Dominican Republic: George Floyd protests spark reckoning with race as elections loom

Mon 15 Jun 2020

Dominican Republic: George Floyd protests spark reckoning with race as elections loom 

By Michael Deibert 

The Guardian

(Read original article here)

As demonstrations were held around the world against racism and police brutality, a group of protesters arrived last week at Santo Domingo’s Parque Independencia to honor the memory of George Floyd, the African American man killed by Minneapolis police.
The vigil had been convened by Reconocido (Recognized), a local organization that describes itself as made up primarily of Dominicans of Haitian descent – a group that routinely faces racist discrimination.

But counter-protesters were waiting for them: an ultranationalist organization dubbing itself the Antigua Orden Dominicana (Old Dominican Order) had called on social networks for people to come out and “defend against the Haitian invasion”.

As Reconocido members tried to hold their event, the counter-protesters shouted invective at them. Police officers stood by, and when they eventually intervened, it was to bundle Reconocido’s leader, Ana María Belique, and another activist off to jail.

“What happened shows the levels of intolerance that exist here regarding the issue of race,” said Belique, who was released hours later without charges. “Perhaps if George Floyd was not black and if we were not an anti-racist collective, it might be different. Because everything black in this country evokes Haiti – as if it were an affront to this nation that turns its back on its black identity.”

The Dominican Republic shares both the island of Hispaniola and an uneasy history with Haiti – the country from which it gained its independence in 1844. It has traditionally provided an escape valve for Haitians fleeing political upheaval and economic desperation at home, even as they are sometimes viewed – often unfairly – as competing with poor Dominicans for low-wage jobs.

The global wave of Black Lives Matter protests reached the Dominican Republic as the country approaches 5 July presidential elections that some believe may put an end to 24 years of nearly uninterrupted governance by the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (the Dominican Liberation party, or PLD).

The PLD first took the presidency in 1996 through a Faustian bargain with the longtime caudillo Joaquín Balaguer, after a campaign marked by fraud and racist incitement that finally saw Leonel Fernández take the presidential sash.

With the PLD now beset by various scandals – and bitterly divided between wings loyal to current president Danilo Medina (in office since 2012 and running the former government minister Gonzalo Castillo as his successor) and Fernández (who is mounting his own presidential campaign at the head of the Fuerza del Pueblo coalition) – polls suggest the ballot may be won by Luis Abinader of the opposition Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM).

What this may mean for the discourse on race in the Dominican Republic remains to be seen. The country’s agriculture, tourism and construction sectors largely depend on immigrant Haitian labor, but over the last decade, generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent have seen a series of court rulings gradually strip them of their nationality.

“Even the political parties that have been seen as more friendly on these issues have been quiet,” said Amarilys Estrella, a visiting professor with the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University.

“All of this silence allows for the amplification of a small group of ultra-nationalists who are anti-Haitian and also anti-black. Even people who might not agree with what is happening might not speak out because they fear they might be a target.”

That fear is rooted in history: an October 1937 speech by the dictator Rafael Trujillo launched a pogrom against Haitians in the country which would eventually become known as “the Parsley Massacre” or el Corte (the Cutting). At least 10,000 and perhaps up to 20,000 Haitians die during a weeks-long paroxysm of genocidal rage.

Acts of public violence against Haitians in the Dominican Republic still happen from time to time, with one of the better-known recent cases being the lynching of a Haitian man in the northern city of Santiago in 2015.

However, protests against corruption and electoral meddling that shook the country earlier this year saw a multiracial and often quite youthful front taking to the streets in what many observers agreed was an unprecedented show of civic discontent that may be a harbinger of future change.

“The young people are in many ways attuned to transnational networks and conversations,” says Lorgia García Peña, an associate professor in the department of romance languages and literatures at Harvard University.

“The language that is being used right now is purposeful. There has been a more global contextualization of the intersection of race, class and economic exploitation that this young generation is much more aware of.”

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

Wed 5 Dec 2018 15.48 GMT

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

The United States is more to blame for its immigration problem than it would like to take credit for

By Michael Deibert

The Guardian

(Read the original article here)

The mass of humanity living in a makeshift encampment at the US border with Mexico is driven by historical forces of which many Americans are only dimly aware.

Demonized by Donald Trump as an “invasion” of miscreants who should be housed in concentration camp-like tent cities, the migrants, many of whom are in fact planning on applying for asylum, persist under the weight of a US history in their home countries as heavy as any burden they carry with them.

Though several caravans have made the trek to the United States over the last year, the one that attracted Trump’s attention left San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, on 12 October. It was largely made up of citizens of that country, as well as some from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Traversing a route infamous for its danger – the Mexican leg of the journey crosses states long in thrall to the country’s powerful drug cartels – their safety in numbers logic is self-evident. What is forcing thousands of people into such a precarious flight?

In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.

Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.

After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.

At least 31 people, the vast majority civilians, died in the violence, but Orlando Hernández continued in office, with Trump’s state department congratulating him on his victory while stressing “the need for a robust national dialogue”.

Honduras is hardly the only country whose society has been undermined by US political decisions both recent and historic.

In neighboring Guatemala, the US provided extensive aid to the Guatemalan military during the country’s 1960 to 1996 civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The war itself was to a large extent an outgrowth of a US-backed coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954.

More recently, the Trump administration has lent its support to attempts to neutralize the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (Cicig), a United Nations-backed body tasked with investigating organized crime and its links to political actors.

One of those actors is Guatemala’s current president, former comedian Jimmy Morales, who is under investigation for allegedly accepting illicit campaign contributions, and came to power with the support of some of the most reactionary elements of the country’s military.

Under the rule of Morales, the Guatemalan government was one of only a handful that followed Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this past May. With his undercutting of Cicig, many view Trump as returning the favour.

But perhaps no country’s history attests to the US role in helping to create the conditions for this latter-day exodus than El Salvador.

After an October 1979 coup resulted in a military-civilian junta, the US government, first under Jimmy Carter and then under Ronald Reagan, supported the junta even as its civilian members resigned and it grew more violent.

As political polarization accelerated, a bubbling multi-front guerrilla insurgency united under the umbrella of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In turn, the FMLN was met with increasing death-squad activity by the right. Much of this violence was orchestrated by US-trained Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former intelligence official.

The United States worked furiously to prevent a D’Aubuisson victory in 1984 elections that saw center-right José Napoleón Duarte come to power. Despite its role in preventing D’Aubuisson’s election, the US government for years poured money into Salvadoran military bodies such as the Atlacatl Battalion, whose chief military maneuver appears to have been the massacre, a tendency which it carried out in mass killings in hamlets such as El Mozote and El Calabozo and even in the capital, where it murdered six Jesuit priests and two lay workers in 1989.

Both during his campaign and his president, Trump has frequently inveighed against criminal organizations with links to El Salvador and their malign influence on the United States. Here, too, the history is more complicated – and more shaped by the US – than many acknowledge.

During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted until 1992 and killed an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands fled to the United States, especially to southern California. There, young Salvadoran boys found themselves endangered by local gangs and coalesced into their own groups, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the American origins of the gang go almost unreported.

All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.

The caravans themselves push on, as the assassinated Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote, “far from where hope is already left behind”.

A few notes on the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting

What I witnessed yesterday at the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting was a disgrace and an affront to democracy.

In a packed house, as citizen after citizen rose to voice to their opposition to the city's collaboration with the Trump administration's nakedly racist policies targeting immigrants, Muslims and others - and to express that there are now whole communities in Miami that are living in fear - the speakers were consistently cut off and silenced by Commissioner Esteban L. Bovo, Jr., who presided over the meeting with the glittering arrogance of colonial proconsul addressing his imperial subjects. 

As voter after voter spoke - some removed from the Chamber by Bovo even though they were no way being disruptive, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez ignored the proceedings entirely, standing off to one side laughing and joking with his cronies. The dynamic finally erupted into a walkout and protest by many of those assembled (including me).

For those interested who would like to see video confirmation of my story, I posted three videos of the meeting and the aftermath that I took with my phone here.

The Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners has clearly forgotten who they work, so I suggest from here on out we remind them, not just on voting day but at every meeting henceforth. They work for us, the city of Miami, and we always have been and remain a city and a county of immigrants and a refuge for the persecuted, all the stronger for our diversity. 

This will not pass. Ni un paso atrás.

Paris, je t'aime

20 November 2015

Paris, je t'aime

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

(Read the original article here)

Eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January of this year -- attacks during which the Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly murdered an unarmed police woman and four patrons at a Jewish supermarket -- something strange happened.

When the literary group PEN announced that it would be honoring Charlie Hebdo, who had attracted the ire of religious fanatics for its drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, with its Courage Award, a group of writers sent a letter to the body to protest this distinction. The letter had been spearheaded by the authors Teju Cole and Francine Prose, who both teach at my former alma mater of Bard College, a place which, at least when I went there, adhered to the rather more open dictum of Walt Whitman which called on artists to unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.

While adding the rather ludicrous caveat that "the murder of a dozen people...is sickening and tragic" the letter attacked Charlie Hebdo for engaging in "expression that violates the acceptable" and accused the publication of "being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering" to "the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises." The letter also said that, by bestowing the award, PEN was awarding a publication "that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world." So, to put it more succinctly, the journalists at Charlie Hebdo had been imperial valets who had brought it on themselves.

(Cole had written an earlier piece for the New Yorker that rather speciously claimed that Charlie Hebdo had "gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.")

In addition to Cole and Prose, among the largely Anglophone signatories were Russell Banks, Eric Bogosian, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz, Francisco Goldman, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante, Charles Simic and, strangely, the New York Times opinion page editor, Clay Risen.

I don't think I had ever been ashamed to be a writer until that moment. It was a scandalous display born out of ignorance of the role of Charlie Hebdo, the function of satire, and the history of modern France as a whole. It was obvious from the nature of the letter that few, if any, of the signatories had probably ever read Charlie Hebdo before the attacks, and had instead formed their opinion on a handful of out-of-context cartoons culled from the publication's 40 plus year history.

The authors seemed oblivious to the fact that satire's function is to sting, not cause guffaws, and that by far the most frequent targets of the publication's cartoonists -- artists such as Jean Cabu, Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Georges Wolinski (all slain in the attack) -- were France's rancid political elite and, especially, the right-wing Front National founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and now run by his daughter, Marine. One of the cartoons most often used to demonstrate Charlie Hebdo's supposed racism, that of French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, a women of Afro-Guyanese descent, as a monkey, was in fact mocking far-right attacks against her, not Taubira herself. [For her part, Taubira gave a moving eulogy at the funeral of Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac.] The signatories simply threw to one side the publication's long history of attacking Catholicism, Judaism and, indeed, organized religion of any sort. They seemed unaware of the series of articles Charlie Hebdo's slain economist, Bernard Maris, had written on the effects of austerity on Europe's most vulnerable, especially in Greece, or that the magazine had spoken out in furious dissent against the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza.

As the French academic Olivier Tonneau wrote shortly after the attacks in response to the venomous social media slander against the paper's slain staff, "if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies."

(Nor were the PEN signatories alone in libeling the dead. The U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that Charlie Hebdo was "not just offensive but bigoted" and engaged in "a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally" and "the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims.")

Now, 11 months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in La Ville Lumière 129 more lay dead. They were black, white, brown (black, blanc, beur in the French phrase), men, women, Christian, Muslim, atheist, straight, gay. They were committing no other crime than sitting out to have a drink on a warm autumn night, going to see a football match or going to see a rock band play. That scurrilous display of those writers can't help but return to my mind.

Today, it is the false narrative, advanced by both left and right, that last week's attacks were the result of France's so-called "Muslim" problem, with a focus on the supposed radicalization taking place in the banlieues, as the poor, heavily-immigrant suburbs which ring many French cities are known, and a blow struck against the "white" city of Paris.

Having come to France through a somewhat roundabout route of years working in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and having only lived in heavily-immigrant neighborhoods (Château Rouge in the 18th arrondissement and Bagnolet, just beyond the périphérique ring-road from Paris proper), I have perhaps a different perspective on this than some foreigners. I've spent a fair amount of time in the banlieues of Paris, and covered the November 2007 riots in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel from the ground. Though they have plenty of problems -- unemployment hovers around double the national average, with that for 21- to 29-year-olds ever higher -- a propensity for radical Islam is not one of them.

The so-called "problem youth" I met in places like Villiers-le-Bel and Clichy-sous-Bois (itself the site of riots a decade ago), were about as far away from Islamist as one can get, drinking alcohol, smoking hash, racing up and down the boulevards on their scooters to a soundtrack of French and American hip-hop music.

The pool of these people who would gravitate towards radical Islam was -- and is -- very small, and those who become jihadis are the same ones who would go shoot up a school or movie theater in the United States without the religious trappings, alienated losers with no life and few opportunities, scorned by many, often including their own families, not because of their ethnicity or religion, but because they are viewed as dangerous malcontents. Somehow a burqa-clad Marianne, the female national symbol of France, does not seem a realistic fear to me.

That isn't to say religion plays no role in France's current anguished self-examination, but to see this series of attacks on Paris -- which ISIS in its "communiqué" referred to as "the capital of prostitution and vice" with all the venom of a nerd being left alone at the school dance -- as a political statement by an oppressed minority is thoroughly absurd. Among the Muslims who have emigrated to Europe and their offspring, there are good people and bad people, strong and weak, secular and fundamentalist.

They are, in short, like people everywhere else. The image, somewhat massaged by both apologists of the left and blowhards of the right, that France's Muslims are bearded salafists heading to the mosque to listen to some deranged imam's calls for jihad, scorned by society, is so far off the mark as to enter the realms of science fiction, as is demonstrated by how many Muslims caught the terrorists' bullets while out at the bars last Friday night.

The immigrant and Muslim communities of France and especially Paris are an integral part of the city and help give it much of its pizzazz and joie de vivre. In my heavily-immigrant neighborhood of Château Rouge, virtually all the bars were owned by Algerians and Tunisians, who were quite happy to quaff a pint at the end of the day. And though France's anti-freedom of expression "hate speech" laws can often be selectively enforced (witness the case of the anti-semitic comedian Dieudonné, which I wrote about here), none of that exculpates such an attack, nor does it excuse discourse on France by a clutch of writers who barely know the country at all.

There has been a bizarre grief contest on social media suggesting, alternately, that if one mourns the dead in Paris and the attacks against the city, one could somehow not mourn recent terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Turkey, those dying in the civil war in Syria, or those being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and that the media had "ignored" such stories, even though they all have received -- and continue to receive -- extensive coverage in every major paper in Europe and North America. Perhaps if people spent less time circulating fake Buddha and Bob Marley quotes they would have noticed.

A Brazilian friend of mine currently based in India (a country that knows a little something about religious-inspired terror) introduced me to the perfect term for both the critics of Charlie Hebdo and those whose mockery and critiques of the genuine pain of so many after the Paris attacks appeared to reveal nothing if not a collection of curdled souls: Catastrophe sommeliers.

After any major example of man's inhumanity, religious fanaticism or simple tragedy, they would appear portentously at the world's side, napkin draped over their arm to decide who, what, where and for how long it was proper to mourn, or whether one was allowed to mourn at all.

And as for me? It would be nice to move back to Paris someday, if I can ever get the money together. In terms of the letter-signers, Michael Ondaatje used to be one of my favorite writers, and I rather liked Francisco Goldman but I'll never buy another book by either man again, and am thinking of getting rid of the ones I have. Most of the rest always struck me as wildly overpraised, so no great loss there.

Though Paris is in deep mourning and will likely remain so for some time, a nation that survived the horrors of a Nazi occupation, World War II and the slaughter of the Paris Commune will certainly wash off the blood, shake off the broken glass, kick the shell casings into the sewer where they belong and get back to doing what it does best, acting as a crossroads for men and women of all faiths and all backgrounds to sample its various charms.

Behind the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died, an image has already been posted up of five people raising a glass of wine in mute salute under the words Paris encore debout (Paris is still standing). Charlie Hebdo's cover after the attacks was a beret-wearing French caricature guzzling bubbly, which then pours out of copious bullet holes in the figure's body, along with the words ils ont les armes, on les emmerde, on a le champagne (They've got the weapons, fuck 'em, we've got the champagne).
The spirit of Paris, of Charlie Hebdo and the spirit of those lives -- so many of them so young -- snatched away last week can never fully leave us. They will be with us as people drink and eat and laugh and flirt on the cafes along the Canal Saint Martin, the sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the trees as their branches move in a delicate ballet from even the faintest breeze.

They will be with us as people from dozens of countries gather at the Marché Dejean in my old neighborhood to sell their wares and to seek new opportunity in their adopted land. They will be with us in the crowded basement clubs in Oberkampf where people know what it is to be young and full of possibility.

They will be with us as one looks down from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre at dusk and sees a magnificent, multicultural city spread out beneath them, a thousand possibilities therein yet to be discovered. And they will be with us wherever people feel their hearts are free, and full of love for their fellow human beings.

It is a love that those who attack this beloved city and its culture, whether with kalashnikovs or keyboards, would be fortunate to one day know.

Brief thoughts on Syria and the European refugee crisis

I think at this point we must all ask: What are we - collectively as citizens of Western countries whose actions (and inaction) have contributed so much to this mess - doing to ameliorate the situation of these poor people fleeing Syria, Libya and so on? Though I have not reported on it myself, I feel the situation in Syria, more than any other event today, says so much about who we are as a humanity, now well into the 21st century. There is so much dishonesty and hypocrisy surrounding it: The use and betrayal (again) of the Kurds and the blind eye turned to the pummeling of them by Turkey's would-be sultan; the breaking bread with Saudi Arabia even as they flood Syria and Iraq with money and jihadis; the support by Iran and Russia of the Assad regime, the abandonment of the people of Iraq after we leveled their country...Really, what is the solution to all this, to so much violence, delusion, chicanery and grief? I wish I knew...

How the OAS Failed Dominicans of Haitian Descent

Earlier this month, the Organization of American States (OAS) sent an "observer mission" to the Dominican Republic to look into that country’s "Haitian problem" (though if we are honest, we should call it the country’s "race" problem or better yet its "money and politics” problem). The mission was prompted, respectively, by a 2013 decision by the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court which retroactively stripped citizenship on an ethnic and racial basis from tens of thousands of Dominican citizens of Haitian descent, seizing from them their most basic civil rights. Far from being corrected, this decision was codified by the 2014 Naturalization Law of President Danilo Medina, himself a member of the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD), the political party which now enjoys a near-total monopoly on power in the country and whose links with elite Dominican business interests, who have historically benefited from access to a disempowered, disenfranchised Haitian-derived labour pool, are longstanding. Though the 2014 law ostensibly offered to “regularize” the citizenship of those who qualified (a relative handful of the Dominicans of Haitian descent), the implementation of the law was carried out in an arbitrary fashion of questionable legality that seemed to put very few indeed on the path to citizenship.

The OAS mission was led by two veteran bureaucrats, Mexico's Francisco Guerrero Aguirre and Uruguay's Gabriel Bidegain, neither of them Creole speakers (the language of the estimated 1 million plus Haitians in the country). They met with government officials and visited a single border area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the one at Anse-à-Pîtres. Their first observation in their public statement is that the OAS "recognized that the Dominican Republic has the right, as a sovereign country, to establish and implement its own immigration policy," a policy that apparently also leaves the Dominican Republic free to denationalize its own citizens on a racial and ethnic basis as it sees fit.

Though the OAS statement said that the body "recognizes that there are people at risk of not having any recognized nationality," the statement nowhere condemned the denationalization of Dominicans citizens of Haitian descent. The OAS findings stand in opposition to those of groups such as Human Rights Watch, which cited, with evidence and first-hand interviews, acts that it characterized as “ongoing violations of the human right to a nationality" against Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, the United Nations, which cited “arbitrary deportations” of Dominicans of Haitian descent that risked violating international laws and the country’s own constitution, as well as reporting from such news outlets as Agence France-Presse  and Al Jazeera.

By remaining silent in the face of the ongoing violations of the human rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent and of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, and with their mission largely uncritically parroting the Dominican government line, the Organization of American States and Messrs Guerrero and Bidegain have failed some of the most vulnerable on the island of Hispaniola and, indeed, in the Americas as a whole, whose welfare it is their duty to protect.

Making sense of Miami:

Thursday 2 July 2015

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future

The dizzying blend of accents entices some visitors and alarms others. But as the US gets ever-closer to Cuba, Miami resident Michael Deibert asks: what can the rest of America learn from its own multicultural metropolis? 

The Guardian
  
(Please read original article here)

Just off Miami’s busy Calle Ocho, the thoroughfare that is the beating cultural heart of the city’s Cuban community, there rises a splendid ceiba tree whose roots erupt from the ground like waves from the sea, and whose vast branches throw shade far to either side.

All around the gnarled roots and tucked into the tree’s hidden crevices, one finds the offerings of the faithful: candles, bags of food, feathers, bones. In this modern metropolis, whose vaulting skyscrapers a mile away reflect the near-blinding sun, the saturnalia surrounding the ceiba attests to the lifeblood of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería, and Miami’s eternal place in the imagination of el exilio, as the Cuban community is often referred to.

I’ve lived in Miami off and on since the mid-1990s. As much as anywhere in the United States – my native country with which I have an often conflicted relationship – it counts as home. Landing back in Florida from Haiti, Paris or elsewhere, Miami always seems to offer the singular trick of providing some of the efficiency and convenience of living in the US while never seeming entirely a part of it.
Miami has long been a kind of quasi city-state that evokes strong reactions from visitors, especially those from more anglicised parts of the country who cannot make themselves understood in English to a large part of the local population – an experience that annoys and alarms them.

The strangest city in what is perhaps America’s strangest state, Miami is now home not just to Cubans but to thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Colombians, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and practically every other Latin American nationality, with sizeable populations of Russians, Indians, Persians and Orthodox Jews as well.

The city has become so micronised that what is commonly thought of as “Miami” in the popular imagination is, in fact, a series of semi-independent small cities – some only a few blocks long – within the urban sprawl of Miami-Dade County (population 2.6 million). It fronts a long sweep of the blue-green Atlantic to the east and finally peters out in the miasma of the Everglades swamp to the west and the necklace of the Florida Keys to the south.

A young city (it was only incorporated in 1896 in what was then mostly wilderness), Miami is often said to have been founded on bootleg liquor and built its skyline on an infusion of cocaine money in the 70s and 80s (at the height of its cocaine wars in 1980 to 1981, the city had the world’s highest murder rate). Nearly 30 years ago, the crime writer Edna Buchanan wrote that Miami had been “a sleepy resort” that had transformed to attract “year-round ... concentrations of everything corrupt, bizarre or dangerous from everywhere in the world”.

Above all, Miami is a place of exile where newcomers try to construct a new life. Upon arriving from Cuba in 1980, the author Reinaldo Arenas – who as a teenaged barbudo had fought with Castro’s forces but was then imprisoned and tortured both for being an independent intellectual and gay – declared Miami “a barren and pestiferous peninsula ... trying to become for a million exiles, the dream of a tropical island”.

No fan of the city, Arenas quickly decamped to New York, where he committed suicide in 1990. Miami, however, continued to percolate like a spoonful of Café Bustelo coffee from the cafe colada that residents traditionally drink every afternoon at 3:05 (the city’s area code). And it has become something more interesting than many had thought possible.

In his office in West Miami near the city’s airport – a few blocks away from a branch of the city’s El Palacio de los Jugos Cuban eateries where the pan con lechón hints at the divine – Armando Valladares sits surrounded by photos of himself with political leaders: Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Florida senator (and Miami native and presidential candidate) Marco Rubio. Now white-haired, bespectacled and elegant, Valladares spent 22 years in Cuban prisons for – among other perceived offences – refusing to put an “I’m with Fidel” sign on his desk at the Ministry of Communications in 1960. Upon his release in 1982, he became a United States Ambassador to the United Nations. After residing in Washington for many years, he moved to Miami about 15 years ago.

“The Cubans have demonstrated their ability and their quality of work here,” Valladares says. “It’s a unique case in the history of the United States where the identity of a city was born, in a sense, in another country.”

The Cuban aspects of Miami’s identity appear to be far less monolithic than they once were, though. Many younger Cuban-Americans support the easing of relations with Cuba that US president Barack Obama has been pursuing with the island’s rulers. Events such as the O’ Miami poetry festival bring Cuban cultural groups such as Omni Zona Franca (from eastern Havana’s housing estates) to Miami on a regular basis, demonstrating that the city’s Latin vibe is more than Hoy Como Ayer (Today Like Yesterday), as one long-standing club wistfully calls itself.

If Miami represents a refuge for Cubans, it serves as no less of one for Haitians who, fleeing a downward economic spiral and the tyranny of some of the country’s leaders, have made a profound impact on Miami’s cultural life over the last several decades.

Along a once-neglected stretch of Northeast 2nd Avenue in the heart of the Haitian immigrant community, a cultural flowering has taken place that has seen the opening of the Little Haiti Cultural Center and its Caribbean Marketplace – a replica of the famed Marché en fer (Iron Market) in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Exuberantly coloured murals by local artists adorn walls, and every Friday night the Rara Lakay band marches through the neighbourhood, beating on drums and blowing on plangent bamboo vaksin trumpets, whose bleat more evokes the deep Haitian countryside than an American city.

“I have seen this city grow culturally,” says the Haitian painter Edouard Duval Carrié, who arrived in Miami from Paris in 1992. “When I moved here it was really a [cultural] desert. That has changed.”
Carrié maintains his studio in Little Haiti. Famous for his painting of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in a wedding dress (an image that did not endear him to the regime), his space now seems a precursor of the area’s renaissance. What was once a district many outsiders approached with trepidation now attracts hundreds of people to the outdoor concerts of its monthly Big Night in Little Haiti.

“This is the doorway to the United States,” Carrié says. “The particularity of Miami is that it has this very ebullient immigration that makes it quite fascinating.”

But Miami’s growth into the multicultural metropolis it is today has had a sinister side, too. In the 1960s, the city built the southern extension of Interstate 95 directly through the heart of the Overtown district, an area that had been a cultural mecca for black culture in the south. “Overtown was a very pleasant place,” says Enid Pinkney, the 83-year-old daughter of an immigrant from the Bahamas (one of the first non-indigenous communities to settle in Miami).

Dispersed to other areas of the city, black residents often found themselves met with hostility. After the 1980 acquittal of four white and Latino police officers for the murder of black businessman Arthur McDuffie, at least 18 people died in rioting and property destruction topped $100m. Fatal police shootings touched off riots in the city at three other points during that decade.

Police departments throughout the county gained a reputation for violence and corruption that intervening years have done little to diminish, with Miami Beach police famously fatally tasering teenage Colombian-American graffiti artist Israel Hernandez in 2013. That same year, a report by the US Justice Department found that City of Miami police had “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive use of force through officer-involved shootings in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution” and that the department was tainted by “deficient tactics, improper actions by specialised units, as well as egregious delays and substantive deficiencies in deadly force investigations”.

Outside observers often remain mystified by Miami. Three years ago, the author Tom Wolfe attempted to capture it as he had 1980s New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and instead spewed forth a right-wing caricature titled Back to Blood that showed no grasp of the place the city has become. Such misconceptions are helped along by gaffe- and scandal-prone local politicians, whose peccadillos include everything from floating the idea to shut down all the city’s libraries to close a budget gap, to the by-now standard (for Miami) cash-for-favours schemes.

In some areas, things have gone over the top. In South Beach – once a slum for retirees and poor immigrants, now a gay mecca and nightlife hotspot – crass commercialisation has resulted in a kind of Vegas-by-the-sea ambiance, with even the famed Lincoln Road, once a redoubt of local restaurants and retailers, now housing little more than chain stores and the bewildered tourists they prey upon. The preponderance of “juniors” (a derisive term for the rich scions of Latin America’s economic elite) in the city can be somewhat off-putting, as it seems not only the language and music of that elite is being imported, but their class system, as well.

But the city has blossomed from the place that Reinaldo Arenas despised. The great Cuban poet and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, who was during her lifetime one of the world’s foremost authorities on Afro-Cuban religion, spent the latter part of her life based in Miami, and donated her abundant collection of papers to the university here. It was home, too, for one of Haiti’s greatest poets, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, for the last 17 years of his life. And, as testament to the city’s new cultural heritage, a new major institution, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, opened next to the waters of Biscayne Bay in 2013; the Art Basel festival attracts thousands to the city every year; and the Miami Book Fair is an autumn staple of the literary calendar.

Perhaps more representative of the city than South Beach today are the northern reaches of Miami Beach, an area that is still home to many working-class residents despite spiralling property prices, where the lilting, almost Italianate sound of Argentine Spanish mixes with the caressing sounds of Brazilian Portuguese in the bodegas and on the beach. The Buenos Aires Bakery & Cafe – an establishment on Collins Avenue, only steps away from the sea – sells a variety of pastries that would make any porteño misty-eyed with nostalgia as well as several different kinds of the leafy, highly caffeinated mate beloved in South America, and does a brisk business.

When one drives south towards the Florida Keys – where the last island, Key West, is a mere 90 miles from Cuba – the county begins to descend into farmland. It was here that, in the early part of the 20th century, a Latvian-born eccentric named Edward Leedskalnin created an extraordinary structure known as the Coral Castle, out of coral-formed limestone. As he worked alone and without advanced equipment, just how Leedskalnin created his “castle” remains something of a mystery – with explanations ranging from some secret mastery of the Earth’s magnetic field to telekinesis.

Today, other dreams are played out in Miami-Dade’s fields, and exist in the imaginings of the many migrant workers who toil here, scant miles from the glittering high-rises of downtown Miami. 
Surrounded by fields of squash, okra, beans and tomatoes, the community of Homestead, despite its tropical locale, evokes the somnolent Midwestern communities of a Ray Bradbury story. Low-rise buildings, train tracks and empty playground swings greet the visitor, and in the street one hears the melange of accents and dialects from the agricultural workers here: Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, Jamaican.

In the offices of the immigrant support group WeCount! just off of North Krome Avenue (which shares its name with one of the US’s most infamous immigration detention centres located nearby), the connection between Homestead’s rural lushness and the city rising only a few miles away seems obvious.

“The Mexicans are the ones that put the food on Miami’s table,” says Catalina Santiago, an 18-year-old high school student who came to the US with her agricultural-worker parents from the Mexican state of Oaxaca a decade ago. “But they are always spoken of in a condescending manner.”

On the street below, where Santiago sits with her brother and a number of other immigrants, dusk falls and Homestead sees Mexican families gathering for Sunday-night dinner at restaurants such as Casita Tejas. When they rise for work early the following morning, some will be met by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police, who will be waiting to check their immigration status and arrest them for probable deportation if they are undocumented (as many are, a state of affairs on which Florida’s agriculture depends).

Perhaps it is impending apocalypse, natural and man-made, that makes Miami’s frivolity all the more poignant. If climate change predictions are to be believed, large parts of Miami – Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, Virginia Key – will be under water in coming years, a phenomenon helped along by the fact that many Florida politicians, including Governor Rick Scott and the aforementioned Senator Rubio, deny that climate change can be linked to human activity.

Driving home north along US1, the skyline of Miami rises above the flat land, its concrete and steel wrapped in the warmth of the tropical sunset. A city of outsiders, refugees and immigrants that – in its reflection of present-day America’s diversity – feels in many ways more “American” than the 1950s small-town Americana that some politicians and commentators are perpetually nostalgic for.

Books in 2013: A Personal Selection

During a year in which I published one book, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books), and finished another, the forthcoming In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press), I also got a fair amount of reading done. As has become something of a yearly tradition, here are the books that made the biggest impression on me in 2013.

Oblivion: A Memoir by Héctor Abad

This work of non-fiction by one of Colombia’s best-known novelists is the moving and painful story of his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, an idealistic physician who was slain by right-wing paramilitaries in 1987 for his work on behalf of the country’s poor and disenfranchised. In the story of his family and of his father, Abad manages to evoke the as-yet-unresolved struggles of an entire country.

Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis

A dreamlike and often eerie depiction of a young woman adrift in Berlin, this first novel by the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis bodes for great things in the future.

The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan

An essential bit of Miami noir, this memoir was first published in 1987, the world this book by a former Miami Herald crime reporter depicts was wistful and vanishing (and quite dark) even then. It was a world where much of Miami Beach was still populated by retirees rather than club kids and where journalism was made up largely of regular working stiffs like everybody else and the idea of a journalism “school” was letting someone getting their hands dirty on a tough beat rather than further lining the coffers of  elite universities. “Once a sleepy resort that shut down during the off season,” Buchanan writes, “Miami now copes year-round with concentrations of everything corrupt, bizarre or dangerous from everywhere in the world.”

The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir by Fernando Henrique Cardoso

A presidential memoir that is actually more engaging before the subject becomes president, this book by Brazil’s 34th president is most interesting in its depiction of the long, arduous struggle that often diffuse democratic forces there waged against a durable military dictatorship. An interesting portrait of statecraft and democratization. 

Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela by Rory Carroll

A penetrating and tragicomic look inside the country that Hugo Chávez ran from 1999 until his death this year, this book by the Guardian’s former Caracas correspondent, examines how Chávez created something unique in the country, “an authoritarian democracy...a hybrid system of personality cult and one-man rule.” Examining how, after a failed 2002 coup attempt, Chávez fell ever-more under the spell of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (“The Cubans took us over” states a former ally glumly), Carroll examines how the Cubans supplied revolutionary manpower in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil, with Cuban doctors pouring into the country to provide their services in the slums , but soon enough returning to Cuba, moving on to work in Bolivia or defection to Colombia or the United States. Their clinics were abandoned, as government officials sought care from elite private hospitals. Roads, bridges and factories all crumbled due to mismanagement and lack of maintenance. And as Chávez’s revolution went along, Venezuelans killed one another in ever greater numbers, with Carroll finally concluding that “the revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse.” Required reading for anyone interested in modern Latin America. You can read my review in the Miami Herald here.

The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash

A curious amalgam of history, sociology and journalism, this pioneering 1941 work by South Carolina native W.J. Cash lays bare some of the attributes and many of the deficits of his native region, including an exaggerated (and easily offended) sense of honor, a florid religiosity and a maudlin sentimentality focused on a mythology of a past that had never in fact existed. Cash witheringly analyzes “the cult of the Great Southern Heart” that ceaselessly attempted to recast the pre-Civil War era south as “the happy country,” and asserts that the south’s view of itself and the outside world was a “tribal complex” which he compared to fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. As with the writing of the great historian John Hope Franklin, the book also serves as a reminder of how, for decades after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy, built on white poverty, a commitment that only began to change under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman during the 1940s. Essential reading.

Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness by Alfredo Corchado

An immigrant’s memoir as much as a drug war thriller, this book is the heartfelt and affecting story of a Mexican native son who crossed to El Norte with his family’s dreams and then returned to Mexico as a reporter, only to watch a long hoped-for democratic transition descend into a mire of drug-related violence.



Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia by Steven Dudley

As peace talks between the government of Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) rebel group dragged on throughout much of 2013, perhaps few observers watching them, hoping for a breakthrough and a political opening, realize that the FARC already had a political opening. The Unión Patriótica, a political party founded by the FARC in 1985 in the midst of negotiations with the government of then-president Belisario Betancur, in fact contested elections around the country for several years. That is, before they were all but wiped out by a savage extermination campaign launched by right-wing death squads collaborating with the Colombian military, and undermined by the wild-eyed paranoia and authoritarianism of FARC leader Jacobo Arenas (who died in 1990). The story of of the UP’s creation and extermination forms the crux of this book by veteran Latin American journalist Steven Dudley (who co-founded InSight Crime, a joint initiative of American University in Washington DC, and the Foundation InSight Crime and currently serves as its co-director). The book’s style can at times be distractingly repetitive, but there are still sobering lessons here about the difficulty for Latin America’s oldest and largest rebel group to “come in from the cold” and why Colombia’s long war may not be over yet.

In Evil Hour By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For a writer who had such such progressive, even utopian, dreams in the political realm, Colombia’s most famous author could certainly have a rather misanthropic view of human beings themselves, and nowhere more so than in this 1962 novel originally titled Este pueblo de mierda (This Town of Shit) but finally published as La mala hora and translated into English as In Evil Hour. Centering around the intrigues of a small Colombian town and a series of poison pen letters posted in public places, the book is a fascinating insight into the beginnings of one of the 20th century's most important writers.

Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost by Paul Hendrickson

Overlong and sometimes given to trying to copy its subject’s distinctive prose style, this book by journalist Paul Hendrickson focusing on events connected to Ernest Hemingway's 38-foot fishing boat named Pilar is still moving and troubling, particularly when looking at Hemingway's slide into instability, mental illness and eventually suicide and the wreckage this left for his family. Often moored in Key West or near Havana (where she now rests), the Pilar was the vessel that shuttled one of America’s greatest writers through some of his most pivotal, and often happiest, moments, and Hendrickson has found a compelling new angle to cut through the Papa myth and see the troubled and acutely sensitive man behind it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 by William E. Leuchtenburg

A fascinating depiction of the extraordinary political skills and accomplishments of one of our greatest presidents, who took the helm of the ship of state at one of its moments of greatest need.


The Death of a President: November 20–November 25 by William Manchester

Key scenes that have faded away in the mists of history - the political infighting that brought John F. Kennedy to Dallas, the chaos at Parkland Hospital following the shooting, the vigil at the airport in Washington as the plane bearing the president’s body landed that cool, damp November night - are brought vividly to life in this excellent book by William Manchester on Kennedy's November 1963 assassination. Other aspects of the story, such as the poisonous right-wing hatred of the president that found Dallas at its epicentre and the pivotal role Ethiopia's Haile Selassie played during Kennedy's funeral and after are also presented to great impact.

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail  by Óscar Martínez

This book by a reporter for El Salvador’s El Faro website is a terrific example of what fearless enterprising reporting can accomplish, tracing the grinding and danger-filled journey of Central American migrants from the Guatemalan border all the way through Mexico and to the border with the United States, the promised El Norte so close and yet so far behind a border wall and across scoring desert and treacherous rivers Martínez does a stellar job of humanizing the immigration debate in the stories of the men and women willing to risk everything for the chance at a better life and the predators that dog them every step of the way.

Sonia Pierre 1963-2011

Sonia Pierre, you were the greatest patriot that the Dominican Republic could ask for, one of the greatest advocates for human rights in the Americas and a hero to us all. Your work and your example live on. Domi byen, fanm vanyan.

2007: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was a fairly interesting one for me, from a reporting perspective and otherwise, and saw me traveling to six countries on three continents.

Beginning in the slums of Bombay and the hills and valleys of Kashmir, continuing on through electoral politics and civil unrest in France and extending to the cocoa fields and rebel roadblocks of Côte d'Ivoire, it was a period during which I felt, as acutely as ever, the importance of the role that a journalist serves as witness and recorder of the struggles of the disenfranchised and how, in our ever-more fraught and divided world, that role of illuminating our common humanity as people - despite transitory national, linguistic, religious, racial or economic differences - is as important now as it has ever been.

What follows is a review of nearly all the articles I've published this year, spanning a number of subjects across the globe.

Here's to hoping for a gentler, more humane and healthier 2008, with greater freedom married to a greater sense of local and global community for all concerned.

Much love,

MD

Côte d'Ivoire: A Call for Solidarity in Resolving Fate of Missing Reporter for the Inter Press Service (December 14, 2007)

The Bitter Taste of Cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire for the Inter Press Service (December 3, 2007)

Interview with France Kassing on Davis, California’s KDVS radio (December 3, 2007)

Blood Diamonds No Longer Congo-Brazzaville's Best Friend for the Inter Press Service (November 30, 2007)

France's Troubled Suburbs Erupt Again for the Inter Press Service (November 29, 2007)

Update on Riots in France on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show (November 29, 2007)

Riots Rage in Paris Suburb After Police Collision, an interview with Robert Siegel on National Public Radio's All Things Considered (November 27, 2007)

In Ivory Coast, a Fragile Peace Is Framed by Promises Unfulfilled for the Washington Post (November 16, 2007)

On Lyrical Terrorists for Countercurrents (November 10, 2007)

Project May Boost Biofuels in East Africa for the Inter Press Service (October 30, 2007)

"We Don't Believe Gbagbo Will Organise Transparent Elections" An Interview with Alassane Ouattara for the Inter Press Service (October 23, 2007)

Puma pounces for Foreign Direct Investment magazine (October 03, 2007)

Burma: Criticism of Total Operations Grows for the Inter Press Service (October 4, 2007)

North Africa a Launch Pad For Auto Markets for the Inter Press Service (September 25, 2007)

'Silicon Ribbon' Pops Up Across the Maghreb for the Inter Press Service (September 29, 2007)

Trade-Africa: Improved Regional Integration Still Key For Success for the Inter Press Service (September 25, 2007)

France: Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed for the Inter Press Service (September 24, 2007)

Sarkozy Hedges Free Market With Government Control for the Inter Press Service (September 15, 2007)

France: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown for the Inter Press Service (September 3, 2007)

African Countries Stand Up to EU for the Inter Press Servce (August 28, 2007)

L'Affaire Libyenne Shows a New Policy for the Inter Press Service (August 27, 2007)

France: Differences Arise Over Education Law for the Inter Press Service (August 27, 2007)

In Defense Of Taslima Nasreen for Countercurrents (August 11, 2007)

France: Sarkozy Charges Ahead for the Inter Press Service (July 30, 2007)

Russian Roulette: A Review of Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia for the Miami Herald (July 29, 2007)

For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues for the Inter Press Service (July 25, 2007)

Hope, Concern Greet China's Growing Prominence in Africa for the Inter Press Service (July 23, 2007)

Following Oil Boom, Biofuel Eyed In Africa for the Inter Press Service (July 13, 2007)

France: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities for the Inter Press Service (June 29, 2007)

G8: Few Concrete Steps Proposed for Darfur for the Inter Press Service (June 27, 2007)

New Plans for Niger Basin for the Inter Press Service (Jun 26, 2007)

France: Immigrants Uneasy over Proposed Policies for the Inter Press Service (June 19, 2007)

Haiti-Dominican Republic: Film on Plantations Spurs Backlash for the Inter Press Service (June 4, 2007)

Trade-Africa: Europe Looks to Encourage Diaspora Investment for the Inter Press Service (May 31, 2007)

West Africa: Currency Integration Still A Few Years Off for the Inter Press Service (May 30, 2007)

An Appeal to Decency on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent: An address delivered to the Journalists & Editors Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean delivered at the Biscayne Bay Marriott Hotel in Miami, Florida (May 12, 2007)

Underreported: An Update on Kashmir on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show (May 03, 2007)

The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir for The World Policy Journal (Spring 2007)

Politics-Sudan: "Do Something Now, Because People Are Dying Every Day" for the Inter Press Service (April 30, 2007)

Haiti: A Literary Icon for "Les Damnés de la Terre" for the Inter Press Service (April 11, 2007)

Haiti/Democratic Republic: Exhibit Reveals a Bitter Harvest for the Inter Press Service (May 13, 2007)

Kashmiri Separatist Seeks End To Armed Struggle for the Washington Times (February 25 , 2007)

Haiti : The terrible truth about Martissant for AlterPresse (February 13, 2007)

The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) calls for action on the Jean-Rémy Badio killing press release (January 30, 2007)

Haiti’s Mythical Man: The Novelist Madison Smartt Bell Humanizes the Person Behind the Legend of Haiti’s Independence for the Miami Herald (January 21, 2007)

Politics-US: Ailing Health System Defies Easy Fix for the Inter Press Service (January 3, 2007)

Les nuits de Paris: Black, blanc, beur

It is the evening of the Nuits Blanches here in Paris, the “white nights” of all-night cultural events that were inaugurated by Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë's in 2002.

As I prepare to go see a pair of African bands set to play a free concert at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the fierce debate regarding immigration in France continues. In recent months, as I alluded to in an article some time ago, France has witnessed the creation of the (often justly) maligned Ministère de l'immigration, de l'intégration, de l'identité nationale et du codéveloppement and the implementation of policies that have chased middle-aged Chinese workers and schoolboys out of windows in nighttime immigration raids and bundled screaming Malians onto planes taking them "home" to Bamako. As a resident of an immigrant community and, indeed, an immigrant myself, I can only say that I hope some kind of humanity to one’s fellow man prevails in this discussion. As I would similarly criticize the current government in the United States, one can control one’s borders without victimizing the most defenseless in society.

Also note that this blog may be silent for a bit as I depart tomorrow for a two week reporting trip to Côte d'Ivoire, which promises many, many interesting things but among them perhaps not regular internet access.

FRANCE: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities

FRANCE: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities

By Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jun 29 (IPS) - In the northern Paris neighbourhood of Chateau Rouge, a casual visitor could be forgiven for a moment for feeling that one had gotten off the city's storied metro and ended up in Dakar or Abidjan.

Here, percolating soukous tunes from the Congo pump out of storefronts such as that of Rythmes & Musiques while women attired in weaved damask robes and men in West Africa's traditionally colourful dashiki vest go about their business in one of the city's most vibrant open-air markets.

But, say observers, "foreign" as they may seem to some French, it is also, empathically, as much the face of modern France as any of the postcard images of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe that tourists usually associate with the country.

Read more here.

Some stories coming out of Hispaniola

There is a very interesting article recently published by the Inter-Press Service by Elizabeth Eames Roebling that looks, from the Dominican side of the border, at the current debate regarding Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the country. One of my own articles for the Inter-Press Service on the same subject was recently quoted by the Boston Globe.

As if one needed any proof that the Dominican Republic is not alone in short-sighted immigration policies, the same day I read for the first time of the plight of Yaderlin Hiraldo, the wife of United States Army Specialist Alex Jimenez, who has been missing since his unit was attacked by insurgents in Iraq on May 12. Jimenez had petitioned for a green card for his wife, who came to join him without proper documentation from the Dominican Republic in 2001, before his disappearance. Ms. Hiraldo is seeking a hardship waiver to stay in the United States which the U.S. government has yet to grant.

From back in Haiti, meanwhile, one of the main gang leaders from the Raboteau district in the northern city of Gonaives, Adecla Saint-Juste, has met his end, “cut down,” Haiti’s Radio Kiskeya is reporting, in the nearby district of Anse Rouge. Many thought Saint-Juste behind the May 16 slaying of Alix Joseph, the director Radio-Télé Provinciale in the city

The offensive of the Police Nationale and United Nation’s MINUSTAH forces against gangs in Haiti’s City of Independence, which has been plagued by gang activity at least since the Armée Canibale gang of Amiot “Cubain” Metayer harassed and killed opponents of then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from 2000 until 2003, appears to be bearing some fruit. Metayer himself was murdered, on what many of his supporters believe was Aristide’s orders, in September 2003, one of the sparks that lit the rebellion that eventually ousted Aristide five months later.

Immigrants uneasy over proposed policies

My first article since relocating here to Paris, on some of the immigration proposals and the creation of the new Ministère de l'immigration, de l'intégration, de l'identité nationale et du codéveloppement by the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was published by the Inter Press Service today and can be read here.

An Appeal to Decency on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent

Address to Journalists & Editors Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean delivered at the Biscayne Bay Marriott Hotel, May 12, 2007, Miami, Florida.

Sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which its indigenous Arawak inhabitants had historically called Haiti, which meant "mountainous land," and Quisqueya, meaning "vast country," the present day nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shared a long and complex history together. It has been a history suffused with mutual resentments, suspicions and hostilities, though it could be argued that, despite marked cultural and linguistic differences, what the peoples of both sides of la frontera have in common far outweighs the traits that differentiate them.

From the revolutionary stirrings lead by Toussaint Louverture in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, to the 1804 declaration of the founding of the Republic of Haiti in the city of Gonaives by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to the Dominican Republic’s own declaration of independence from Haiti in 1844 and the five subsequent invasions by Haitian leaders in attempts to recapture it that came after, the political geography of each country has been marked by certain unfortunate similarities. Long periods of military or quasi-military rule interrupted by various, often highly authoritarian and corrupt, civilian leaders, a deeply entrenched economic elite and a highly disenfranchised poor majority, a relatively weak judiciary and repeated interventions by foreign powers.

The trajectories of the two nations began to diverge somewhat, though, over the last twenty years, when Haitians witnessed a long-cherished goal - the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986 and the holding of free elections in 1990, and ten years later, when the Dominican Republic elected Leonel Fernández as president in 1996, marking a final break from the tradition instituted by the dictator Rafael Trujillo which had seen Trujillo, his vice-president Joaquín Balaguer or their surrogates dominate the country's politics largely since 1930.

Since those pivotal moments, fate has not smiled on Haiti. The joy of the 1990 election, which saw the elevation to the office of the presidency of the former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was lost in the bloodshed of the coup that followed in 1991 and the military junta that ruled the country from 1991 until 1994. Returned to office by a U.S. invasion in 1994, Aristide again assumed the presidency in 2001, only to be ousted once more in 2004 by massive street protests and an armed rebellion, his administration drowning in a sea of violence, nepotism and corruption. A 2004 -2006 unelected interim government oversaw what can only be described as a low level civil-war between police, former rebel forces, street gangs loyal to Mr. Aristide and United Nations troops, finally culminating in the election and inauguration of René Préval , the only Haitian president ever to serve out his constitutionally-mandated term to elected office. Though Préval has made some steps towards stabilizing Haiti’s political situation and, to some degree, arresting its downward economic spiral, the essential myopic venality of Haiti’s political and economic classes and the dire poverty that contribute to that instability remain essentially unchanged.

In the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, despite its own share of corruption scandals since the mid-1990s, we have witnessed the peaceful handing of power from Leonel Fernández to Hipólito Mejía in 2000, and from Mejía back again to Fernández in 2004. The Dominican tourist industry has continued to blossom, and the passage of the DR-CAFTA treaty has opened the door for more economic development, such as was witnessed by the DR’s 10.7 percent economic growth last year.

But when we look more closely at these broad strokes, what kind of picture do we see?

The Dominican Republic, with a population of nearly 10 million, has an average life expectancy of around 73 years. It’s total infant mortality rate is around 28 deaths for every 1,000 live births, its literacy rate hovers around 85%, its unemployment around 16% and around 25% of its citizens are said to live below the poverty line. Many of these statistics would be considered fairly dreadful by most standards, but venture across the border to Haiti and observe the situation there. Haiti’s nearly 9 million people can look forward to a life expectancy of just 57 years, and the nation’s infant mortality rate claims almost 64 babies for every 1,000 live births. The literacy rate creeps just north of 50% of the population, two-thirds of the labor force have no formal jobs and 80% of people live below the poverty line. Over the past 50 years, 90 percent of Haiti’s tree cover has been destroyed for charcoal and to make room for farming, with the resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country’s arable farmland.

But these are, in many ways, simply dry figures, devoid of humanity. What does it mean, for instance, to say that almost 100% of a country’s total population lives in the direst poverty, or that a natural resource as basic as tree cover has now been almost completely exploited and exhausted?

For me, the face of Haiti, its suffering, and its resilience, came in a thousand faces across this battered, bleeding land. I saw the history of Haiti written in the face of a young man from the slum of Cite Soleil, home to 250,000 souls in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, who spoke proficient English and French along with his native Kreyol and yet was forced, along with his brother, to work as a government gunman following the murder of his parents, only to be abandoned when his political patron fled the country and left his minions to fend for themselves. I saw the history of Haiti in another nearby slum, where a group of gentle souls had attempted to build a community out of the hollowed-around ruins of an expansive former torture chamber, so poor that they subsisted on cakes made out of clay and seasoned with inexpensive cubes of chicken or beef bouillon. And I saw the history of Haiti in the weathered visages of peasant farmers and market women in the village of Fonds-Verettes, below mist-shrouded mountains largely bare of trees, amidst a clutch of tarp-covered market stands and beside an immense field of boulder-sized rocks, where the rains of May 2004 killed over 900 people, their ferocity made doubly so by the lack of any trees to hold the topsoil fast when the tropical rains burst forth.

Not surprisingly, the lure of a better life in the Dominican Republic has proved irresistible to many Haitians, and currently there are an estimated 650,000 to one million undocumented Haitians living there. Though traditionally these Haitians have labored in the sugarcane fields, known as bateys, owned by individuals such as the Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, and the wealthy Vicini family, who are also owners of the Diario Libre newspaper, recently Haitians have also taken jobs in such urban endeavors as construction, auto repair and working in the country’s booming resorts. In the last several years, great tension has erupted between Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian-descent in the Dominican Republic, their advocates, the Fernández government and some of those in the country’s economic elite. Though many of the country’s industries, including the sugar and construction industries, are largely dependant on immigrant Haitian labor, an increasingly assertive movement for immigrant and worker rights in the Dominican Republic, spearheaded by such individuals as Movimiento De Mujeres Dominico Haitiana (MUDHA) leader Sonia Pierre (herself born in a batey) and the Anglo-Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley, have met with fierce resistance. The hostility between the Haitians and those who, on one hand, need their labor but on the other hand resent what they view as their ingratitude, as well as between the Haitians and poor Dominicans who view the Haitians as usurping their jobs and working for lower wages, has often erupted into violence.

In May 2005, in the border towns of Ouanaminthe and Dajabon, I witnessed the aftermath of the summary eviction of at least 3,5000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent following the murder of Dominican businesswoman Maritza Nuñez in Hatillo Palma, 166 miles northwest of the capital, Santo Domingo, for which four Haitian immigrants were blamed. I heard numerous stories of families separated, husbands from wives, parents from children, of destruction of homes by civilian mobs at times lead by local political leaders, of mistreatment at the hands of the Dominican military (including of immigration documents torn up by soldiers at the border) and of occasional murder, as well. These expulsions resulted in a formal protest being sent to the Fernández government by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, demanding that they not be repeated. But, unfortunately, the events of May 2005 appear to have been an opening salvo in an ongoing drumbeat against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent that has only grown shriller and uglier over the last two years.

Expulsions of this nature have continued, albeit on a smaller scale, as has violence against Haitians in the DR. In August 2005, three young Haitian men on the outskirts of Santo Domingo were set ablaze by a mob, and later died from their wounds. That same month, four Haitians were murdered by guards in a banana field in the Barahona region. In 2006, two more Haitians were burned to death by a mob in the village of Las Matas de Farfan. Two activist priests who had long advocated for the rights of Haitians laboring in the bateys, the aforementioned Father Christopher Hartley and the Belgian Father Pedro Ruquoy, were driven from the country in late 2006 and late 2005, respectively, amidst credible death threats and a campaign of vilification by some in the Dominican government and some elements of its media. In a May 2006 open letter to President Fernández , Amnesty International Secretary General IRené Khan bemoaned the fact that "since May 2005, Haitian and Dominicans of Haitian descent have been subjected to collective and arbitrary expulsions by the Dominican authorities in violation of the Dominican Republic’s obligations under international standards including the American Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights." A similar March 2007 press release by Amnesty stated that the "Dominican-born children, and even grandchildren," of Haitians, remained "as a permanent underclass, denied birth papers, and thus, access to schooling and decent jobs."

This release came after September 2005, when a legal team that included Sonia Pierre, successfully argued before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the Dominican Republic was in violation of Articles 3, 5, 19, 20 and 24 of the American Convention on Human Right Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica in denying citizenship to two young girls, Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico, born in the Dominican Republic. That decision also reinforced the fact that, in its denial of citizenship to persons born within its borders, the Dominican Republic was in violation of Article 11 of its own constitution, which guarantees Dominican citizenship to the all those born within its territory save for those "in transit" and the children of foreign diplomats. The Fernández government has said that, though it has begun paying damages to the two girls, it intends to disregard the commission’s expansive ruling.

What has been the broader response of the Fernández government to these incidents? A call to the rule of law? An appeal to Dominicans to make their vibrant, culturally rich, economically viable nation a place where those of whatever descent and whatever skin color can live together? Unfortunately, no.

Since its return to power in 2004, the Fernández government, which many had great hopes for, has appeared to be completely beholden to the whims of the country’s economic elite, and seems more than happy to use the plight of the Haitians within the Dominican Republic as a convenient scapegoat for its own failings. Recent threats to revoke the citizenship of Sonia Pierre, Dominican born and raised, an endeavor that would seem farcical were not the Dominican authorities apparently so set in carrying on with it to its logical, absurd and bitter conclusion, typify this approach. Dominican Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, one of the bitterest critics of the newly-assertive Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic, has a long-standing relationship as an executive and major shareholder of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with the aforementioned Fanjuls; the Vicini family, who run the Batey dos Hermanos sugar-growing territory and whose Diario Libre newspaper has often been the font of vitriolic attacks against the advocates for the rights of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, also maintain close ties with the Fernández government.

Confronted about its human rights record in this regard, the Fernández government often posits, without any concrete proof, that a conspiracy of foreign governments and NGOs is underway, in an attempt to make the Dominican Republic take responsibility for Haiti, which they claim the international community has largely failed to do. While the incidents of violence against Haitians here described and the Dominican government’s response in no way rise to the level of the dictator Trujillo's 1937 massacre of between 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians throughout the country, they are nevertheless troubling coming from a country lead at present by a group of highly educated technocrats who, quite frankly, should know better.

By no means am I trying to let Haiti’s leaders off the hook for the calamitous condition their countrymen find themselves in. Over the last decade, as the Dominican Republic has prospered, Haiti’s political class has succeeded in murdering almost any hope the vast majority of decent, honest, hard-working Haitians have for their beleaguered country, along with thousands of Haitian citizens, continuing in a tradition that Frédéric Marcelin, a former Minister of Finance and noted author, characterized in 1904 as "civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries, economic ignorance and idolatrous militarism." Haiti’s leaders in general and Mr. Aristide in particular have much to answer for in their chronic betrayal of the legitimate hopes of Haiti’s poor majority. Likewise I agree that the Dominican Republic cannot accept unfettered and unrestrained immigration from its neighbor to the west.

However, I would argue that the present approach of the Fernández government to the Haitian question in the Dominican Republic is both disingenuous and inhumane. Disingenuous because it refuses to adequately address the vast networks of human trafficking and abusive labor practices that bring Haitians to the Dominican Republic in the first place, many with credible links to some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, while essentially choosing to crucify the powerless victims of such smuggling. Inhumane because it seeks to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Dominican citizens for no other reason that the country of their ancestry and the color of their skin. I know the righteous and justifiable outrage that would greet any similar treatment meted out to the estimated 1 million Dominicans living in my hometown of New York City, and I can only ponder the motivations of such policies.

In November 2006, speaking at Counterpart International's headquarters in Washington, DC, President Fernández said that, regarding Haiti’s security and economic development, Haiti could not "do it alone," and that he hoped that Haiti could " turn around economically." On some level, then, the Dominican government must. in fact realize what is at stake is not the political expediency of the moment, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti need to address their linked destinies in an honest and non-demagogic way. For Haiti, that means that its political class will have to behave in a responsible and competent way that it has never seemed to master in the country’s 200 year history, so more Haitians are not forced to seek economic sustenance in neighboring countries where they are met by exploitation, brutality and racism. For the Dominican government, it means not wearing one face abroad, where it talks of development and the international interest, and another at home, where it appears content to fan the flames of xenophobia and bigotry.

In his 1943 novel of Haitian peasant life, Gouverneurs de la Rosée (translated into English as Masters of the Dew), the great Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain surveyed the environmental and economic devastation of his country and penned the following lines, and I would like to conclude with them as they give a poignant window into the human dimension of the forces that drive Haitians across the border in the first place, and the gravity of what they risk once they get there.

Life had dried up…One only had to listen to this silence to hear death. One yielded to this torpor and felt himself already buried. The regular and repeated blows of the mallets in the mortars had become stilled since there wasn’t a grain of millet to husk. How far things were from the good old days of the konbit, from the virile joyous chants of the men folk, from the sparkling, swinging hoes in the sun, from those happy years when we used to dance the minuet under the arbors with the carefree voices of dark young girls bursting forth like a fountain in the night. . . . Can a man die like that, as a breath of air blows out a candle, as a pruning knife cuts a weed, as fruit falls from the tree and rots?