Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians
By Edwidge Danticat
December 29, 2017
In the early nineteen-eighties, soon after cases of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (aids) were first discovered in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control named four groups at “high risk” for the disease: intravenous drug users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. Haitians were the only ones solely identified by nationality, in part because of twenty or so Haitian patients who’d shown up at Jackson Memorial Hospital, in Miami. “We forwarded these cases to the C.D.C.,” Dr. Arthur Fournier, who treated some of those first Haitian patients, told me recently. “The media then took off with the sensationalistic headlines.” Suddenly, every Haitian was suspected of having aids. At the junior high school I attended, in Brooklyn, some of the non-Haitian students would regularly shove and hit me and the other Haitian kids, telling us that we had dirty blood. My English as a Second Language class was excluded from a school trip to the Statue of Liberty out of fear that our sharing a school bus with the other kids might prove dangerous to them.
Last week, as many Haitians and Haitian-Americans were preparing for the Christmas holidays—some burdened by the fear that they or their loved ones might be deported in a year’s time because of the Trump’s Administration decision to end Temporary Protected Status(T.P.S.)—a Times article about President Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts brought back these memories and more. The article described a meeting that took place at the White House in June, when Trump expressed outrage that, in spite of his contested January, 2017, executive order barring refugees, particularly those from seven predominantly Muslim countries, too many immigrants had been granted visas to enter the United States. According to the Times, Trump was angry that fifteen thousand Haitians were among them. They “all have aids,” he allegedly said.
We are used to Trump insulting people of color with callous or racist remarks. He has referred to Mexicans as criminals and rapists and, in the June meeting described in the Times, Trump reportedly also complained that forty thousand Nigerian visa recipients would never “go back to their huts,” while branding Afghanistan a terrorist haven. (The White House has denied that Trump denigrated immigrant groups during the meeting.) Still, Trump’s alleged remark about Haiti and aids cut deep, reopening a painful wound that goes back several decades.
Haiti: Charles Aznavour in concert for Haiti’s economic elite
Eric FEFERBERG / AFP
Charles Aznavour gave a sole concert on Friday, December 29th, 2017 in Port-au-Prince. The singer, who is 93-year-old, performed in Haiti in the past but only once in 1974. Seeing his popularity with Haitians, his recent performance could have been a national event. But everything was done so that only the country’s economic elite could take advantage of Aznavour’s visit.
With our correspondent in Haiti, Amélie Baron
Aznavour cannot be any more popular in Haiti, but his concert had nothing for the larger public. The venue was accessible only by car, but the biggest deterrent was the ticket prices which range between 100 and 250 US dollars. This was totally out of reach for the immense majority of Haitians, as the writer Lyonel Trouillot expressed.
"Two hundred and fifty dollars, is more than my monthly salary at the University of Haiti. And then the chosen place, we have the impression that it recalled the Duvalier years when you had the rich displaying their money while demonstrating complete contempt for the living conditions of the majority of the population."
Lyonel Trouillot said: "The company which invited him is managed by the son of the former president of the Republic. The management of the public affairs is continually questioned. Today, I would like Aznavour to sing some songs of social character which he may have written or sang, because it is necessary to remind these people that they are rich because to the poverty of others."
This concert by Charles Aznavour's could have been a national event, instead it constitutes a new proof of the immense economic and social disparities in Haiti.
Message from American Secretary of State
In a recent press release, American Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, while at a party to celebrate Haiti’s independence on January 1st, declared:
"On behalf of the government of the United States, I offer my best wishes to the Haitian people while you celebrate the 214th anniversary of Haiti’s independence.
The United States and Haiti share a long history of close relations, and our future is even more closely linked due to the fact that nearly a million of Americans of Haitian origin contribute to Haiti’s economic growth.
We recognize the tremendous progress realized by Haiti during the last year. The inauguration of President Moses in February and the work undertaken by Haiti to stabilize its electoral system in the future, can reaffirm the commitment of the Haitian people in favor of the democracy, the rights of man and the rule of law. We also note significant progress regarding security and greet the efforts displayed by Haiti to develop its farming sector.
As friend and long-time partner, the United States remain determined to support Haiti while it tries hard to increase economic growth and investments, by releasing all of its potential.”
The Diaspora is going to be able to look at contents by TNH
Last Friday, Gamall Augustin the Managing director of the National Television of Haiti (TNH) and Clifford Dessables who heads of Focused Media Team LLC (Florida), signed an agreement which is going to allow the Haitian Diaspora to view the contents of TNH on cable television platforms.
Under the terms of the agreement, TNH grants permission to the Focused Media Team to look for distribution spaces for the contents of TNH, with the operators specialized in the distribution of television contents. This will help open the international market to the productions of the Haitian public service channel.
In this partnership, several parameters are taken into account in particular the quality of the production, but especially the respect for the copyright guaranteeing the signature of TNH, even beyond Haiti’s borders. As a result, certain segments of productions by TNH can be part of a menu offered by big international content distribution firms on the world market.
HL/HaïtiLibre
If This Is America
Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen DEC. 22, 2017
If this is America, with a cabinet of terrorized toadies genuflecting to the Great Leader, a vice president offering a compliment every 12 seconds to Mussolini’s understudy, and a White House that believes in “alternative facts,” then it is time to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.”
If this is America, where the Great Leader threatens allies who do not fall in line, retweets the anti-Muslim racism of British fascists, insults the Muslim mayor of London, dreams up a terror attack in Sweden, invents a call from the Mexican president, claims the Russia story is a “total fabrication,” then you will have to “bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.”
If this is America, less than a year into the Trump Presidency; yes, if this is still America, where Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, thanks the Great Leader for “allowing us to have you as our president,” and Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, says Trump’s will be the greatest presidency “maybe ever,” and the Great Leader celebrates a tax cut that saves his family millions but allows CHIP health insurance to expire for sick children, then you must “force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone.”
If this is not Turkmenistan, nor yet the land of Newspeak, but our America after all, where the curiously coiffed Great Leader of childish petulance accuses all media dissenters of distributing “FAKE NEWS,” and attacks the judiciary, and adores an autocrat, and labors night and day for his wealthiest cronies in the name of some phony “middle-class miracle,” then you must “hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ ”
If, beyond every abuse, this is yet America, where the Great Leader’s administration recommends that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not use the words “fetus,” “transgender,” “science-based” or “diversity,” (but can still, according to a New Yorker cartoon, use the word “moron”), and climate change is no longer a strategic threat (or even an admissible term in government circles), then it is time to heed the poet’s admonition: “Being lied about, don’t deal in lies.”
Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
If this is America, our America of government for the people, by the people, and you cannot believe how low the Great Leader will stoop, how much lower he will go than seemed possible, and sometimes you feel the need to wash the ambient crassness and vulgarity from your skin, for they seep into you whatever protection you may wear, and you are aghast at how the G.O.P. has morphed into palace courtiers outdoing each other in praise of their plutocratic reality-show prince, then it is time to ponder the poet’s words:
“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; if you can think — and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
If this is America, where the Great Leader wants you to believe that 2+2=5, and would usher you down his rabbit hole, and struggles to find in himself unequivocal condemnation of neo-Nazis, and you recall perhaps the words of Hannah Arendt, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist” — if all this you have lived and felt and thought across this beautiful and spacious land, then you must be prepared to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.”
If this is America, and you know where militarism and nationalism and disdain for intellectuals and artists, and the cultivation of enemies and scapegoats, and contempt for a free press can lead, and it pains you to see the world voting against the United States at the United Nations with the exception of Micronesia and Nauru and Palau (and a few others), then you will see that this, Trump’s American travesty, is in fact a lie and an affront and a betrayal.
America cannot be “first,” as Trump insists. It can be a thug and a bully only in the betrayal of itself. It must be itself, a certain idea of liberty and democracy and openness, or it is nothing, just a squalid, oversized, greedy place past the zenith of its greatness.
Throughout this column, I have been quoting Kipling’s poem, “If,” an evocation, addressed to his son, of the qualities that make a man. It incudes these lines:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss.
As a new year approaches, stoicism will prevail, decency will prevail, contestation will prevail, over the Great Leader’s plundering of truth and thought. This is not America. It must be fought for and won back.