Toussaint Louverture has loosed something stranger than haints in the hills around Port-au-Prince down to the rolling blue washing Jacqmel. Until the earthquake, the world was unfazed by Haiti's hellish Present: its foreign sweatshops, deforested land, barren farms, AIDS, graves and fever food: the slow starvation that casts its skeletal shade across generations. American expeditionary forces, NGOs, Chinese cargo containers, French aid groups, aid from everywhere, energy biscuits and bottled water all raining on the rubble. Louverture is dancing in that rain.
The word 'Hades' is often mistranslated as 'Hell'. But the Greek word means simply this, 'The Unseen'. In the case of Haiti, 'Hades' does in fact mean hell. Back in June of 2009 the website Racism and National Consciousness posted the following from Haiti Libre:
Recent incidents involving Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic should alert even the most jaded observers that an already very serious human rights problem is getting worse. A confluence of factors - a rapid siccession of executions in the last few months, arrogance and defiance from the Dominican government officials, institutions and citizenry vis-a-vis the plight of Haitian workers, the shameful indifference of the Haitian governemnt and the relatively superior economiuc and militarty position of the Dominican Republic - has created a pre-genocidal atmosphere that raises the spectre of the 1937 mass murder of tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants.
"Pre-genocidal"? That would explain why Haitians have not flooded into the Dominican Republic. And if they try to make it to America they will deported back to Haiti - or even worse, Guantanamo Bay. So it is that Haitians are virtually prisoners in their own devasted nation. And the world turns a blind eye to the threat that lurks right next door. Towards the end of Apocalypse Now, Brando/Kurtz sais, "The horror...the horror..." Indeed, the horror.
- KBOO