Vol. 80/No. 35      September 19, 2016

 

UN caused cholera epidemic in Haiti; Cuban doctors fought it

 
Six years after it was revealed that unchecked waste leakage from a United Nations “peacekeeping” camp introduced cholera to Haiti, U.N. officials have finally admitted the agency’s “own involvement in the initial outbreak.” At least 10,000 people died and more than 350,000 were sickened in the first year of the epidemic. Some 36,000 people there got cholera last year.

The U.N. had repeatedly denied any responsibility. Backed by Washington, it claimed immunity and successfully fought off lawsuits seeking compensation for cholera victims.

The record of intervention in Haiti by U.N. forces and U.S. troops stands in stark contrast to the solidarity and work of medical volunteers from revolutionary Cuba.

Cholera did not exist in Haiti prior to October 2010, when a contingent of troops from Nepal arrived to join the U.N. military forces there. Violating basic sanitation norms, the camp dumped and leaked waste into a tributary to the Artibonite River, the biggest river in Haiti. After the outbreak U.N. officials refused to allow Haitian health workers to test the Nepalese soldiers for cholera. At the time, a cholera outbreak was sweeping Nepal.

U.N. forces have been deployed in Haiti since 1993 to help Washington keep in place a stable capitalist government. After a January 2010 earthquake Washington and the U.N. sent thousands of additional troops to “ensure security” for relief missions.

Washington’s exploitation of the resources and labor of Haiti goes back to 1915 when U.S. troops invaded to force Haiti to keep repaying its “debt” to Paris for the slave rebellion from 1791 to 1803 that freed it from French colonial rule.

The U.S. government backed the brutal dictatorships of Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude from 1957 until 1986, when workers and farmers overthrew it in an uprising. In 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and prominent critic of the Duvaliers, was elected president. After just seven months he was overthrown by the military and forced into exile.

Concerned that continuing resistance by workers and farmers could get out of hand, President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti and returned Aristide to power in October 1994. Washington forced him back into exile in 2004. The U.S. troops were replaced by the U.N. As of July this year there were 2,360 soldiers and 2,326 police under U.N. auspices.

The U.N. has served as a vehicle for Washington’s war moves from Korea in the 1950s to Somalia in the 1990s.

Cuban internationalism

The cholera epidemic would have been worse had it not been for the rapid response by the revolutionary government of Cuba, which beefed up its internationalist medical contingent in Haiti. The volunteers had been there for more than 12 years and jumped in to play a leading role in slashing cases of the disease by 90 percent.

The Cuban mission grew to more than 1,200 doctors and nurses who volunteered to go to the most remote parts of the country. It established more centers to treat cholera than all other governments and non-governmental organizations there combined and had a higher success rate. Hundreds of Cuban internationalists are still in Haiti today.

“Our capital is as human beings and human values of solidarity,” said Cuban doctor Jorge Balseiro, who directed a Cuban-staffed hospital after the quake, during a tour of Canada in 2011. “It is not a question of rich or poor but of the will to do something.”

Cholera is easily preventable with a modern sewage and water system. But in Haiti, considered by the World Bank the poorest country in the world, less than 8 percent of the people have access to potable water and only 10 percent have electricity. Port-au-Prince, a city of about a million, has no sewage system.

Where did all the money go?

Washington and the U.N. boasted that they had put together $14 billion to aid Haiti after the earthquake. But despite some $6 billion spent so far, “no major water or sanitation projects have been completed in Haiti,” the New York Times reported Aug. 17, and that two pilot wastewater processing plants have closed because of lack of funds.

Tens of thousands of people are still in camps and hundreds of thousands live in wooden and tin homes with no running water or electricity.

“Where did all the money go?” asked NBC News in January 2015. Much went into the pockets of think tanks, “nonprofits” and other corporate entities for studies, advice and overhead.

When asked if any of the 25 water systems the United States Agency for International Development says it provided to Haiti after the quake are still functioning, an agency spokesman told the Militant it was “still looking into this.”

Haiti is a case study of how imperialism pillages semicolonial countries. In 1995, soon after Washington put Aristide back in power, the Haitian government cut tariffs on U.S. rice imports from 35 percent to 3 percent. It did the same on chickens. The influx of rice, much of it from Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, helped destroy Haiti’s near self-sufficiency in food and drove thousands of peasants off the land.

In 1993 Haiti had three large broiler farms producing up to 250,000 birds a month and 262 smaller farms producing up to 6,000. All were driven out of business by the influx of cheaper chicken parts from the U.S.
 
 
Related articles:
Agreement to end Colombia-FARC war opens door for class struggle
Lessons of Cuban Revolution valuable in Colombia
Fidel Castro’s 2008 book discusses how Cuban fighters took power, course of leaders of FARC
Rebel Army’s moral values key to overthrow of Batista
IRS attack on Pastors for Peace is aimed at solidarity with Cuba
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home