Willow Walk

The 2012 Campaign

Attend, O public, to my supple song

It  is of moment but it won't last long,

Think how the world, in these dank, cheerless days

Could be improved by satire's fiery blaze.

But no lampooning could produce the pain

Of list'ning to a speech from Herman Cain;

Of knowledge of the world he gave no sign

But like a dullard uttered 'nine-nine-nine'.

'Twas not that did him in, I shall be clear,

But an excessive liking for the fair.

Rick Perry strode so handsome on the stage,

Proclaimed himself the Hero of our Age

And truest Guardian of good Christian Rage.

Alas for him, this Spokesman of the South

Could not connect his mind unto his mouth.

The fist was small, the latter seemed so large

But could not function even at full charge.

The lady Bachmann said that she was sent

By God's command; she lost and so she went

Right back to Minnesota where she rants

Ignored by all except the flies and ants.

But now, as we survey the meeting hall

Behold the earnest visage of Ron Paul.

He wants the government to do fuck-all

Yet thousands think he's Jefferson return'd,

The brilliant leader for whom they've yearn'd.

Onward he leads his happy, crazy band

With a mad mix of Jesus and Ayn Rand.

And who is this who comes into our forum?

The sweater-vested frothy Rick Santorum.

The problems of the poor do not him vex,

Instead he worries about man-dog sex.

The great crusade that he has in his sights

Is that of cutting back on women's rights,

On those of gays, Latinos, and of blacks,

Because that way the rich will pay less tax.

Now Doctor Gingrich makes the ladies swoon

With talk of bases on Mars and the Moon,

He's go to any length, will lack all ruth,

But damn it all, will never tell the truth.

He has a plan to get us out of debt

By staking all on an enormous bet

That wealthy folk are selfless. That's a bitch

Leaving the poor at mercy of the rich.

Willard declares that he's truly the One,

Ordained by Heaven, the true, blessèd son

Who has come to save us, to take us higher,

And we should rejoice for he loves to fire.

Romney's the Savior, worthy of each vote,

Even from those who can't stay afloat;

He sympathises, he'll write them a note

Explaining why each poor person's to blame

For outsourcing. Isn't that such a huge shame?

Barack Obama looks, and shakes his head

At this assemblage of the living dead.

For, like the rest of us, he's of the part

That manages to have both brain and heart.

 

poui

pale yellow blooms under a silver tree

out of a legend that we do not know

this warm reminder with its pallid glow

 

absent all anger absent too all glee

for a short season we absorb the show

pale yellow blooms under a silver tree

 

so magic fills the air and what we see

is all the ground covered in golden snow

a lovely moment if we let it be

pale yellow blooms under a silver tree

Free at Last!

John Maxwell

As a toddler on Derby Beach, now Silver Sands, I remember asking my father what was the roaring sound we heard when we put seashells to our ears. His answer, I believe, was to the effect that the shell concentrated all the sounds around us, the wind, the waves, the sand, every noise in the universe, into the shells and perhaps, with enough patience, we could unravel and make sense of some of it. If my grandchildren were in the neighbourhood I don't think I'd need to answer that question, since I doubt that they would now be able to find a whole seashell on any Jamaican beach. My father died when I was 12, of a heart broken (it was said) by the electorate of Northern Trelawny, who had forgotten the hard labour he'd put in as Member of the Legislative Council for the whole parish. His brother-in-law, Morris Thelwell, a comparative unknown, had won Southern Trelawny for the Jamaica Labour Party while the totally obscure Clement Aitcheson, head-teacher of the Duncans Elementary School, selected for that job by my father, had won in Northern Trelawny also for the JLP. Another brother in law, Hugh Cork, had won southern Clarendon for the JLP. I remember as a ten year old cowering in my father's library in astonishment as my father excoriated Bustamante who wanted to recruit him to run for the JLP in 1944. It was an unforgettable confrontation: my father, all 5'6' of him facing down Bustamante, nearly a foot taller with a hairdo that exaggerated his height. Busta, furious, simply went across the street and recruited Aitcheson. My father had refused to join the PNP because he thought that there was still a place in Jamaican politics for independents. His sympathies were with the PNP and he really admired Manley, but a decade earlier, Manley had been the lawyer whose arguments unseated him on the ground that he was not wealthy enough to be elected. It wasn't Manley's choice; in those days lawyers were more or less obliged to accept the first brief offered and the first brief was from the losing candidate, the richest man on the north coast, the manager of the building society, the chairman of the Parish Council, the Custos of the Parish, the MLC and the attorney for more than half the land and sugar estates in Trelawny – Mr W.U.Guy S. Ewen. Manley regretted the result – as he wrote the Chief Justice afterward – why should people be prevented from being represented by the delegate of their choice simply because he was poor?

A few years later Manley joined a ferment with O.T Fairclough, Ken and Frank Hill, W.A.Domingo, Adolphe Roberts, Amy Bailey and the rest to first energise the Jamaica Progressive League in New York then Public Opinion in Jamaica and finally the People's National Party which was determined to give every man a vote and to bring universal human rights to Jamaica.

So, despite my father's defeat at the hands of Manley, he would tell me, as a toddler, that I had to grow up to become a lawyer like Mr Manley, to defend poor people. Shortly after the case Ewen's solicitors distrained on my father for the costs of the case. They were determined to finish him off. The bailiffs seized everything in the house, including my baby crib and announced that they were coming back for the "body" – they were going to arrest my father for debt and cast him into the debtor's jail in the St Catherine District Prison. This animus was provoked by the fact that shortly after winning the case against my father Mr Ewen dropped dead, felled according to the gossipmongers, by my grandmother's obeah.Dad won the ensuing bye-election with all his papers in order When the sale of my father's pitiful possessions failed to satisfy the lawyers a commitment warrant was issued for his arrest and incarceration. My father's roots are in Accompong and in Maroon Town and he vanished into the Cockpit Country. Not even my mother knew where he was. The plan was that he could not be 'attached' once he was sworn in to the Legislative Council. But Trelawny is a long way from Kingston; in those days of marl roads the drive was anywhere between four and five hours. My father's best friend, Mr A.B. Lowe, MLC for St James and a very sober and upright Baptist deacon was the unlikely agent. By prior arrangement Lowe picked up my father somewhere on the Burnt Hill Road and then drove south, through Manchester, Clarendon and St Catherine, outwitting the small army of scouts on the expected North coast route. In Kingston my father was stowed on the back seat of the car, covered by empty luggage and a carpet. Instead of coming through Duke Street and the northern approaches to Headquarters House, Lowe came from the East on Beeston Street. When he drove around Headquarters House seeking a place to park, special constables alerted to his friendship with my father, asked Lowe if he had seen Maxwell. Telling what was probably the only lie in his life Lowe said he'd seen someone resembling my father at the Beeston Street entrance and the bailiffs dashed off. Lowe and one or two confederates, pulled some of the luggage out of the car, blocking the sidewalk while my father sprinted up the steps, escaping capture by inches. He was duly sworn in and in time paid his debt to the solicitors.

the mad hatter’s teaparty

all softer magics fall before the lie

that eases into minds and dulls all taste

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

where carrion birds in masses all now fly

above the lands that swiftly go to waste

all softer magics fall before the lie

 

we watch the largest rivers all run dry

and wonder just what pain we have embraced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

no one's ambitions here would move so high

now our best memories shall be erased

all softer magics fall before the lie

 

that all will soon be better by and by

when good and sacred words will be enplaced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

 

for far too long and now no honest eye

is left to note the urgent need for haste

all softer magics fall before the lie

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

What the World Owes Haiti

John Maxwell

Some of us grow up with the feeling that being free means that we are at liberty to do whatever we want – as long as we don't hurt anyone else; that simply by being born, we are entitled to inherit the riches and beauty of nature and to do whatever we think will make us wealthy, healthy and happy. Most of us grow up in very different circumstances, walking barefoot, wearing cast-off clothing and knowing that we are mostly free to do what we can get away with and knowing that we will probably always have to worry about the next meal. In places like Jamaica, however, rich and poor tend to believe that there are some basic freedoms we all share: the right to life, to liberty and to say what we want and associate with whomever we choose. These freedoms are rights for which the human race has been fighting for a long time, and a few hundred years ago certain people believed that because they had acquired the Chinese invention called gunpowder, they owned superior rights to all those who had not got the secret recipe. Primitive firearms made it possible for long distance 'impersonal' murder. Until then, if you wanted to kill someone you had to stab, or to throw a spear or an arrow not much further than the length of a cricket pitch. Blunderbusses and muskets meant that you could remain out of the range of your enemy's arrows and spears and mow him down with invisible darts accompanied by horrendous noises. Primitive firearms meant that men on horses, armed with guns, could round up dozens of fellow humans in a cost-effective time frame and move them like cattle to enormous holding pens where they were selected for desirable qualities and priced accordingly. Upright European merchants would then select those creatures most likely to bring good prices on the other side of the Atlantic, either for breeding purposes or for hard labour growing sugar or cotton. As the history of the Palace of Westminster makes plain: The outbound slave ships were packed with British goods such as metal goods, firearms, textiles and wines, destined for exchange for human cargo. And returning vessels heading to their home port filled with plantation produce from the colonies.

Here was a trading network on an integrated international scale, lubricated by slavery, and all approved, regulated and monitored by Parliament.

We know of dozens of Acts passed specifically to encourage, regulate and monitor the trade in Africans."

Shameless and Graceless

 

John Maxwell

Henry Kissinger once said that the United States had no friends, only interests. Watching the US intervention in Haiti makes it clear that the US, in the pursuit of its interests, does not need to exhibit any human attributes, such as shame or grace. I said a few weeks ago that it seemed a little counterproductive sending masses of soldiers to Haiti since you can't eat soldiers and soldiers needed to be fed and, in Haiti, one American probably consumes as much as ten Haitians. Feeding 20,000 US soldiers takes as much resources as feeding the entire population of Cite Soleil - the biggest slum in the Caribbean. It is heartbreaking to read of the screwed-up relief efforts, screwed up mainly by sending in soldiers instead of relief workers, nurses and just ordinary people willing to follow instructions and to use their imaginations and initiative. Remember that army put-down from the comic books: "You're not being paid to think!" Famines, famously, are not caused by shortages of food but by deficiencies of imagination and planning. In Haiti at this moment, some of the world's most disciplined people are too often, being treated like wild animals. The problem is that many of Haiti's self-appointed rescuers are scared witless by their own superstitions and the garbage fed them by irresponsible journalists and crazy preachers. You can see it in the pictures, where people have on their own, formed orderly queues but are still being harassed by men with rifles and an inflated sense of their own importance. One of the scourges of Haiti, self-righteous NGOs, are clearly wasting resources, time and lives insisting on being protected against starving women and children instead of getting out and doing what they should be doing. Above it all are the mainstream journalists, busy viewing with alarm, scornful of the heat, the smells and the people, and prophesying at any moment, outbreaks of mindless violence. It is impossible to view Haiti without realising the enormous tax the world pays for ignorance and fear, and without understanding the real cost of journalism in promoting strife, frustration and unhappiness. The Internet has made it much easier to transmit lies and superstition. A piece that landed on my screen supposedly from a black person in South Africa was so full of misinformation and outright lies that I thought that it must be a production of one of the thousands of rightwing solfataras of hate. Briefly, this farrago of nonsense claimed that no black country had come to the aid of Haiti – when his own country had been one of the first responders. Venezuela and other Caribbean countries had also made their contribution and of course he forgot Cuba, with 1,200 doctors and other emergency workers now there and more to come. The letter was meant to discredit the poor, the black and the developing countries who are clearly not grateful for the incredible blessings bestowed on the by colonialism. One of these days someone should try to estimate the real economic cost of 'journalists' like James Anthony Froude, Rudyard Kipling, Bob Novak, Jules Dubois and their more recent versions, the Wolf Blitzers, Judith Millers and their ilk. These people are among the most important factors in the current confusion about Haiti and about the true state of the world. Robert Novak, for instance, parachuted into Haiti in 2004 on a mission to sanitise the bloodthirsty La Tortue and his way of doing that was to malign Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Jamaican Mahogany

John Maxwell

There are lots of places in this world where, for weeks or months to come, people will be turning to other people and saying – "Let's ask Rex what he thinks …" before realising that there is no Rex to ask, that the man they depended on for advice or counsel is not there any more. Rex is dead. Gone. He has been part of the intellectual landscape of Caribbean society for so long that he seemed to be a permanent fixture, one of those features that were here when we came and will be here long after we've gone That will be true in a sense, except that when we lose a tree of this size, the space it once occupied appears so big that it seems impossible to fill. Trelawny and more specifically, the Cockpit Country and its environs is where the soul of Jamaica goes for rest and recuperation. It is the spiritual home of Jamaican culture, the centre of resistance to slavery and colonialism, the last bastion of the maroons and the first place where the British Army first conceded defeat in the Western hemisphere. And here, every little boy has a built-in feistiness, and the knowledge that he is no one's inferior. As Rex Nettleford grew to young manhood he never appeared in any doubt that he was not simply destined to be 'somebody' but that he always had been somebody and he took it upon himself to carry this effortless self-confidence into the building of a Jamaican personality worthy of the Kojos and Akkompongs that populated the mists of Burnt Hill, Bunkers Hill and all of the Land of Look Behind. But he was also acutely aware of the other side of his patrimony and embraced his European heritage as eagerly as the rest. In the Jamaica of the 1950s the idea of country boys dancing ballet was so outlandish as to seem bizarre, but that did not bother Rex Nettleford who knew what he wanted to do and refused to be fazed by opposition or even ridicule. His determination to excel at anything he did swept away the ridicule and the opposition and by the time he won the Rhodes Scholarship it was clear that here was someone out of the ordinary. His selection by Norman Manley to be a member of the Mission to Africa on behalf of the Rastafari movement was recognition at the highest level, if any were needed, of his quality , and his career since then has simply amplified our understanding. A little while ago, I had just returned from nearly a year of medical treatment abroad. Rex sought me out to invite my wife and me to the season's final presentation of the National Dance Theatre . At the very end of the concert came an electrifying session from the company's massed drummers – a performance that I told him deserved to be on DVD on its own. It was hair-raising, and with the dance, one of the most profoundly exciting theatrical experiences I've ever had; And I thought, this was the ultimate artistic tribute to Rex, who in the near half century of the NDTC has forged an instrument of national expression that is professional, imbued with enormous confidence and skill and with an elan that elevates them to the highest class. The NDTC's achievement alone would be the pride of any one auteur working full time. That Rex managed this intricate and demanding human enterprise along with his other 'day jobs' is an amazing feat. Rex was above all a teacher dedicated to his students and to none more so than the Diploma classes at Carimac that he and (Sir) Roy Augier, by far the most senior members of the university, insisted on teaching, year in and year out in an extraordinary example of commitment to the welfare of the young. He never gave up even when he was Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He took the Extra-Mural Department and converted it into an open University, inadequately named the School of Continuing Studies and singlehanded he created the Trade Union Institute – in my view the crown jewel of his successful campaign for the 'smaddification' of Jamaicans like him It is impossible to do justice to Rex Nettleford. It is, for instance, unprecedented and amazing that of Oxford's more than 7000 Rhodes scholars, Nettleford should be among four singled out for special centenary honour and even more extraordinary that the University of Oxford should create, in his honour, a special prize in Cultural Studies, a discipline almost unknown when he was at university. I could go on, piling statistic upon statistic, fact upon fact, honour upon honour, degree upon degree, but none can add to the lustre that was Rex's. I am proud, simply to say that I was honoured to have been his friend for most of our lives.

Protecting Haiti’s Interest

John Maxwell

It would be ironic, if you like your irony flavoured with blood and disinfectant, to discover that moored off Port au Prince at this moment is the US hospital ship, the USS Comfort, one of two employed in 1994 as floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour. Today the Comfort is providing medical care for people injured in the great earthquake of January 12. In 1994, the Comfort and its consort functioned as temporary 'processing facilities' for Haitian refugees fleeing from a US supported coup and attendant tyranny. The refugees had been picked up either on the high seas or in Jamaican waters, running for their lives from a US-backed hoodlum-state, whose favourite law and order procedures were murder by dismemberment and disemboweling with bodies left in the streets; and women and children, beaten, publicly raped and disfigured and otherwise terrorised to encourage the others. Of those kidnapped either in Jamaican waters or on the high seas, 78.5% were sent back to their murderers while the rest were sent to Guantánamo Bay. This barbarous triage was a joint venture operated by President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States and Jamaican Prime Minister Percival James Patterson. It was ended by Clinton's deciding he couldn't afford the death of a prominent black American leader on his record, if not on his conscience. Randall Robinson, President of TransAfrica, in one last desperate initiative, began a fast to the death in protest against his President's callous behaviour. Clinton had inherited "the Haitian problem" from his predecessor who could tolerate any number of fair-skinned Cubans dropping in on Miami Beach, but was revolted by the idea of Haitians doing the same thing. It didn't matter that the Cubans, like Jamaicans and Mexicans were economic refugees while the Haitians were literally in fear of their lives. This point was made explicit in 2002, by a former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, at the launching of the Haiti Democracy Project, the most important US NGO operating in Haiti. The launching was at the Brookings Institution, one of the most eminent right ring 'think-tanks' in Washington. Carney said:

"Ambassador Roger Noriega mentioned that one of our interests is to defend human rights, but he didn't mention the fundamental interest, which is to defend Miami Beach. We don't want Haitians on Miami Beach … That is a fundamental interest of the United States … Now that you have realized that interest, you hopefully will have policies by which Haitians can realize their prosperity and their future at home. " How do you do that? Well, we haven't figured that out yet, have we?"

That was a job for the Haiti Democracy Project and other US backed subversive NGOs whose function was simply to make sure that the President of Haiti, legally elected, would be unable to govern. These NGOs, dozens of them, using tactics honed in the 'peaceful overthrow' of former Communist states, didn't work well in Haiti; violence and provocation were introduced. The most effective weapons against Aristide were the press releases of the NGOs, swallowed whole by a criminally compliant US press. Even now, six years after Aristide was kidnapped by the then US Ambassador, US news agencies are printing garbage about "Aristide, deposed amid a violent uprising.' These days, the USS Comfort, Bill Clinton and P.J Patterson are back in the organised hypocrisy game, along with new players like Ban Ki Moon who is proving as clueless about Haiti as his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Obama has brought back G. W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice's mouthpiece. No doubt there is room for old Haiti hands like Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Pity they can't reanimate Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, both eminent authorities on black people. But there's always Luigi Einaudi: "The only thing wrong with Haiti is that it is being run by Haitians"

Boojum Hunting in the Caribbean

 

John Maxwell

 

When Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean nearly 40 years ago he was shocked by – of all things – a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean.

In the area known as the Doldrums (wonderful word) Heyerdahl's papyrus raft Ra II, was surrounded for days by a wilderness of plastic rubbish from all over the world. The Age of Plastic has bequeathed countless conveniences to humanity as well as new forms of cancer and enormous collections of litter on land, at sea and even in space.

Since Heyerdahl's observations we now know that every ocean in the world has its own garbage dump. The largest by far is the so-called North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area covering most of the North Pacific from Alaska to Japan – twice the size of the continental United States and discovered only in 1997. The gyres are not easily discerned, because most of the plastic rubbish has been macerated by marine forces and is composed of small particles that float just below the surface, killing fish that mistake it for food.

The Atlantic gyre like all others. has formed at the confluence of various ocean currents, an area of slackwater circulating majestically, slowly and almost imperceptibly until you pick up – on a Jamaican or Haitian beach – soft drink containers thrown into the Congo or the Niger.

There is another less well known gyre in the North Caribbean which has quite different effects from the other garbage patches.

This area of existential discombobulation is much more dangerous than its kin. It is, first of all, not composed of material fragments but of abstractions, strange apparitions that do not poison fish or litter beaches but poison minds and litter brave new policies with the toxic detritus of ancient ignorance, hysteria, and unreasonable beliefs.

It is a place where ancient racist libels still hang around, driving US politicians to distraction and the Bible. It is the place where apparitions like Pat Robertson, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, and Luigi Einaudi flourish and have their being, sustained by vicious fables invented 500 years ago to justify human slavery, revised and updated periodically to deal with black rebellion against slavery, and colonialism, and used today to frighten and confuse US soldiers and journalists.

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

 

John Maxwell

 

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights especially my rights to self determination and self expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country,my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo" flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped President and his wife.

The Central African Republic – one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' – agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for – for the disappearance of the Aristides – they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' – terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world – France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF    declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA his Secretary of State was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service'. Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians; "Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for repaations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the French in exchange for a lower interest longer term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating forty etc etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gun point into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the 'houses of Satan.'

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for US agribusiness