This week in Haiti
Singer Martha Jean-Claude Dead at 82
Haitian singer and actress Martha Jean-Claude, whose engaged music inspired Haitians struggling against dictatorship for decades, died at age 82 on Nov. 14 in Havana.
Known as "the daughter of two islands," she was a symbol of the fraternity between Haiti and Cuba, where she lived most of her life and raised four children.
Martha Jean-Claude, known affectionately as Mamita, came to fame in Haiti during the 1940s, most notably during Port-au-Prince's bicentennial festivities in 1949. As a child, she sang at the Port-au-Prince Cathedral and, in 1942, began her professional career with folkloric concerts at the Rex Theatre, where she was often accompanied by fellow singer-dancer Emérantes Despradines.
In 1952, she was imprisoned for publishing a play, "Avrinette," which the regime of President Paul Magloire found subversive. She fled to Cuba on Dec. 20, 1952.
"I left Haiti after spending several months in prison while pregnant," she recalled in an interview. "I gave birth two days after getting out. One month after leaving prison -- my husband was in Cuba -- I left to join him." She had married Cuban journalist Victor Mirabal, whom she met after one of her shows. A few months later, they married in Venezuela.
Together they had four children: Linda, an opera singer in Madrid; Sandra, a musician living in Amsterdam; Magdalena, a doctor living in Cuba; and Richard Mirabal, a musician and director of the Martha Jean-Claude Foundation, based in Pétionville, Haïti.
In Cuba, she quickly became a star on the stage, radio, and television, playing with different orchestras and in many clubs, including the famous "Tropicana." In 1957, she spent a year working in Mexico, where her "Afro Cabaret" was very popular on television.
When she returned to Cuba in 1958, the country was in upheaval and she sided with the revolutionaries. After the Batista dictatorship fell in 1959, she became something of an ambassador for the Cuban Revolution, Haitian culture, and the the anti-Duvalierist struggle, bringing her concerts to many socialist countries as well as playing at schools, Army bases, and official receptions in Cuba. She even travelled with the Cuban Army to Angola in the 1970s. She also toured Paris, Montreal, New York, Panama, Mexico, and Spain.
In 1971, she starred in the anti-Duvalierist film Si m pa rele, produced in Cuba.
"It's natural that I struggle for social justice," Martha said in an interview explaining the political character of many of her 50 songs and 8 albums. "To sing the song of the peasants, that's what is in my heart. I lean toward these people. My songs are what one calls protest ballads."
After 34 years in exile, she returned to Haiti in 1986, after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, and held a triumphant concert. She performed again in Port-au-Prince in 1991 with Mackandal, a musical group she formed in 1978 with her children Richard and Sandra.
Several of Martha's grandchildren accompanied her to a concert in her honor with Despradines and Cuban singer Celia Cruz at the Sylvio Cator stadium in Port-au-Prince in July 1996.
The same year, President René Préval honored her with Haiti's highest medal of honor.«With her children born in Cuba, she created the Martha Jean-Claude Foundation with the goal of perfecting the artistic formation of youth and to allow better cultural relations between Haiti and Cuba,» a Haitian government press release explained after her death.
Last year, Richard Mirabal, working with Cuban television, produced a one-hour documentary on her life and music entitled "Fanm 2 zile" (Woman of Two Islands).
Her last public appearance was at a reception in the Palace of the Revolution in Havana on Jul. 17 on the occasion of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's state visit to Cuba. Although in a wheel-chair, Martha bantered cheerfully with Fidel Castro and Aristide.
Born in Port-au-Prince on Mar. 21, 1919, Martha suffered in recent years
from diabetes and other ailments and spent her final month in a Cuban hospital.
Her family was all on hand for her death. Her funeral, attended by former
Haitian president René Préval, was held in Havana on Nov.
15.
The
So-Called Evidence Is a Farce
by Stan Goff
(Last of three parts)
Last week, the so-called Northern Alliance in Afghanistan captured the capital, Kabul. Some may be tempted to think that the war is now almost over. But in this final installment, Stan Goff explains that Washington was never really pursuing its professed goal of flushing out a handful of terrorists living in caves. It's real aim is to establish a military foothold in Afghanistan to guard its oil interests in an unstable region, whose complexities it does not even begin to understand.
----
What the U.S. is responding to is not Sept. 11, but the beginning of
a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning
of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the
empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about. The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not enhance our security; it will significantly degrade it. Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of war on several counts and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a position of moral and political neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences -- but loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to ignore nukes.
The current operation in Afghanistan is the U.S. military's dumbest operation yet. I was sent to Somalia in 1993 as part of the ill-fated Task Force to capture Mohammed Farah Aidid. That Task Force had all the gadgets imaginable, perhaps at that time the most technically sophisticated Special Ops force ever assembled. That's why the United States was stunned when that Task Force went home with its dead and wounded, its tail firmly between its legs, defeated by a near-feudal warlord.
There's been all kinds of nonsense written about why and how that happened, not the least of which is the perennial claim that politicians kept soldiers from exerting the necessary force to get the job done. This is just military rationalization. Military success is not a function of force alone, geography and weather alone, technology alone, intelligence alone, or political context alone -- but a combination of all these and a host of other largely uncontrollable variables.
There is no shortage of idiots in the military, as there are in any bureaucracy, who have a powerful vested interest in mystifying military matters for the public, so the public remains inclined to "leave it to the experts," ignore their perfidy and corruption, and accept their bullshit excuses for their failures. These nitwits actually believe they can "win," whatever that might mean right now, in Afghanistan and other places. But Afghanistan has some very important similarities with Somalia which the short memories and limited intelligence of this Administration have led them to miss, apparently.
Here's the reality in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is a backward, tribalistic entity, coherent only in its politico-geographic definition. It was turned into some semblance of a nation by socialists once, who aligned with the Soviet Union and had just begun the process of breaking down the deep ignorance and patriarchal savagery that characterized many of the societies within its borders. That's an assessment, not a judgment. Being backward does not excuse "civilized" governments, like the U.S., using them for bombing practice.
As part of a Cold War strategy, the U.S. -- beginning with the Carter Administration -- began a covert program of destabilization in Afghanistan by arming and training a whole bevy of wanna-be tribal warlords to attack the godless communists. In fact, the Taliban can trace its origins as a military-political force back to this scheme. They are "Made in the USA."
President Jimmy Carter's hatchet man, Zbigniew Brzezinski, developed this destabilization plan to force the Soviets to come to the aid of the socialist government there, whereupon the Soviets fell into the same military trap the U.S. later encountered in Somalia. (Brzezinski, by the way, is today working as a consultant with... Amoco, who along with BP, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Unocal, are all stomping around in the Caspian region.)
There is no one, singular, cogent military force to focus against. There are a host of factions -- well-armed thanks to the U.S. -- who change alliances like you and I change underwear, in a country that is divided by some very forbidding mountains, and a total lack of infrastructure. In other words, there is no clear enemy, therefore there can be no clear, decisive objectives. A military task force cannot conquer a nation that doesn't actually exist.
The introduction of two dozen Stinger missiles here, or 500 assault rifles there, or (as in Somalia) 200 RPG's [rocket propelled grenades], can almost instantly shift the entire balance of power between numerous, unpredictable factions who are constantly jockeying for position. Combat can be engaged by as much technology as you like. It becomes moot, however, because low-tech variables can still have such a profound and completely unpredictable influence on the actual overall situation.
This is what happened in Somalia, regardless of the lame excuses of various military pundits.
The Taliban is reputed to have around 10,000 or so "Afghani-Arabs." But 38% of Afghanistan is Pushtun, who are further divided between two sub-ethnicities, the Ghilzai and the Durrani. Twenty-five percent are Tajiks, with loyalties divided between Afghanistan and neighboring Tajikistan. The Hazara constitute 19%. The Uzbeks are 6%, and the rest is a hodge-podge of Aimaks, Turkmens, and Balochs. Most are Muslims, but there is a Sunni majority that is hostile to the Shiite minority -- mostly Hazaras, who are far more sympathetic to the Iranians than to most other Afghanis. Half the country speaks Dari-Farsi, 35% speak Pushtu, 11% speak Turkic dialects, and there are around 30 minor languages. Geography and loyalties divide these populations up like a shifting jigsaw puzzle. And Afghanistan's most important export commodity is heroin.
The so-called Northern Alliance is composed of people just as reactionary as the Taliban. Let's reflect for a moment on the "Northern Alliance."
First of all, the Pakistanis, who until the Bush people started threatening them and acting like psychotics in the wake of the attacks, were supporting the Taliban. Pakistan is extremely hostile to most of the groups that constitute the so-called Northern Alliance.
When U.S. strikes started, the Northern Alliance was emboldened to shoot a few Katyusha rockets at some suspected Taliban positions in the mountains north of the capital, Kabul. This is being interpreted by US pundits to mean there are some definable groups standing in the wings to stabilize things, post-Taliban. Ha!
This is an "alliance" primarily of Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, who have themselves engaged one another in a number of bloodthirsty conflicts. What holds them together now is mutual hatred of the Taliban.
So what happens when they, with American/NATO assistance, defeat the Taliban? (which can certainly happen). Will they then decide to stay together and let bygones be bygones? Not likely. And what of the dominant plurality of Pushtuns of the south?
Well, Bush and crew have an idea. They're going to get the doddering King Mohammed Zahir Shah (yes, I said "king"), a Durrani Pushtun, to lead the whole bunch in a chorus of Cumbaya. How Bush et al have avoided the little issue of the king's avowed commitment to a "Greater Pushtun Nation" might only be explained by denial. And prior to the Northern Alliance's combined resistance to the Taliban, they had set aside their blood feuds to do what? Well, fight against Pushtun nationalism, of course.
Follow along. I know it's convoluted, but it's very important. This is the war we'll pay for with our money and some of our young people's lives. Afghanis are already paying for it with theirs.
The Pakistanis are having none of this, meanwhile, and as the first explosions in the Afghani night signified yet another raid on the US Treasury for the war industry, the recalcitrant Pakistanis, ever more preoccupied with the possibility of civil war in Pakistan, still couldn't agree with their new US allies on who should run Afghanistan.
There will be some deals struck, I expect, with whomever is to try their hand at being US quislings, and certainly the main deal has to be control over that lucrative and singular export commodity, heroin. This should surprise no one familiar with the US foreign policy establishment, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is attracted to dope like a lunar moth is attracted to a naked light bulb. So is the U.S. banking industry, but that's a different article.
Drug money is unmarred by those embarrassing paper trails, and it gives our resident spooks plenty of cash for bribes, contracting out to criminal syndicates, and weapons purchases.
But will all this stabilize Afghanistan enough for the oil consortiums to build their precious pipeline? Only if we secure it through a permanent troop presence, supplied and supported by static installations, which can then be attacked at will by guerrillas who are right now being convinced that the U.S. wants nothing less than the destruction of Islam. Remember Vietnam, anyone? Some people will call these installations "mission creep." Others use the word "quagmire."
I won't even begin to speculate now on what new conflicts the evolving situation will bring forward between other players, including the Iranians and the Russians.
Just as Herr Hitler thought he could do the same dumb shit Napoleon tried and failed at, this Administration thinks it can do the same dumb shit as the Soviets, and before them the the Brits, the Greeks, the Persians, the Arabs, the Mongols... everyone has had a crack at this area called, deceptively because it is many places, Afghanistan... and get away with it.
On the domestic front, I think there is a tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors. This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling. It is only a short step from there to go after other groups. We have long been prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.
It's for all these reasons that I say emphatically that we cannot accept anything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit stories. What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes much more difficult.
The Left needs to understand its critical role here. We must be the credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism, and then take political power.
Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced with a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism.
And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.
*~