The autopsy report of Toussaint Louverture enters the MUPANAH
The Haitian National Pantheon Museum (MUPANAH) welcomed in August new objects in its collection, including the autopsy report of the famous Toussaint Louverture. Emmelie Prophet, Director of the institution, was quick to announce the news and invite visitors to come and discover the new exhibits at the MUPANAH.
In terms of collections, the last 24 months have been fruitful for the Museum of the Haitian National Pantheon (MUPANAH), which is 36 years old. Royal clothing, a vase dated to the Amerindian age, sashes of former Haitian presidents among others joined the collection of the institution responsible for conserving, protecting and valuing the country’s historical and cultural heritage.
Haiti president indictment session postponed for second time
The session devoted to the analysis of the request for the indictment of President Jovenel Moïse was postponed Monday afternoon due to security problems. Gary Bodeau, the speaker of the chamber of deputies, announced the continuation of the session arguing the lack of serenity in the room.
A climate of tension prevailed in the area and in front of the Legislative Palace during the day as dozens of opposition protesters clashed with police in front of the building.
The police used tear gas on several occasions to repel the demonstrators who threw stones at the building. Several windshields of vehicles were broken by demonstrators who launched slogans against Moïse and parliamentarians of the majority
Gang violence increases in Port-au-Prince
In recent days, armed gangs have escalated the violence in Martissant, a district south of the capital. Three people, including a policeman, were killed by the gangs over the weekend. The policeman ensured the safety of a young migrant in Chile who was visiting his parents.
Residents are upset over the lack of reaction from the police. For instance, parents of a trade unionist were unable to have the support of a police patrol for a judge to draw up a record of the death.
Travelers bound for Port-au-Prince from Miami will soon face fewer options
Starting on Aug. 20, American Airlines is once again reducing its direct flights from Miami to Port-au-Prince, cutting the number of daily flights from two to one.
The change is due to American Airlines’ cancellations of about 115 daily flights because of the ongoing grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jets, said American Airlines spokeswoman Martha Pantin.
The reduced Haiti flight scheduled is supposed to last until Nov. 2.
Though not the only airline to fly to Haiti — Air France, Delta, JetBlue and Spirit all fly out of the U.S. — American has long been the dominant player in Haiti travel. It has its own second floor departure lounge at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince and occupies six check-in reservation counters compared to JetBlue’s four.
Spirit Airlines, which flew its last flight from Fort Lauderdale to Cap-Haitien, the country’s second largest city, on June 18, said unrest and operational issues were behind its decision to suspend service. “We have not determined a restart date,” spokesman Derek Dombrowski said.
Haiti’s tourism market has been taking a huge hit since last July. First, mass protests and rioting over a proposed fuel hike led to the temporary cancellations of international flights. Then in February, more anti-government protests and a nine day shut-down of the country led the U.S., Canada and France to all raise their travel warnings. The decision prompted the booking company, Expedia, to remove all Haiti flights and hotels from its site.
The reduction in air travel comes just as Haiti’s tourism market appears to be on the mend. In June, the U.S. State Department reduced its travel warning from Level 4 to 3. And last month, the diaspora, the country’s biggest market, began returning along with its musicians, who launched summer tours with packed street and bikini beach parties, and sold-out concerts.
Edwidge Danticat Returns to Haiti In New Stories
Edwidge Danticat’s collection Everything Inside explores the ethereal and urgent influence of Haiti on its stories’ characters
By Gabrielle Bellot
“Sometimes people know our most vulnerable places,” Edwidge Danticat says. “Because of that, we do things we know we shouldn’t do—things that have tragic outcomes. This is the kind of conflict that I’m drawn to: people asking very hard questions.”
In Danticat’s new collection, Everything Inside (Knopf, Aug.), these questions may explore romantic infidelity, broken pacts, or the identity of a long-lost parent; sometimes, they involve the labyrinthine question of whether to return to Haiti—the country—from Little Haiti in Miami, where many of the stories take place. Danticat says that above all, she wished to “show all the layers” of the women in her new stories when they make their decisions—good, bad, and everything in between. And it is this core idea—women faced with choices at once mundane and magnitudinous—that perhaps best characterizes Everything Inside.
But Haiti’s history is also one of astonishing rebellion and of ordinary people just trying to get by—facts often ignored by American media, which insists on painting Haiti as an epicenter of suffering. This is what Danticat’s fiction has sought to capture, too, through the tenderness and resilience of its characters. Rather than focusing solely on the ravages, she also shows Haiti’s beauty, geographically and culturally. Her work has always been quietly revolutionary in both its explicit depiction of tragedy and its examination of deep interpersonal relationships.
Danticat’s newest collection takes this idea further, presenting Haitians, Americans, and Haitian-Americans who have varying degrees of distance from the Caribbean nation. Some of the characters have never experienced the horrors that Danticat’s earlier characters fled; many live in America. In these stories, Haiti’s enduring presence feels more ethereal—urgent in a different way for this new generation.
Exile, to be sure, has always defined Danticat’s work, in all of its protean, poignant forms—be it political, geographic, cultural, or existential. And though Everything Inside focuses perhaps most on interpersonal distances, Danticat’s American characters are still connected to Haiti, and so, she observes, they must face “the flip side of exile: whether or not to return.” When these characters do travel to Haiti, she notes, they don’t wish solely to see monuments to loss; they want to see “the pretty places,” too—“the multiplicity of Haiti and of their ancestry.”
It’s important, Danticat says, that Everything Inside not be read purely as a text of a particular cultural moment—partly because she considers books to be “always behind the cultural moment”—but rather as something as much of the present as the past and future. She decries what she identifies as the day-to-day grotesquerie of the American political present. Obliquely, her book, with its focus on transnational figures who have family in Haiti and America, critiques both the closed-border sentiments of the Trump administration and governmental corruption in Haiti. Her characters “are in the middle” of all this, she says, just “trying to keep it together” in a volatile world.
But in the end, Danticat says, this is a collection about people and the complex interactions and decisions they share. Its tenderness feels striking in a hectic 2019. In the end, we are left with these characters’ brutal, banal, and beautiful moments, like a wide night luminous, every so often, with firefly stars.
Trump’s Racism Against Haitians on Display Again: Ending the Much-Needed Haitian Family Reunification Program Hurts Thousands of Haitians!
Family Action Network Movement (FANM)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Rhenie Dalger, Steve Forester
Phone: 786-280-9062, 786-877-6999
Email:
Who: Former AILA President: Ira Kurzban, Immigration Advocates, Faith and Community Leaders, FANM members.
What: Trump Administration to Terminate the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program
When: Wednesday, August 14, 2019,
Time: 10:30 AM
Where: FANM : 100 N.E. 84 Street, Miami , Florida 33138
Trump’s Racism Against Haitians on Display Again: Ending the Much-Needed Haitian Family Reunification Program Hurts Thousands of Haitians!
Trump’s DHS on August 2nd announced its intention to end the Haitian Family Reunification Program (HFRP), which it began strangling when he took office in January, 2017.
From “shithole countries” and saying Haitians “all have AIDS,” to asking bipartisan senators “why would we want any more Haitians?” and saying he prefers “Norwegians,” to ending Haiti’s TPS and inclusion in the H-2A and H-2B programs, this is yet more evidence of his anti-Haitian actions and animus.
Speeding up legal immigration from Haiti was urged by bi-partisan supporters as a way to help Haiti recover after 2010’s quake, which killed at least 250,000 and devastated the nation. Although not created until March, 2015 and too-limited in scope, about 8,300 beneficiaries (who’d each waited about ten years in Haiti!) of DHS-approved visa petitions have joined their families under the program.
HFRP operated by invitation only to qualifying petitioners (as beneficiaries who’d been waiting in Haiti for years finally came within 42 months of getting visas), but Trump’s DHS intentionally never issued any invitations, effectively strangling it.
Former American Immigration Lawyers Association President Ira Kurzban, long a champion of equal treatment for Haitians, said, "The decision of the Trump White House to end this program is simply one more racist act against Haitians that began with his calling Haiti a “shithole” country and then cutting all benefits to Haitians including TPS , the H-2A, and H-2B programs.”
Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) immigration policy coordinator Steve Forester, one of the program’s champions said, “Just like ending Haiti TPS, this again demonstrates Trump’s racism and disregard for the rule of law; it hurts the United States by impeding Haiti’s recovery from the quake, 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, the ongoing imported cholera epidemic, and it again shows Trump lied when he told Haitian-Americans he cared about the hundreds of thousands who died in the earthquake.”
“Terminating yet another legal and badly needed program clearly shows that the Trump administration real intent is to stop the flow of black and brown immigrants coming into this country, period,” said Marleine Bastien, Family Action Network Movement Executive Director. "Why else would he stop a bona fide , legal program when Haiti is going through such a high level of instability, human rights violations, and violence? The ending of the HFRP, continuous ICE raids, and targeting legal immigrants who use welfare benefits show that President Trump real issue is not about legal or illegal immigration; it is about preventing Black and Browns to come or remain in the United States.”
Family Action Network Movement (FANM) formerly known as Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, Inc)/ Haitian Women of Miami is a private not-for-profit organization dedicated to the social, economic, financial and political empowerment of low to moderate-income families….to give them the tools to transform their communities.