By Garry Pierre-Pierre A few months after Jean Bertrand Aristide was ousted as president of Haiti following a bloody coup d’etat on September 30, 1991, something amazing happened. A seemingly spontaneous right-wing opposition movement sprung out of nowhere. The name of the group was Revolutionary Front Armed for the Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). Its leader…
Jean Henry Ceant By Garry Pierre-Pierre Over the weekend, the Haitian parliament voted overwhelmingly for Jean Henry Ceant to lead as the country’s next prime minister. Legislators also ratified his cabinet, even though some had to pay their taxes retroactively and in the middle of the night in order to do so. I’m not making…
Things are so bad for the average Haitian that they are willing to live anywhere, no matter how dehumanizing they may find their lives in their new land. Their reasoning is that things are worse for them in their homeland. That’s sad and I am sure it rips your heart to know that as president you are ruling over a people who would rather be anywhere but home.
Grenadières By Garry Pierre-Pierre SAINT MALO, France – The young Haitian team fought valiantly in all of its three group matches, but lost all of them – against China, Nigeria and Germany – by a 1 goal differential. This team of overachievers was defeated by clearly superior teams with resources and systems that ultimately found…
U.S. knows that democracy is messy and precarious, it should help struggling democracies like Haiti, not undermine it.
Haiti is known as a “black” country, because more than 90 percent of the population is of African ancestry. But at home, the lighter your skin, the higher social and by extension economic privilege you enjoy. The business class is made up largely of Haitians of Arab ancestry. There is a tiny bit of others who traced the lightness of their skin to the European presence in Haiti before 1804, when they left following the successful slave revolt for independence. Combined, they make up less than half a percent of the population. Dark-skinned Haitians are discriminated against sometimes subtly and at times overtly. In short Haiti resembles Apartheid South Africa.
Last week violence unseen in more than a decade erupted Port-au-Prince, the capital and other cities across the nation.
The first and obvious explanation for the violence is that a steep government mandated rise in the price of oil and transportation was the spark that created this explosion. While I agree that increase was what ignited this violence, to focus on it as the sole reason left the government off the hook.
I will never forget the day I left my sun-drenched Caribbean homeland for the bright lights of New York. I was playing an intense pickup match of soccer, as we did most afternoons in soccer-crazed Haiti. My cousin crashed our game when he came for me. I was told to go home to shower because I was going to the United States. Game over.
I know that the Haitian-American clergy has a history of keeping its distance from social and political activism and I respect that. But these are not normal times and we need to cast aside some precedence to deal with this clear and present danger that Trump represents. Again, I do not write this lightly. We need to act and act fast. This is a call for all good people to step up and defend our rights that are under severe attack.
Our religious leaders cannot sit idly by. If they do, history will not be kind to them.
Electricity in Haiti remains elusive to the average household. Those who do have power in their homes don’t count much on the government. Electricity comes from individuals installing generators, inverters and solar panels. For the most part, the state’s monopoly, Electricity of Haiti, better known by its French acronym EDH, provides four hours a day per neighborhood on a rolling basis. On a bad week, there isn’t any at all.