Controversy has flared around a cruise that proposes to bring some 500 tourists to Haiti on Aug. 19 to pay tribute to the Haitian people for the vanguard role their ancestors played in winning the nation’s independence 200 years ago.

But Haiti pro-democracy groups are warning that, unless its organizers take a clear political stand, the cruise will help the public relations of Haiti’s current illegal government, which Washington set in place after U.S. Marines kidnapped constitutional president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29 and militarily occupied the country.

Worse yet, a key coup leader represents the cruise in Cap Haïtien.

Called “Cruising into History,” the project is the brain-child of political activist Ron Daniels, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and founder of the Haiti Support Project. Sailing from Miami on Royal Caribbean from Aug. 14-21, the cruise has received the endorsement of prominent celebrities like actor Danny Glover, singer Harry Belafonte, and congressman John Conyers (D-MI). Conceived over two years ago in concert with erstwhile Aristide ally Leslie Voltaire, who was the constitutional government’s Minister for Haitians Living Abroad, the cruise seeks, according to its website, to “foster relationships between people of African descent and Haitians to build a strong and vital solidarity network in support of the contemporary struggle for democracy and development in Haiti.”

However, that “contemporary struggle for democracy” received a giant setback five months ago when the constitutional government was overthrown by a U.S.-backed destabilization campaign.

One of that campaign’s leaders was Frandley Denis Julien, the coordinator of the Citizens Initiative, which organized the Haitian opposition’s first successful march of about 8,000 in Cap Haïtien on Nov. 17, 2002. Funded by Haiti’s businessmen, led by former Col. Himmler Rébu (closely linked to the dreaded Tonton Macoute paramilitary force under the Duvalier dictatorship), endorsed by the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Republican Institute (IRI), and hyped by anti-Aristide media in Haiti and the U.S., that march heralded the “macouto-bourgeois” offensive which, with Paris and Washington’s aid, eventually unseated Haiti’s democratically elected government.

Today, Mr. Julien is the public face of “Cruising into History” in Haiti’s north, where cruise participants are scheduled Aug. 19 to visit historic sites from the 1804 Haitian revolution or just lounge around the secluded resort of Labadie, 10 miles west of Cap Haïtien.

Mr. Julien went on to become a leading member of the IRI-concocted Group of 184, a “civil society” front and principal chariot of the “unarmed opposition” to Aristide, headed by U.S. citizen and sweatshop magnate André Apaid. Today Mr. Julien is a defender and ally of the de facto government of Gérard Latortue, who was installed as Washington’s puppet prime minister after Aristide’s removal.

Having an occupation facilitator as its representative renders meaningless the cruise’s stated mission of saluting Haiti for being “berated, belittled, denigrated, invaded/occupied and exploited by the forces of Europe and America” over the past two centuries, anti-coup groups say.

“If Ron Daniels’ cruise arrives in Haiti to join and celebrate the coup d’état and its supporters, especially on the anniversary of Bwa Kayiman [the Aug. 14, 1791 voodoo ceremony that launched the slaves’ revolt] and the Haitian Revolution, it defiles Haiti’s revolutionary legacy, disrespects Boukman [the leader of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony] and the founding fathers and mothers of Haiti while reinforcing the Haitian people’s current oppression and shall be denounced both in Haiti and abroad by freedom loving people,” wrote Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network in an Aug. 1 press release.

Participants in a Jul. 27 anti-coup “teach-in” at Roxbury Community College in Boston during the Democratic National Convention “expressed concerns about the mission” of the cruise to Rep. Conyers, Laurent said. Mr. Daniels was also in Boston and held a meeting with certain Lavalas Family party leaders about the cruise.

Mr. Voltaire is also billed to be on the cruise. But Haiti’s Lavalas masses view him with contempt for his role in helping to usher in the coup administration and military occupation. He worked with the U.S. Embassy to help nominate the “seven sages” who appointed Latortue unconstitutionally. In his Mar. 8 press conference from Bangui, Central African Republic, Aristide characterized Voltaire’s role as “a continuation of the coup d’état,” without naming him.

Haiti’s anti-coup forces want to make sure that “Cruising into History” will be a gesture in support of justice and democracy in Haiti, not the counter-revolution. Ms. Laurent warned cruise organizers to disassociate from Mr. Julien and not to allow Latortue’s coup regime to “kidnap their agenda.”

“There is no doubt that the Haitian people’s struggle in 2004 against former colonists and slave holders, against the Latortue dictatorship and Haitian economic elites, and against U.S.-supported ex-Haitian army officers, death-squad leaders and mercenaries, is a continuation of the Haitian Revolution,” she concluded.

Benjamin Dupuy, the secretary general of the National Popular Party (PPN), was warmly received at two well-attended events in Canada last weekend.

On July 24, the Committee of Haitians in Ottawa for Haiti’s Reconstruction (CHORHA) held a meeting of over 100. The following evening, several hundred people responded to the call of Konbit Vérité in Montreal.

At both events, the organizers projected a half-hour video depicting the spirited marches of thousands of PPN militants in Port-au-Prince on Mar. 27 and Sep. 30, 2003. Following the projections, Dupuy offered an historical analysis of the different stages that led to the Feb. 29 “coup-napping” and exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

At the Montreal event, Dupuy rapidly traced the roots of Haiti’s most recent coup back to the 1806 assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who led Haiti to independence. “Dessalines said that all those who had fought deserved to have a plot of land,” he explained. But a formerly propertied class – the freedmen or affranchis – were opposed to this first-ever land reform. “They betrayed the pact of May 18, 1803 which gave us our national flag because they wanted to get their hands on the only wealth the devastated colony had left: land,” Dupuy continued. “So they plotted to assassinate Dessalines and there emerged our grandon [big landowning] class, which up until today exploits the peasantry.”

Meanwhile, a comprador bourgeoisie emerged in the cities. These two ruling classes have feuded for power throughout most of Haitian history but united in a counter-revolutionary block when the people elected Aristide 1990 and 2000.

Dupuy noted that Aristide was a disciple of Toussaint Louverture, who led the struggle to abolish slavery in the French colony of St. Domingue. And just like Toussaint, “Aristide believes in diplomacy, in bargaining,” Dupuy explained. “We in PPN told him on many occasions over the course of the last three years that these people were organizing themselves across the border [in the Dominican Republic], and that former soldiers only know how to handle one tool. I said that we had to prepare the people. We couldn’t sit on our hands waiting for the assassins to attack. But even if Titid didn’t want to betray the people, his diplomacy and the lessons he learned in Washington induced him into error, because the people believed in him and that confused them about the true nature of imperialism... So we know the rest of the story. Aristide was kidnapped just the way that Toussaint was. But finally we are at the moment, just like after the kidnapping of Toussaint, where the true struggle starts. That was the moment that the people started their struggle for independence. So there is no question of despair. The struggle has just begun!”

The speech was interrupted several times by sustained applause and was followed by a many questions from the audience, which allowed Dupuy to further develop his analysis.

On July 26, Dupuy held a press conference in Montreal that was attended by both the Haitian and Canadian press and television.

Participants and organizers of both events were enthused by the message from and response to mini-tour of Ben Dupuy and the promise of PPN’s continued resistance to the Feb. 29th coup d’état.