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Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Caricom has Failed in having the Cuban Embargo Lifted
Thursday, December 8, 2022
The arrival of Venezuelans seeking better lives has strained the economies—and societies—of Latin American host countries
Venezuela’s Migrants Bring Economic Opportunity to Latin America
By promptly integrating migrants, the economies of host countries stand to increase their GDP by as much as 4.5 percentage points by 2030
Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s gross domestic product is estimated to have declined by more than 75 percent, the most for a country not at war in the last 50 years. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the country’s economic and humanitarian crisis, and in 2020 more than 95 percent of Venezuelans were living below the poverty line.
The arrival of Venezuelans seeking better lives has strained the economies—and societies—of Latin American host countries that are already balancing tight budgets, especially since the pandemic.
Colombia, which has received the most Venezuelan migrants, estimated spending about $600 per migrant in 2019. This covered humanitarian aid, healthcare, childcare, education, housing, and job-search support. With more than 2 million arrivals, this translates into $1.3 billion in assistance. In 2019, this cost peaked at 0.5 percent of Colombia’s GDP.
In the long term, however, this investment has the potential to increase GDP in host countries by up to 4.5 percentage points by 2030, as we find in our latest research on the spillovers from Venezuela’s migration.
To reap the benefits from migration, host countries need to integrate the new arrivals into the formal labor force—and society—by promptly offering them work permits and access to education and healthcare.
Migration flows
After a brief interruption during the pandemic, when many countries closed their borders, migration from Venezuela has resumed and is expected to continue in the coming years, although at a slower pace.
We estimate that Venezuelan migrants will number around 8.4 million by 2025—more than 25 percent of the country’s population in 2015.
The characteristics of migrants have evolved as the economic crisis intensified. The first wave of migrants were mostly professionals with high levels of education. The second consisted of middle-class young people with a university degree. Since the economy collapsed in 2017-2018, migrants have tended to be from low-income households and with lower levels of education.
Overall, the demographic profile of Venezuela’s migrants is like that of the local population in host countries. Almost two-thirds are of working age and almost half are female.
Most have settled in other Latin American countries, while some have migrated to North America and Europe, mainly the US and Spain.
While Colombia remains the main destination, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru have also received sizable flows, with their combined number of migrants exceeding 2 million, more than 3 percent of the local population on average.
Effect on labor markets
Our research finds that Venezuelan migrants—many of them more educated than the local populations—face higher unemployment, are more likely to initially work in the informal sector, and earn less than the local workers.
We didn’t find evidence that migrants are displacing domestic workers, although we have seen downward pressure on wages in the informal sector.
The wage gap between domestic and migrant workers grows with the level of education, which suggests a misallocation of human capital—workers’ skills, knowledge, and expertise—as educated migrants tend to only find unskilled jobs. On average, domestic workers earn about 30 percent more than migrants.
Cost and benefits
Our analysis finds that providing migrants with humanitarian assistance and access to public services carries a sizable fiscal cost and puts pressure on the budgets of host countries, as the Colombia example shows.
But the analysis also identifies large medium-term gains in productivity and growth resulting from an increase in the labor force and better alignment of migrants’ human capital with jobs. These gains are greater for countries that receive larger and more educated migrant flows relative to the domestic population.
We estimate that, with the right support and integration policies, migration from Venezuela has the potential to increase real GDP in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile by 2.5 to 4.5 percentage points relative to a no-migration baseline by 2030.
We also project that the cost of integrating migrants would narrow over time as migrants join the labor force, increasing economic activity and expanding the tax base.
Continued support
Early in the migration crisis, countries in Latin America welcomed Venezuelan migrants and provided support in the form of visa waivers, mobility cards, and access to humanitarian assistance, healthcare, education, and childcare. Migrants also received work permits and credentials to help them integrate into the labor market.
However, in 2018 and 2019, we saw a shift in policies as migration flows intensified. While some countries introduced new programs to facilitate the integration of migrants, others made it harder for Venezuelans to enter by requiring additional documentation.
Countries should continue supporting migrants and helping them integrate into the formal sector so they can find jobs that are in line with their human capital and increase productivity in the economy.
This will require improving transitional arrangements and asylum systems, bringing in migrants into the health and education systems, and formalizing migrant workers by giving them work permits and accelerating the accreditation of skills and education.
To cover the costs of implementing these policies, countries should seek help from donors and international institutions. The IMF is analyzing the impact of migration and coordinating with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other relevant agencies to help countries access funding sources.
Countries in the region should also agree on a coordinated response to the migration crisis, in which each one contributes its fair share to the support and integration of migrants.
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Defending Latin American and Caribbean dignity
Anti-Cuban maneuver in the Organization of American States (OAS) defeated
...the OAS - an organization with no moral authority and a long history of betraying the peoples of Latin America
Author: Internacional news staff | informacion@granmai.cu
A call for a meeting made by the United States to the Organization of American States (OAS) to "analyze the situation in Cuba," no doubt to justify interference, failed miserably due to the refusal of the majority of its member countries.
Party Political Bureau member and Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla posted a tweet yesterday, July 28, describing the events as a defeat for the U.S. within the pro-imperialist entity.
"Anti-Cuban maneuver in the OAS defeated. Rejection by a majority of member states forced suspension of a Permanent Council meeting," the Foreign Minister stated, adding that the President pro tempore of the Council admitted the failure through a "pathetic letter insulting Cuba."
Rodríguez Parrilla also thanked the countries which "defended Latin American and Caribbean dignity," refusing to support the maneuver.
According to a report by Russia Today, Washington Abdala, president pro tempore of the Permanent Council, reported that, after receiving statements from several countries, it was decided to postpone the meeting to conduct consultations that could be useful.
Abdala added that he has asked the organization's Secretariat for Legal Affairs to prepare a report on the situation in Cuba in relation to the OAS - an organization with no moral authority and a long history of betraying the peoples of Latin America. He said the document will be shared with OAS members when it is available.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
“Economic Genocide” in Latin America: The Unspoken Legacy of Wall Street and the IMF. President Cristina Fernandez
United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 2014: Argentina's President Fernandez de Kirchner Denounces Economic Terrorism
By Carla Stea
Dazzling and supremely erudite, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner denounced as terrorism the economic policies that have been strangling the developing world during the past century, and are continuing these criminal actions today, the legacy of Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys’ gangster economic policies. These policies, implemented by the infliction of “shock therapy,” institutionalizing torture, murder and disappearances of individuals, groups, and often heads of state who defy these barbaric economic models, are policies which are more accurately described as global economic theft, sanctioned by the theory that “might makes right.”
The IMF’s “conditionalities” were described, in sanitized language, as “structural adjustment programs,” demanding the obliteration of free national education and health care programs, causing the destitution of majorities of citizens in the developing countries, and resulting in the gross indebtedness of collaborating governments to parasitic interests of multinational corporations, banks, hedge funds, vulture funds and their ilk. The Milton Friedman Chicago Boys policies were described by one of Friedman’s most brilliant students, the German born economist Andre Gunder Frank, as “economic genocide.”
President Kirchner described her late husband, President Nestor Kirchner’s success in rebuilding Argentina, despite the total bankruptcy into which decades of the Chicago Boys policies had plunged a devastated Argentina. She described the earlier chaotic situation, in which Argentina had five presidents in one week during 2001, a disaster rivaled, perhaps, only by Bolivia, which, similarly hostage of the Chicago Boys, had three revolutions in one afternoon, finally resulting Bolivia’s progressive presidency of Juan Jose Torres in 1970. President Torres was overthrown, ten months later, by fascist General Hugo Banzer, with the blessing of Washington, and was then murdered in Argentina in 1975.
The earlier history of Argentina described by President Kirchner, a history common to almost all Latin America Southern Cone governments hostage to the Chicago Boys’ policy of economic genocide, is succinctly summed up by Professor John Dinges in his work “The Condor Years,” (Pages 154-155).
[By 1975], “Inside the U.S. embassy Legal Attache Robert Scherrer quickly developed information that the Torres murder was part of the new security forces cooperation among the military governments…the bloody reality of mounting repression and the assassination of three prominent figures – the Uruguayan Senators Michelini, Gutierrez and Bolivian President Torres who had sought protection in Argentina… .Slowly, among those reading the most secret intelligence traffic about Latin America – in the embassies, in the CIA, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the State Department there was an awakening to a flow of hard evidence that was soon to become a flood: that by 1975 the government of Argentina was committing human rights violations on a massive scale never before seen in Latin America, and the six military governments of the Southern Cone were cooperating to assassinate one another’s opponents.”
This was the Argentina in which Presidents Cristina and Nestor Kirchner spent their earliest years. This was the environment in which the Chicago Boys’ murderous economic policies were forced down the throats of the majority of Argentina’s citizens, utilizing torture, murder and “disappearances” to facilitate the “privatization” of the country’s resources in the organized theft of the nation’s patrimony. This theft was engineered by one of history’s most deadly mobs of criminals, the Chicago Boys, trained by the sociopath Milton Friedman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in a decision grossly discrediting the legitimacy of the Nobel Committee.
President Kirchner described the economic and social recovery steered by her husband, President Nestor Kirchner, a program of social and economic inclusiveness which made education widely available to Argentina’s majority, which decreased unemployment while establishing social safety nets, a program in which Argentina’s economy began to thrive, as Nestor Kirchner weaned Argentina’s economy from the IMF ‘debt trap’ (the title of the superb book by economist Cheryl Payer), and made arrangements to pay off the astronomical debts amassed during the previous period of economic domination by the Chicago Boys, (debts for which Nestor Kirchner’s government was in no way responsible). President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner spoke with legitimate pride of Argentina’s success in reducing widespread poverty, despite the financial disaster engineered by the thugs of the international financial system who are currently still attempting to hold Argentina hostage.
President Kirchner voiced the concerns of the greater part of the developing world, which voted on September 9, 2014, for the United Nations General Assembly resolution: “Toward the Establishment of a Multilateral Legal Framework for Sovereign Debt Restructuring Process.” Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman (whose father, the great journalist and human rights advocate, Jacobo Timerman, had been imprisoned and tortured for two years in Argentina during that same “dirty war” of 1976 described earlier) introduced that resolution, “establishing an ethical political and legal pathway to end unbridled speculation.” The resolution was adopted, with 124 nations supporting it, eleven nations opposing it, and forty one abstentions…The scandalous profits made by parasitic “vulture funds” are funneled into campaign and lobbying to prevent change in the current viciously unjust economic architecture. The Cuban delegate stated the appalling fact that “Developing countries had paid many times the amounts originally received as loans and that devoured resources essential for development.” The distinguished American economist Joseph Stiglitz has repeatedly emphasized precisely this same fact.
President Kirchner denounced U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Griesa, whose currently strangling injunctions, prohibiting Argentina’s repayment of 92.4 percent of the debt until the “vulture funds” are paid in full, would force the return of Argentina’s economy to destitution, totally destroying the new economic and social programs which are empowering Argentina’s majority, and would quickly restore the earlier squalor of the economically colonized Argentina into which Milton Friedman’s thugs and the IMF had forced Argentina to subsist for decades of Kirchner’s earlier life.
In her masterpiece, “The Shock Doctrine,” exposing the criminal thuggery of Friedman’s Chicago Boys, Naomi Klein states:
“In the early nineties, the Argentine state sold off the riches of the country so rapidly and so completely that the project far surpassed what had taken place in Chile a decade earlier. By 1994, 90 percent of all state enterprises had been sold to private companies, including Citibank, Bank Boston, France’s Suez and Vivendi, Spain’s Repsol and Telefonica. Before making the sales, (former President) Menem and (former Finance Minister) Cavallo had generously performed a valuable service for the new owners: they had fired roughly 700,000 of their workers, according to Cavallo’s own estimates; some put the number much higher. The oil company alone lost 27,000 workers during the Menem years, An admirer of Jeffrey Sachs, Cavallo called this process “shock Therapy.” Menem had an even more brutal phrase for it: in a country still traumatized by mass torture, he called it “major surgery without anesthetic.”*
“* In January 2006, long after Cavallo and Menem were out of office, Argentines received some surprising news. It turned out that the Cavallo Plan wasn’t Cavallo’s at all, nor was it the IMF’s: Argentina’s entire early-nineties shock therapy program was written in secret by JP Morgan and Citibank, two of Argentina’s largest private creditors. In the course of a lawsuit against the Argentine government, the noted historian Alejandro Olmos Gaona uncovered a jaw-dropping 1,400 page document written by the two U.S. banks for Cavallo in which “the policies carried out by the government from ’92 on are drawn up…the privatization of utilities, the labour law reform, the privatization of the pension system. It is all laid out with great attention to detail
….Everyone believes that the economic plan pursued since 1992 was Domingo Cavallos’s creation, but that’s not the way it is.” In the long term, Cavallo’s program in its entirety would prove disastrous for Argentina.
…So many jobs were lost that well over half the country would eventually be pushed below the poverty line.”
As President Fernandez Kirchner charges, today it is obvious that U.S. Federal Judge Griesa’s ruling is an attempt to destabilize Argentina, using a new imperialist tactic devised by the current gangsters of international capitalism who thrive by devouring the lives and patrimony of the majority of citizens of the developing world, and, indeed, impose these tactics upon the “99%” percent of citizens within the countries of the developed world.
President Fernandez Kirchner explicitly denounced as economic terrorists the “vulture funds” which, supported by the United States’ judicial system, are attempting to destabilize and ultimately overthrow her government. She stated: “Not only those who place bombs are terrorists, but also those who destabilize the economy of countries, and cause hunger, misery and poverty from the sin of speculation.”
Judge Griesa is attempting, in fact, to fine Argentina $50,000 per day for not complying with his ruling, and declaring Argentina in contempt of court.” In response to his brutal arrogance, President Kirchner cited a quote from former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who described such “creditors” as immoral, preventing countries from tackling problems of education, health and poverty.
Argentina’s president spoke fiercely of such engineered poverty and destitution as creating fertile breeding ground for terrorist leaders recruiting among those who have lost all hope of lives affording them options for fulfillment and dignity, and her voice echoed, 35 years later, the speech delivered on August 27, 1980 at the United Nations Eleventh Special Session on Economic Development: “Toward a New International Economic Order”: Joaquim Chissano, then Foreign Minister of Mozambique addressed the General Assembly, decades ago, and stated:
“The existing economic order is profoundly unjust. It runs counter to the basic interests of the developing countries…we see the perpetuation of underdevelopment in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The peoples of those continents are forced to face hunger, starvation, poverty, nakedness, disease and illiteracy increasingly. We denounce any kind of economic prosperity or independence for part of mankind built on the dependence, domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind…the developing countries have warned the world about the need to take measures to eliminate the main obstacles to emancipation and progress of the peoples struggling for a proper standard of living which would meet the basic needs of life.
…During the colonial period we were branded as rebels and insurgents when we demanded the restitution of our status as human beings. When we demanded independence we tried to talk peaceably with our masters, but no one would listen. The dialogue of force was imposed upon us. We took up arms. Much blood was spilt. But only in that way were we able to win.”
Twenty-nine years later, at the 64 Session of the United Nations General Assembly, on September 24, 2008, Stjepan Mesic, President of the Republic of Croatia, and the last President of Yugoslavia stated:
“Our world is finally still dominated by an economic model which is self-evidently exhausted and has now reached a stage where it is itself generating crises, causing hardship to thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. If one attempts to save this already obsolete model at any cost, if one stubbornly defends a system based on greed and devoid of any social note worthy of mention, the result can be only one: social unrest harboring the potential to erupt into social insurgence on a global scale.”
Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, President of Argentina today raises her powerful voice in, once again, the noble call for economic and social justice. Those who are guilty of perpetuating the injustices she and so many other world leaders abhor walked out of the hall as she spoke. And those are the ones who may ultimately pay the fatal price for ignoring her warning.
October 25, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
Latin America: Fertile ground for Russian President Vladimir Putin's foray
LatAm: Fertile ground for Putin's foray
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
USAID Subversion in Latin America Not Limited to Cuba
By Dan Beeton- CEPR
A new investigation by the Associated Press into a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project to create a Twitter-style social media network in Cuba has received a lot of attention this week, with the news trending on the actual Twitter for much of the day yesterday when the story broke, and eliciting comment from various members of Congress and other policy makers. The “ZunZuneo” project, which AP reports was “aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government,” was overseen by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). AP describes OTI as “a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.” Its efforts to undermine the Cuban government are not unusual, however, considering the organization’s track record in other countries in the region.
As CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot described in an interview with radio station KPFA’s “Letters and Politics” yesterday, USAID and OTI in particular have engaged in various efforts to undermine the democratically-elected governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Haiti, among others, and such “open societies” could be more likely to be impacted by such activities than Cuba. Declassified U.S. government documents show that USAID’s OTI in Venezuela played a central role in funding and working with groups and individuals following the short-lived 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chávez. A key contractor for USAID/OTI in that effort has been Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI).
More recent State Department cables made public by Wikileaks reveal that USAID/OTI subversion in Venezuela extended into the Obama administration era (until 2010, when funding for OTI in Venezuela appears to have ended), and DAI continued to play an important role. A State Department cable from November 2006 explains the U.S. embassy’s strategy in Venezuela and how USAID/OTI “activities support [the] strategy”:
(S) In August of 2004, Ambassador outlined the country team's 5 point strategy to guide embassy activities in Venezuela for the period 2004 ) 2006 (specifically, from the referendum to the 2006 presidential elections). The strategy's focus is: 1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez' Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.
Among the ways in which USAID/OTI have supported the strategy is through the funding and training of protest groups. This August 2009 cable cites the head of USAID/OTI contractor DAI’s Venezuela office Eduardo Fernandez as saying, during 2009 protests, that all the protest organizers are DAI grantees:
¶5. (S) Fernandez told DCM Caulfield that he believed the [the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps'] dual objective is to obtain information regarding DAI's grantees and to cut off their funding. Fernandez said that "the streets are hot," referring to growing protests against Chavez's efforts to consolidate power, and "all these people (organizing the protests) are our grantees." Fernandez has been leading non-partisan training and grant programs since 2004 for DAI in Venezuela."
The November 2006 cable describes an example of USAID/OTI partners in Venezuela "shut[ting] down [a] city":
11. (S) CECAVID: This project supported an NGO working with women in the informal sectors of Barquisimeto, the 5th largest city in Venezuela. The training helped them negotiate with city government to provide better working conditions. After initially agreeing to the women's conditions, the city government reneged and the women shut down the city for 2 days forcing the mayor to return to the bargaining table. This project is now being replicated in another area of Venezuela.
The implications for the current situation in Venezuela are obvious, unless we are to assume that such activities have ended despite the tens of millions of dollars in USAID funds designated for Venezuela, some of it going through organizations such as Freedom House, and the International Republican Institute, some of which also funded groups involved in the 2002 coup (which prominent IRI staff publicly applauded at the time).
The same November 2006 cable notes that one OTI program goal is to bolster international support for the opposition:
…DAI has brought dozens of international leaders to Venezuela, university professors, NGO members, and political leaders to participate in workshops and seminars, who then return to their countries with a better understanding of the Venezuelan reality and as stronger advocates for the Venezuelan opposition.
Many of the thousands of cables originating from the U.S. embassy in Caracas that have been made available by Wikileaks describe regular communication and coordination with prominent opposition leaders and groups. One particular favorite has been the NGO Súmate and its leader María Corina Machado, who has made headlines over the past two months for her role in the protest movement. The cables show that Machado historically has taken more extreme positions than some other opposition leaders, and the embassy has at least privately questioned Súmate’s strategy of discrediting Venezuela’s electoral system which in turn has contributed to opposition defeats at the polls (most notably in 2005 when an opposition boycott led to complete Chavista domination of the National Assembly). The current protests are no different; Machado and Leopoldo López launched “La Salida” campaign at the end of January with its stated goal of forcing president Nicolás Maduro from office, and vowing to “create chaos in the streets.”
USAID support for destabilization is no secret to the targeted governments. In September 2008, in the midst of a violent, racist and pro-secessionist campaign against the democratically-elected government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Morales expelled the U.S. Ambassador, and Venezuela followed suit “in solidarity.” Bolivia would later end all USAID involvement in Bolivia after the agency refused to disclose whom it was funding in the country (Freedom of Information Act requests had been independently filed but were not answered). The U.S. embassy in Bolivia had previously been caught asking Peace Corps volunteers and Fulbright scholars in the country to engage in espionage.
Commenting on the failed USAID/OTI ZunZuneo program in Cuba, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) commented that, "That is not what USAID should be doing[.] USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished."
But USAID’s track record of engaging in subversive activities is a long one, and U.S. credibility as an “honest broker” was lost many years ago.
April 08, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Latin America and the Caribbean moving forward
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The Black Dilemma!
The black American population according to the latest census is shrinking, whether in Washington DC, Los Angeles or Harlem New York, the Mecca of Black Renaissance; is losing its majority to an increasing white populace. The same phenomenon is visible also in the Caribbean, where, whether in Roseau Dominica or in Port au Prince, Haiti, beautiful homes are closed, and their absentee owners are in New York, London or Toronto. The black dilemma pictures a canvas whereby new Caribbean or African blood is not welcomed with open arms by the indigenous black American population to increase and renew the black stock of America.
The Euro-American by contrast, coming from Lithuania or Malta, is quickly mixed and integrated into the bloodstream of the white population, thereby energizing America and its white composite. The black dilemma is made more troublesome due to the fact that in the Caribbean those who left their homelands to establish themselves in Europe or in America must endure the ignominy of a one way ticket. They are not welcomed to bring back their intellectual and their financial resources in the building of their motherlands. From Belize to Cuba, in passing through Trinidad or Jamaica, the Caribbean Diaspora does not enjoy the political right to vote and cannot contribute to the policy-making of their country so as to render their homeland hospitable to all.
This attitude can be compared with the situation facing European immigrants, where new legislation is being drafted to offer citizenship to the offspring of the third generation of immigrants whose parents left Europe for the United States some fifty years ago. These new French, Polish or Italian citizens with double nationality will pollinate both side of the Atlantic with new inventions, new business and new offspring that will make both their ancestor-lands and their new home-lands fertile and prosperous.
This essay is looking into what deliberate steps should be taken in a diligence mode to increase the black stock of America, create a renaissance in the Caribbean and in Africa with the exchange of resources and of people on both sides of the Caribbean and of the Atlantic sea.
The cold shoulders existing between brethren of the same continent has its origin in the dark ages of Africa's history. For example, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a recent article in the New York Times, quoted John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University, who in their research have found out that 90% of the black slaves brought into the Western Hemisphere were captured by and sold to European traders by African elites and kings, who took them as hostages through tribal warfare. This attitude and its ongoing deluge of inhospitality has extended itself at all levels and in most places since.
Starting with my hometown of Grand River Haiti, it has produced through the years not only liberators and luminaries such as Jean Jacques Dessalines and Jean Price Mars, it has also produced more recent individuals such as Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald, and, as well, Marie St Fleur, the first Haitian-American State Representative in Massachusetts. Despite these contributions, the elite of Cape Haitian, the closest large city, has always found repulsive those outsiders—moune en dehors—who migrate into the city. Some of the former have also left for Port au Prince, the capital, where they have themselves also endured the disdain they had earlier bestowed on their comrades.
Migrating into America, those who came barefoot as well as those who came wet foot have endured similar hostility, not only from the authorities but also from black natives who were supposed to be a natural ally in the acculturation process. By comparison, the Jewish Diaspora from Russia has a well oiled agency that picks up the new migrants at the airport, with a scholarship to City College, a voucher for lodging and another for food stamps. Henry Kissinger, as a young lad, for example, could not get into Harvard but was schooled at City College through that route before moving to higher ground.
I am watching with desperation the young men and women from Senegal or Mali on 125th Street in Harlem selling counterfeit merchandise, or luring the ladies in for a hairdo while they represent excellent material for a one way ticket to City College up the hill. No concerted effort is being made by officials or the non-profit organizations to help this new crop of migrants to become fully integrated into the fabric of America, and thereby renewing the black stock for a continuous process of nation building.
Recently, some 30 Haitians people landed in Jamaica after the earthquake in search of a solace in a more peaceful land. They were unfortunately returned by the Jamaican government under the pretext that Jamaica could not afford to absorb them. The contradiction in brotherly solidarity occurred at this peak of Haiti’s national disaster. Such lack of solidarity in such extreme conditions can only spell, in the long-term, the demise of all of us. I have also seen in Roseau, Dominica, how the culture of stupidity has facilitated the extinction of the Creole language as a lingua franca of the citizens of Roseau as compared to the rest of the country, where speaking Creole is routine and ordinary.
The black dilemma, as Abraham Lincoln and Frederic Douglass have seen, could not be solved in a piecemeal manner, State by State, as Senator Frazier Douglas then preferred it to happen. Today, sorting out and solving the black issue, starting from the United States with its sizable black population and a black president, it must be seen in its entirety and its universality. Barack Obama can help but using a Lincolnesque analogy, he must be forced to do so.
There is no other solution but using the term of Frederic Douglass, who, while speaking to Lincoln, said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never did and never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both.”
Yet when the black dilemma is solved it will be only a partial one if it does not include the white population. As with the women’s liberation movement that failed to include the men in the process, the white populace must also be included into that solution. Making the world hospitable to all is not a black or white issue; others like the Abolitionists, the Quakers and the British did understand that humanity is indivisible.
In closing, maybe we should hear from the man from Harlem, Langston Hughes, to find our direction and purpose:
I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart
I am the Negro bearing slavery scars
I am the red man driven from the land
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak
Yet I am the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the old world white still a serf of kings
Who dream so strong, so brave so true?
That even yet its might daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That made America the land it has become
O; I am the man who sailed those earlier seas
In search of what to be my home
For I am the one who left Ireland’s shore
And Poland plain land and England grassy ilea
And torn from Black Africa strand I came
To build a homeland of the free
O’ let America be America again.
May 1, 2010
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