Project for Global Democracy and Human Rights



Haiti

France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make.
—Toussaint L’Ouverture, founder of the second American republic, 1801

You are peasants; you are poor. You are the same color I am. They don’t like you. Your hair is kinky, same as mine. They don’t like you. Your children are not children of big shots. They don’t like you.
—President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, December 2002

In Haiti we still have political parties and citizens not ready to embrace democracy. Why do they refuse to go to elections? They fear that simple and important principle: one man, one vote. I think we are all equal. I think the peasant and the rich man are all equal.
—President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, February 2004

Presidential Palace

Uneven enforcement of criminal law and efforts to revive army imperil troubled nation’s future

Haiti’s problems are the product of a deeply-divided and dysfunctional society, not just failed leadership

Exorcising Haiti’s ghosts

Why Aristide should have completed the three years stolen by the military coup

Haitians’ view of the USA changing as U.S. policy changes

International human rights law calls for the restoration of democracy, but not foreign intervention in the democratic process itself

Haiti is not Somalia: the case for intervention

Keeping up on developments: good sources



Cuba

How Washington unintentionally helps sustain autocratic rule in Cuba

A leftist caudillo’s police state



Dominican Republic

Blind octagenarian holds on to power through vote fraud



Grenada


Revolution and invasion



L to R: Dep. P.M. Bernard Coard, Foreign Minister Unison Whiteman, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley (March 1980)

© 1996, 1999 Andrew Reding, Project Director and Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute


return to index and cover page