolyard. Once you got ’em down, everybody piles on,” Paul said of the 2016 contest. “And I’ve been under a dog pile for a couple of weeks.”
There may be cause for optimism, however, in the form of Gary Heavin, a cigar-chomping billionaire Republican donor who was at Paul’s side in Haiti for much of the week, having arrived with the senator and some of the other doctors on his private jet.
At the eye center, at least, it was easy to find evidence that Paul’s privately funded mission made a difference. The trip was organised by the University of Utah’s Moran Eye Center, which regularly leads trips designed to train local doctors and address “curable blindness” in poor areas around the world.
Cataract surgeries often take no longer than 20 minutes, allowing teams of volunteer surgeons to perform dozens in a single day. The Haiti group completed 109 surgeries in the three days Paul was on hand and expected to finish nearly 200 by the time the full group left the country on Saturday.
On Tuesday morning, the day after his surgery, Saint Fleur sat in a room crowded with patients quietly waiting for the bandages to come off. He was speechless for a few moments after the white gauze was peeled away. Then he began to smile.
“I see! I see!” he said, joy spreading across his face. With shaking hands, he began reaching out for nearby medical staff, hugging anyone he could and affectionately touching their faces.
“I love you,” he told a nurse. “Yesterday I couldn’t see!”
Saint Fleur then spoke directly to Paul: “If it’s for money, I could not do this. I have no money,” he said through an interpreter. “God sent you to me.”
Cholera, climate change fuel Haiti's humanitarian crisis: UN
Port-au-Prince (AFP) - Climate change, cholera and the return of thousands of emigrants from the neighboring Dominican Republican are fueling a humanitarian crisis in Haiti, the UN warned.
The impoverished Caribbean nation is facing a deluge of problems, pushing an already vulnerable population closer to the edge, said Enzo di Taranto, who heads Haiti's UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Among these pressures is a new cholera outbreak. Cases are up 300 percent in the first months of 2015 compared to the same period last year, di Taranto said in an interview with AFP.
Haiti -- the poorest country in the Americas -- is already suffering from chronic instability and struggling to recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people and crippled the nation's infrastructure.
A cholera outbreak after the quake was blamed on UN peacekeepers' poor hygiene.
According to UN data, nearly 20,000 people have been affected and 170 killed by the disease since the beginning of the year.
More than 8,800 Haitians have died of cholera since it appeared in October 2010 and, even today, cases recorded in Haiti surpass the total number of people with the disease elsewhere in the world.
Out of an estimated population of 10 million, around three million Haitians still are drinking dirty water, OCHA said.
Beyond the increase in cholera, the humanitarian situation in the country is worsening because of a "convergence of several factors," di Taranto said.
"The devaluation of the gourde (Haitian currency), which means an increase in the price of baseline products like medicine, food and water; the drought which has hit many regions in the country; and also the repatriation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic," are all contributing, he said.
- Families with nothing -
In June, the neighboring Dominican Republic introduced a tough new immigration policy, prompting 60,000 Haitians to leave the country.
Many ended up back in Haiti, straining an already vulnerable system.
The uncontrolled flow is exerting a "demographic pressure on the already very weak health system in Haiti and on the supply of food and water," di Taranto said.
He said the problems are especially bad in the southeastern community of Anse-a-Pitres.
Many families who returned from the Dominican Republic are living hand-to-mouth in shanties.
The effects of climate change are also encroaching. The summer drought previously confined to country's north has crept into the south.
"In the Cayes region and the Macaya natural park, water sources are dry," di Taranto said. "It's a problem that's spreading."
Haiti, which has lost 98 percent of its forest cover, has seen worsening agricultural conditions and topsoil erosion.
Because of this, the warm air current from "El Nino" is affecting Haiti more than other countries in the region.
"We need to launch public rural development programs which let us confront these climatological dynamics that we can't control," di Taranto said.
To address the immediate humanitarian emergency, OCHA estimates it will need around $25 million in the next four to six months.
But five years after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, international aid for Haiti is diminishing.
It's a situation that directly threatens help for more than 60,000 victims of the quake who are still living in camps.
To access a broader pool of potential donors, the United Nations is planning an online crowdfunding campaign and also using celebrities to draw attention to the cause.
The last such visit was from the singer Beyonce in May.
State Department Cautiously Criticizes Dominican Deportations
A mild rebuke from the Obama administration isn’t doing it for many activists.
Roque Planas
Reporter, Latino Voices, The Huffington Post
The State Department on Friday gently scolded the Dominican Republic for its resumption of deportations, urging the country's government to avoid deporting people to Haiti if they had once held a claim to Dominican citizenship.
The statement was a notable departure for the Obama administration, which has otherwise remained largely silent in recent months as the Dominican government’s widely criticized immigration regularization process wound to a close.
“We recognize the prerogative of the Dominican Republic to remove individuals from its territory who are present without authorization,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner wrote in the statement. “At the same time, we urge the Dominican Republic to avoid mass deportations and to conduct any deportations in a transparent manner that fully respects the human rights of deportees.”
But for many human rights groups that have long protested the Dominican government’s actions, the State Department's remarks didn’t go far enough.
Francesca Menes, a co-coordinator of the #Rights4AllInDR campaign, says her U.S. coalition of Dominican and Haitian expat groups aims to pressure the U.S. government into taking more direct action to curb deportations in the Dominican Republic.
“Our expectation was that there was going to be some kind of intervening to hold the Dominican government accountable, rather than releasing some statement,” Menes told The WorldPost. "The Dominican Republic is so close to us and we’re just watching from afar.”
In this photo taken on Jan. 29, 2011, a Haitian woman gathers her belongings while shouting that she was only working and not doing anything wrong, after being detained by Dominican specialized military border officers in Jimani, Dominican Republic.
Menes said she was disappointed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hasn't spoken about the issue, given the Clinton family’s close ties to Haiti. She noted that former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is competing with Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, recently met with Haitian and Dominican immigrants in Florida to discuss the crisis.
Clinton “has a national platform that she could use to speak up and she hasn’t,” Menes said. “[O’Malley] just taking that initiative meant a lot to us, as opposed to Hillary, who also came down here, but chose to only meet with the Cuban community.”
The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wade McMullen, an attorney with RFK Human Rights, said that deportations in the Dominican Republic are carried out much more rapidly than in the United States and with little opportunity to appeal the decision.
“Some of the people who have been deported have reported that there’s no process at all,” McMullen told The WorldPost. “They just get picked up, put on a bus and sent to the border. It’s extremely quick... We’re really concerned that this process doesn’t comply with the Dominican government’s international human rights obligations.”
The Dominican Republic resumed deportations last week, according to local reports, after largely suspending them for a year and a half to give people a chance to comply with the new immigration normalization plan. Thousands of undocumented Haitians began leaving the Dominican Republic voluntarily when the June 17 deadline passed. Settlement camps have sprung up across the border in Haiti to receive the migrating Haitians, according to NPR.
A series of legal changes since 2004 have eliminated the concept of birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic. The newer standard was enshrined in the country’s 2010 constitution, and a 2013 Constitutional Court ruling applied the standard retroactively, leaving thousands of people who'd once qualified for citizenship effectively stateless -- including an estimated 60,000 children.
Facing an onslaught of international criticism over the court’s ruling, the Dominican government implemented a plan to normalize the status of undocumented Haitians and to restore citizenship to Dominican-born people with undocumented parents who had previously qualified for citizenship.
But human rights groups largely panned the plan. Some 56,000 people who previously held passports, national IDs or other documentation identifying them as Dominican nationals had their citizenship restored under the plan. However, fewer than 9,000 people who were born in the country but lacked such documents, or else had difficulty obtaining them, applied to register as foreigners with an expedited pathway to citizenship before a February deadline. June 17 was the last day for undocumented immigrants, including people left stateless by the new policies, to register with the Dominican government as foreigners with the possibility of obtaining a provisional visa.
Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized the Dominican government’s new immigration and citizenship system, warning that the policies could lead to the deportations of thousands of Dominican-born people made stateless through the process. The vast majority of the estimated 200,000 stateless people in the Dominican Republic are of Haitian descent and black, fueling suspicions that racism played some role in creating the policies.
Dominican officials aren't likely to be very receptive to the foreign criticism. President Danilo Medina has defended the country's immigration and citizenship scheme as an issue of sovereignty, saying in speeches that he won’t bow to the interests of international nongovernmental organizations. Medina administration officials have pointed out that the United States routinely deports Haitians and other foreign nationals over the protests of U.S. immigrant rights advocates.
CARIFESTA
The following is the scheduled program of nine remaining days of this celebration of Caribbean Culture
These nine days will take place simultaneously in 5 planned cities: Jacmel, Port-au-Prince, Cayes, Gonaïves and in Cap-Haïtien.
CARIFESTA XII, official programming
Inauguration of the exhibit "Shared Memories"
On Saturday morning, First Lady Sophia Martelly, Honorary President of the Museum of the Haitian National Pantheon (MUPANAH), Dithny Joan Raton, Minister of Culture and Michèle G. Frisch, the Chief Executive Officer of the MUPANAH, inaugurated the exhibitb"Shared Memories" in the presence of the members of the official delegation of CARICOM led by its General Secretary, Irwin Larocque, accompanied by his assistant, Dr. Douglas Slater.
Conceived within the framework of the Festival of the Arts of the Caribbean (CARIFESTA XII Haïti 2015), this exhibit tells of the exceptional story of Haiti in the Caribbean context. A story marked by the revolutionary fights that led to the collapse of the slave colonial system in Haiti and the other islands of the Caribbean.
This exhibits also opens on the Creole identity, as an intercultural factor stemming from striking episodes of the history of humanity, as the conquests, the colonization, the atrocities of slavery, the resistances as well as the revolts.
To visit in the MUPANAH from August 23rd until October 22nd, 2015.
Grand Market is awaiting for you!
Last Saturday afternoon, the official inauguration of "Grand Market" took place.
Grand Market consists more than 100 exhibitors of small business craftsmen and women; more than 25 working restaurants serving throughout the day; a fashion stage, and a music stage for artistic representations every evening starting at 6:00 am p.m. Let us call recall that the Grand Market occupies the following streets: Magny, Saint Honoré, Magloire Ambroise, Capois and Legitime.
Ambassador Pamela White says Good bye …
After three years of service in Haiti, Ambassador Pamela White is leaving. In her last speech, she was eager to underline that she arrived "enthusiastic" and that she was leaving with the same feeling.
For her, the Haitian politicians are intelligent and passionate about their country. The main problem, she stressed, is that they blame each other and are unable to get along about common projects for their country.
Pamela White was also eager to speak about the corruption: "It is at every level," she said, adding, "There is a price to pay for anything here." During her interview with the newspaper Le Nouveliste, the American ambassador spoke for a long time about this plague. She said she had spoken about it not only with President Michel Martelly, but also with Minister of Justice Pierre Richard Casimthe ir. Even when she sees a street protest, Pamela White cannot refrain from wondering: "Who paid this time to make people take to the streets".
And then the ambassadress spoke about the ULCC, the Unity to Fight Against Corruption, financed largely by the United States. She said she was sorry about the departure of Colonel Atouriste, who was at the head of the institution. "He was not even given the opportunity to take to the courts cases of corruption that the ULCC had discovered.”
She was also questioned about the country’s national police force, the PNH which, according to White, had made a lot of progress, and become much more professional, thanks to 100 million dollars spent by the United States to equip the force. Drug trafficking had also decreased a lot, said the ambassador. The DEA was very satisfied with the work made by the BLTS, the Brigade to Fight Against Narcotics, which in 2015 was able to intercept more illegal drugs than it had during the previous 5 years
During the meeting, Pamela White was very open. It was as if she confided to “Le Nouveliste.” But for several years American ambassadors upon their departure have behaved this way.
It's as if they wanted to unload all that they had on their conscience by sharing everything that they had liked, and everything that hadn’t worked. In short, Pamela White is not different from those who preceded her in this office, which is so critical in Haiti.