In response to the deadly flooding in Haiti, the Socialist Workers campaign demands:

Massive, immediate U.S. aid to Haiti, with no strings attached!

Cancel Haiti’s foreign debt! The imperialist powers use this debt bondage to plunder the entire Third World.

All U.S., UN, and other imperialist troops out of Haiti!

The rising death toll in Haiti, the thousands left homeless, and the threat of epidemics after Tropical Storm Jeanne is not a “natural calamity.” It is caused by decades of imperialist oppression that has blocked economic development.

Deforestation has magnified the destructive effects of flooding in Third World countries from Haiti to Indonesia and Nicaragua. After decades of intensive tree cutting for firewood and charcoal, barely 1 percent of Haiti’s territory has tree cover. Without access to electricity or modern fuels, thousands of workers and farmers depend for heat, light, and cooking on charcoal made from chopping down trees. The disaster in Haiti highlights the reality that more than 2 billion people in the world—one third of humanity—lack access to any modern form of energy.

The Socialist Workers campaign supports the efforts by the power-poor semicolonial countries to obtain and develop the energy sources necessary to expand access to electricity, a precondition for economic and social advances. We call for exposing the drive by Washington and its allies to prevent nations oppressed by imperialism—such as Brazil, Iran, north Korea, and India—from developing the sources of energy they need, including nuclear power.

Washington’s response to this disaster is a promise of miserly aid. Instead of doctors, it deploys soldiers, whose job is to keep working people in check. In contrast, revolutionary Cuba gives true solidarity with no strings attached. Some 600 Cuban volunteer doctors and nurses offer free, quality medical services in rural areas of Haiti.

At least 2,500 people are dead or missing in Haiti in the wake of the storm. Dozens were killed in the rest of the Caribbean and in the United States from the recent hurricanes. In contrast, not a single person died in Cuba during Hurricane Ivan, and only four during Hurricane Charley, as the revolutionary government mobilized workers and farmers to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people and to organize other life-saving preparations. Why? Because in Cuba, workers and farmers have made a socialist revolution and hold political power, acting in the interests of the majority, not the profits of a few.

Cuba points the road that workers and farmers in the U.S. and elsewhere will need to take: to organize a movement to wrest power out of the hands of the exploiting classes, establish a government of working people, and join the worldwide fight for a society based on human dignity and cooperation, not the capitalist law of the jungle.
 
 
Related articles:
Haiti floods: a social, not a ‘natural,’ disaster
Imperialist plunder is cause of deadly toll
‘Immediate, unconditional U.S. aid to Haiti!’
Says Martín Koppel, socialist candidate for U.S. Senate in N.Y.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home