US deports ex-paramilitary leader 'Toto' Constant to Haiti

[Judi Lynn]

2. I have no doubt the Haitian elites, all right-wing, the sweat-shop owners, landowners will keep him,

because they are also the ones who supported Papa Doc Duvalier, and his creepy son who used the Tonton Macoute (his father's notorious, wildly brutal death squad) to keep the huge poor population paralyzed with fear.

They probably are overjoyed to get him back, unfortunately. Haitian elites have always had the total backing of the US, Canadian, French political, military, industrial folks, throughout.

Leaders who've cared for the population don't seem to last long, no matter how many times they get elected. The U.S. government hates them, sadly.

They overthrew the slave-owners because the suffering was horrendous, and apparently offended the other European-controlled nations. They did assist Cubans in their own struggle for freedom...

The Threat of a Free Haiti
BY
SAMUEL FARBER
The Haitian Revolution sowed fear in the hearts of Cuba's slaveholding class.



In 1791, while France entered the early stages of its revolution, the slaves of its Caribbean colony, Saint Domingue, rose up and took arms. It was the first successful slave revolt in history, one that overthrew white colonial rule and established the new state of Haiti in 1804.

The Haitian Revolution sent shivers through European possessions across the Caribbean and Latin America, and into the newly independent United States. It became a tremendous symbol of hope for slaves throughout these countries, and one of tremulous fear for their masters, particularly those living in the colonies. Its effects extended to the South American independence movement led by Simón Bolívar, and to France, particularly during the more radical periods of its own revolution.

In Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, historian Ada Ferrer undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the impact made by the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, then still a Spanish colony located only fifty miles from Haiti’s western sea borders.

Ferrer — whose previous book Insurgent Cuba examines the racial dimensions of the island’s pro-independence movements in the latter half of the nineteenth century — develops an insightful account of the ways in which the Haitian Revolution spurred the intensification of plantation slavery in Cuba, fostering at once the growing power of slaveholders and a new spirit of rebellion among slaves, encouraging an antagonism that culminated in several failed slave conspiracies and rebellions.

When revolt broke out in 1791, Saint Domingue hosted eight hundred sugar plantations that together produced as much sugar as all of Britain’s Caribbean colonies combined. By its conclusion, sugar production had collapsed in Haiti along with slavery and French rule.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/haiti-revolution-toussaint-louverture-cuba-aponte-rebellion-jacobins/