Haiti: A Continuous Quake

By Kim Ives on January 11, 2020

Could we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terrible earthquake with a magnitude greater than 7 on the Richter scale that struck the Republic of Haiti on January 12, 2010 without asking where the donations went for reconstruction of the many structures destroyed and to help the thousands of victims who survived the disaster?

A few months after the earthquake, the country was still the victim of a cholera epidemic caused in October 2010 by the occupying forces of the Minustah. It had created nearly 800,000 victims and 11,000 dead added to the 250,000 dead during the earthquake, 300,000 injured and more than one million homeless.

In reality, we have remained exposed to many disasters and they continue to destabilize us. Natural disasters, the political ones orchestrated by the great capitalist powers to ruin us more, are the most cruel, because they occur daily.

The majority of the people live without access to drinking water, without a decent house with sanitary facilities, without health care, the population is crammed into slums in housing resembling small tombs.

The imperialist triumvirate – United States, France, Canada – as executioners imposes its dictates on us. We had resisted the catastrophic Michel Martelly for five years. After a little lull, just after Hurricane Matthew destroyed three to four departments, we were forced despite everything by Cyclone Jovenel Moise who leaves nothing in his path. It is a systematic devastation to the point of making the American dollar almost equivalent to 100 Haitian gourdes.

Popular resistance in a death struggle tries to subdue the international forces of evil while local retrograde forces strengthen them so that the latter continue their dirty work. The masses of people injured by the violence of misery are the thousands of people still trapped in the debris of poverty and unemployment in a country of looted resources as in the days of the colony of Santo Domingo.

Aid for reconstruction has been diverted by international vultures since the earthquake. Ten years later, the horrors experienced by the Haitian population remain as they are. It was as if the earthquake had barely passed since social conditions are still disastrous, nothing was done to replace the ruined socio-economic infrastructure created by centuries of imperialist oppression.

The only way to fight natural disasters is first to end the rotten, corrupt laboratory of the capitalist system in a revolutionary struggle for the socialist transformation of Haitian society.

Source: Haiti Liberte