Ouvè Lapôt'la

The same guy who turned a song about social security into a funky boogaloo, also has this irresistible number. There is something about biguine and rhythms from Guadeloupe and Martinique that seamlessly fuse with jazz so well, which is especially evident in the piano here.

Promenades dans les campagnes d'Haiti

Candelon Rigaud

Candelon Rigaud's Promenades dans les campagnes d'Haiti, published in 1928, is an invaluable survey of the Cul de Sac plain and its varied communities, plantations, and inhabitants. Rigaud, who directed the book toward foreign audiences, presumably to attract foreign investment in agricultural and agro-industrial enterprise in the region, provides an excellent overview of the Cul de Sac plain's agricultural potential, as well as marking the impact of the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO). As one of the areas of Haiti formerly occupied by sugar plantations in the colonial period, the plain's colonial plantations have, for the most part, been parceled out or worked through sharecropping arrangements, like the demwatye system. 

However, as noted by various scholars,  the plain witnessed an attempt by the Haitian state and various landholders to redevelop the long-gone sugar industry in the second half of the 19th century. As part of a return to the land, some planters decided to invest in sugar mills, new transportation (the PCS railway system was built, in part, to transport cane and other goods from the plain to Port-au-Prince) and crops, such as tobacco. Perhaps due to the region's proximity to the national capital, and the tendency among various Haitian governments to grant estates and farm land to generals and soldiers, the Cul de Sac plain appears to have presented greater resistance to the growth of an independent peasantry than other parts of Haiti, but 3/4 of the plain was uncultivated in the early 1900s. According to various foreign accounts, such as Richard Hill's journey through the region in the 1830s, or Aubin's 1910 account, Haitian sharecroppers and rural workers sometimes formed their own labor cooperatives or used cooperative labor practices like the konbit to harvest cane and other crops for landowners and themselves.

Rigaud's text outlines this tentative attempts at capitalist plantations on various habitations, including Chateaublond, which was owned by Jacques Roumain's grandfather, Tancrède Auguste. But even before attempts to revive sugar production in the late 19th century, sugarcane was continuously cultivated for several distilleries. Rigaud methodically takes the reader on a journey throughout the entire plain, describing the history of each former plantation, its inhabitants, the owners, and production. It becomes increasingly clear that due to a combination of Haitian state interest, private capital, and limited foreign investment (mainly German, for the PCS railway), the Cul de Sac witnessed a burgeoning but small-scale revival of sugar, although not enough to significantly shape the export economy. The US Occupation, and with it, HASCO, however, accelerated the process by overtaking small-scale sugar producers and even entering the spirits market through its own distillery. Auguste's Chateaublond, which possessed one of theg significant usines in the area, for example, was forced to terminate production once HASCO and its monopoly (plus ties to US capital) took over. 

Promenades breaks down the process through which HASCO purchased and leased land that previously belonged to various Haitians in the Cul de Sac plain, introduced scientific cultivation, improved irrigation and, in most cases, ceased using the demwatye system to produce an adequate amount of cane for its vast mill near Port-au-Prince. It would appear there was even a degree of internal migration within Haiti, with workers coming to labor on lands owned or leased by HASCO from as far away as Jacmel. Interestingly, most laborers were contracted through recruiters, and many Haitian landowners were forced into the position of supplying cane for HASCO, becoming akin to the colonos of the Caribbean sugar industry as in places like Cuba. The Haitian national bourgeoisie were coerced into a comprador class, piggybacking on US capitalist companies. 

As for the "peasants" and shifting social relations within the plain, transformations already noted by Aubin in the early 1900s appear amplified by the 1920s. HASCO, through leasing land and direct ownership, controlled over 6000 carreaux in land, most of it not worked through the local sharecropping system. Internal stratification within the peasantry intensified, in the Cul de Sac as well as the Leogane plain, as elucidated in Richman's Migration and Vodou. HASCO and US sisal companies increased the number of wage laborers in the plain, yet Rigaud concludes his text by calling attention to efforts to eradicate the demwatye system. The caco wars, opposition to the US Occupation, and other fears of the impact of dispossession and emigration on the Haitian peasant illustrate the degree of uncertainty which characterized the time. Furthermore, the HASCO strikes in 1919 and thereafter, mark a shift where rural workers, the so-called rural proletariat, appear in the annals of the Haitian labor movement. 

Unfortunately, Rigaud, due to his class position and vested interest in further development of the plain, seems to endorse HASCO and its alleged beneficial impact on the Cul de Sac, but his firsthand account remains indispensable for any future project exploring the history of the company. It's impact on the region was tremendous, and surely was a culmination of a process of earlier attempts at capitalist agriculture in Haiti, as outlined by historian Michel Hector for the period 1860-1915. Perhaps, as suggested by Richman, shifts in the nature of Vodou, its hierarchic elements, and the rise of elaborate ceremonies, reflects this growing inequality and insecurity of the time. Future posts shall examine in more detail these elements, particularly in tracking the evolution of the Cul de Sac plain after the 1920s.

RIP Bloncourt

Image Courtesy: Île en Île.

Gérald Bloncourt, one of the youth leaders who played a pivotal role in the 1946 revolution in Haiti, passed away last month. Bloncourt altered the course of Haitian political history, alongside Rene Depestre, Jacques Alexis, and many other left-wing students and youth eager for a change in Haiti after World War II. Through a youth journal, La Ruche, and their activism, demonstrations and protests eventually led to autocratic Lescot's fall from the presidency. However, much has been written about January 1946 and the role of Bloncourt at that convergence of radicalism, democratic fervor, the birth of an official Haitian labor movement and political upheaval. Bloncourt deserves additional attention for contributing to the Haitian arts movement as well as photographing the lives and struggles of immigrant communities in France during his long exile from Haiti. 

As someone interested in radicalism, labor, and social movements in Haiti, Bloncourt and his collaborators at La Ruche are a treasure trove of information, context, and details on how Haitian youths coming of age during and after the US Occupation came to Marxism and social movements. Issues of La Ruche are available online at the University of Florida Digital Collections, and the short-lived journal contained a variety of viewpoints on the questions of labor, class, and socialism in a Haitian context. Chenet, Alexis, Menard, Depestre, plus Bloncourt and many others contributed essays on surrealism, the question of inter-class alliances, US imperialism, the color question (showing the influence of Roumain and Christian Beaulieu, particularly the latter's essay in Le Nouvelliste on the Leyburn thesis), Marxism's applicability in an underdeveloped country like Haiti, and the relationship between religion and fascism. 

Bloncourt was clearly a product of this milieu of early radical thought in Haiti, both echoing and predating other Marxist currents in 20th century Haitian politics like Roumain's 1930s party or the subsequent parties, the renewed PCH and the Parti Socialiste Populaire, or PSP. In fact, Bloncourt was surprisingly tied to the second PCH associated with Felix Dorleans Juste, and not the PSP, which suggests the extent to which youth radicals in Haiti at the time were politically divided and differed in their interpretation of Marxism, political activity, and labor movements. Now, with only Depestre and Chenet, the remaining survivors of the Cinq Glorieuses, it behooves us to study in detail the revolutionary moments in Haiti when socialist and democratic change was possible. Bloncourt's generation helped ensure the the middle-class and segments of the working-class had a voice in Haiti. It's up to us to complete the vision. 

Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti

Haitian Railroads ca. 1925

Although it is difficult not to sympathize with the wise words of Delorme, who warned us of the need to have proper roads before thinking of railroads, Georges Michel's Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti is an excellent introduction to the history of trains in Haiti and what could have been. Although it is somewhat hard to think a truly national railway system would have been completed had it not been for the US Occupation (and its improvement of the roads and promotion of automobiles), Michel's text analyzes the development of industrial, freight, and passenger lines in Haiti since the late 19th century and gives a richly detailed breakdown on the speed, construction, and relationship with local economies of the various railroads on the island.

For example, the PCS line, stretching from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican border, with another extension to Leogane and the tramway system within Port-au-Prince, predated the US Occupation (founded with German capital). It was explicitly tied to the passenger needs for local markets, trade on the Dominican border (the company even built a wharf on Lake Azuey), and transporting sugar and other products produced on the Cul de Sac and Leogane plains. The PCS line was eventually purchased by HASCO, which ceased passenger service, solely focusing on transporting cane to their central mill near Port-au-Prince. Thus, the fate of the PCS railway was diverted away from the various economic and market interests of the populations living from Leogane to the Cul de Sac plain, to serve the needs of HASCO, which ruined small-scale sugar plantations or absorbed them, while also dominating the local rum market. Perhaps Michel was on to something when he criticized the US for disrupting the development of the Haitian railway.

Other railroads examined by Michel include a Gonaives to Ennery line, 33 km long, whose service was terminated under President Borno in the 1920s. By 1919, a Port-au-Prince to St. Marc line and Cap-Haitien to Grand Riviere du Nord (with extension to Bahon) were completed. These lines carried various tropical commodities to the major port cities, as well as passengers. Standard Fruit for the banana trade, SHADA, and other agro-industrial firms used these lines to transport their products, and these aforementioned lines fell under the purview of the national railway company. Unfortunately, it never developed into a national railway system, connecting Cap-Haitien to Port-au-Prince, nor Leogane to Cayes. Falling under the remit of the MacDonald Contract, which infamously triggered rural discontent in Haiti as a concession that would forcibly dispossess farmers off their land to allow MacDonald to develop banana plantations, the Compagnie Nationale des Chemins de Fer was eventually nationalized by  Estimé after refusing to raise wages of striking workers in the 1940s. It persisted for a few decades, but by the 1960s and 1970s, these trains were eventually discontinued, scrapped, or only used by a few industrial concerns. 

Michel's book contains a chapter on a few plans to reestablish and expand train lines in Haiti, including two involving French and Canadian capital, but nothing came to fruit under the Duvalier dictatorship. Despite the fond memories of older generations of Haitians and, as the chapter on the Dominican Republic reveals, Dominicans, the chances of a renewed railroad system in Haiti appear grim. However, Michel's study of the history of the train system does persuasively illustrate how US imperialism and Haitian political failure and corruption ruined the chances for Haiti to ever establish a truly national network. The main areas to receive a line were intimately tied to export commodities, and the HASCO takeover of the PCS line reinforce the region's dependence on sugar, to the detriment of a varied export economy. One expects the development of railroads to focus on cities and the transportation of goods, but the truncated nature of their development in Haiti is an excellent illustration of the numerous shortcomings of the Haitian economy, disarticulated, 'underdeveloped,' and in a state of dependency. 

For those searching for additional information on Haitian railroads, Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin, digitized at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, provide rich details on the construction of trains, the tramway service, workers, and the social impact of a regular train service on the people of Haiti. Travelers accounts also provide some perspective, as they describe the tramway system in Port-au-Prince, the use of smaller railroads by some of the usines established in other regions of Haiti, or the various establishments that used the PCS railroad or national lines. 

The Time Machine

After finally reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, one can see why it is so important in the history of the genre of science fiction. However, since I had expected a longer narrative with more details on the Morlocks, I was a little disappointed. Nonetheless, the socialist politics of Wells and his views on evolution, capitalism, and the 19th century's myth of progress provide an interesting opportunity to explore utopia and dystopia through the lens of science fiction. As a socialist of a Fabian bent, one sees the Time Traveller and the unnamed narrator (who sounds a lot like Wells) using the Eloi and Morlocks as a metaphor for the social conflict of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat. However, as a non-Marxist socialist, one cannot help but feel that the Time Traveller, who identifies more with the physically beautiful Eloi, is still focused on top-down social change and legislating socialism instead of class war (which, presumably, would culminate in the dystopian future evolutionary divergence of the species).

 Moreover, the impact of Darwinism and, perhaps, Hegelian dialectics, indicates a need for a constant struggle of to create new forms. In the distant future visited by the Time Traveller, the descendants of the bourgeoisie have become weak, small, and less intelligent, while the descendants of the proletariat retain some knowledge of machinery but live in the underworld and are reduced to feasting on the Eloi for their survival. A solution to the crisis of capital and labor that retains social inequality will not suffice, but the glimmer of conflict and change is necessary of some sort. What that entailed to Wells in 1895 is not clear to me, but clearly the environment of Social Darwinism, scientific racism, elitism and socialism fueled his imagination over what steps should be taken to avoid entrenched social inequality. Due to his contradictory nature on the dilemma, Wells is thought-provoking, as well as a challenge to the discourse of progress. 

Double Star

I've finally read a Robert Heinlein novel. Although Philip K. Dick's harsh words for Heinlein in one of his novels had long turned me against him, Heinlein's Double Star is a rather engaging novel about political intrigue in a distant future. Dealing directly with issues of authority, xenophobia, and inter-species harmony, Double Star features an actor, Lorenzo Smythe, hired to impersonate the visionary politician, Bonforte, who is for political inclusion of non-humans in the Empire, free trade, and civic virtues. In short, Bonforte and his political ideals seem to resemble the political ideals of Heinlein himself. Indeed, for a short spell, I was reconsidering the accusations of fascism and racism against Heinlein, but it would seem he oscillated between racial inclusion and reactionary views. Nevertheless, in this novel, despite the sacrifices of Lorenzo to attain the political vision of Bonforte, and in spite of its basis on the deception of an actor portraying Bonforte, one sees Heinlein's didactic and optimistic science fiction tale as less reactionary or fascist. Indeed, while not much of anything actually occurs in the novel, one is overwhelmed by the degree to which Lorenzo identifies with Bonforte and develops into him, making the predictable conclusion more emotionally satisfying. Of course, Heinlein is sophisticated enough to not resolve the moral dilemma of this story, nor oppose the power of charisma and irrational attachments in political affairs, which makes this more nuanced than science fiction's earlier wave of utopian futures. 

Are You Glad To Be in America?

Although James Blood Ulmer has not occupied much of my jazz interests, I couldn't pass on an opportunity to hear him perform at one of the more interesting jazz venues. Unfortunately, I incorrectly assumed Ulmer was playing with a band, but it was just 90+ minutes of Ulmer wailing on his electric guitar with thick electric Delta Blues licks, folksy singing, Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile, and "Rock Me Baby." It was very calming music, reaching back to the origins of the blues while straying far from jazz throughout. Indeed, it was drenched in the blues and a quasi-West African desert blues mood that left the audience mesmerized. Ulmer joked throughout the show, even referencing Trump in "Are You Glad to be in America?" Personally, I would have preferred some jazz material, although one song dedicated to Ornette Coleman may have been from the latter's fusion years. 

PCS Workers on Strike

Although it remains difficult to find primary source materials from the voices of workers in the early moments of Haitian labor history, the Port-au-Prince paper, Le Matin, provides a few examples. In early September 1908, the mechanics, drivers, and employees in the workshops of the German Compagnie des Chemins de fer de la Plaine du Cul-de-Sac went on strike for higher wages. According to Le Matin and Le Nouvelliste, service for the train was discontinued in Port-au-Prince for a few days, until the strike was resolved by the eighth day of the month. 

What, however, makes this brief strike of industrial workers important or memorable? First, this may have been the first strike to unite different types of workers, instead of the previous strikes of workers or artisans of a specific trade. Unfortunately, in this PCS employee strike, those working in the ateliers ended the strike before the mechanics and drivers, a strike of this nature may be a portent of future solidarity strikes and walk-outs and major foreign-owned companies, such as HASCO. This can also be distinguished from the walkout of shoemakers at Tannerie Continentale, where the tanners remained. 

Last, but certainly not least, the striking workers sent a letter to the director of PCS, Tippenhauer, who shared it with Le Matin, providing some idea of how the strikers saw themselves, who they were, their specialized jobs, and their names. Unfortunately, the letter, as reproduced in Le Matin, is too short, but still a valuable document on an early company strike in Haiti. Although additional research must be conducted into the history of the PCS and subsequent labor actions and unions among drivers and railway workers in Haiti, perhaps these incipient labor actions involving foreign industries in Haiti shed light on the process of working-class formation.