Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the Historical Standards of Acceptance in Leadership and Revolution. According to Color

[When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first Black head of state.

Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe immediately demonized Dessalines. Even in the United States, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers recounted horrific stories of the final years of the Haitian Revolution, a war for independence that took the lives of some 50,000 French soldiers and over 100,000 Black and mixed-race Haitians.

For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.

Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.]

Full article (Truth Out)

After the Quake, Luxury Hotels Rise Above Haiti’s Homeless

After the Quake, Luxury Hotels Rise Above Haiti’s Homeless

TakePart.com

According to the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti, just over $9 billion has been disbursed toward relief and reconstruction efforts in Haiti; 59 percent went to U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and private contractors, 40 percent went to the donor countries’ civil/military entities, and 1 percent went to the Haitian government.

At the January 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual meeting of corporate and government leaders from around the world that’s like Burning Man for the 1 percent, Lamothe said that one key to rebuilding the country was tourism and that the government was investing in the industry to stimulate economic growth, with the belief that economic benefits would trickle down to the poor. “Our strategy is very simple,” Lamothe said at this year’s forum. “In order to fight poverty, we need to create wealth.”

Wealth for whom? one might ask. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested $2 million in Pétionville’s Royal Oasis, where rooms go for $250 a night and up. Its website stated that its $2 million equity stake in the venture would generate income that it would later plow into other projects and programs over the long term. The International Financial Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, contributed $26.5 million to the Marriott project.

The Bleached Bones of the Dead: What the Modern World Owes Slavery

The Bleached Bones of the Dead: What the Modern World Owes Slavery.

[…. Consider, for example, the way the advancement of medical knowledge was paid for with the lives of slaves.

The death rate on the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World was staggeringly high. Slave ships, however, were floating laboratories, offering researchers a chance to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Doctors and medical researchers could take advantage of high mortality rates to identify a bewildering number of symptoms, classify them into diseases, and hypothesize about their causes.

Corps of doctors tended to slave ports up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Some of them were committed to relieving suffering; others were simply looking for ways to make the slave system more profitable. In either case, they identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. Priceless epidemiological information on a range of diseases — malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and so on — was gleaned from the bodies of the dying and the dead…]