MAY 4, 2010 2:07AMVision of Plantation Haiti - A White Pearl, Again!
Haiti For Sale
La Gonave - The Vision
The people of Haiti are fighting against formidable odds, as all around them in the Caribbean exist only U.S. or Euro colonies, client states and territories, also hostile to Haiti's Afrocentricity and refusal to be quietly re-colonized.The tiny nation of Haiti has valiantly struggled, for over two centuries, for its sovereignty, its own language, Vodun sacred values and most importantly to not end up a colonial enterprise, like the Dominican Republic and as the rest of the Caribbean islands where mostly Eurocentric-black overseers manage their Black and brown populations for the benefit of the white superpower nations. And where the Island peoples are set off as props in their own homeland - maids, butlers, prostitutes, gardeners, entertainers and housekeepers - servicing the foreign-owned white tourist industry while their masses live in abject poverty and total deprivation; their island resources exported to feed and further enrich said same foreign white countries as in the times of slavery. (Media Lies and the Real Haiti News, 2007; Does the Western economic model and calculation of economic wealth fit Haiti, fit Dessalines' idea of wealth distribution? NO! ; Haiti's Riches: Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti; Haiti's Riches and, Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?)
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Without a strong military ally to ward off plunderers by leveraging their muscles for defenseless Black Haiti in foreign relations and trade, Black Haiti shall always be subject to exploitation and impoverishment. It's assets stolen, its attempts at participatory democracy destroyed and the resulting chaos and misery used for the benefit of making the superpowers' elites wealthier.
Haiti is not the poorest country, it's the most exploited country. (See. Program and presentation summary of an HLLN To -Tell-The-Truth- About-Haiti Forum with Ezili Dantò (Photos and Agenda ; Haiti's Riches.)
La Gonave is a Haitian satellite island located in the Gulf of La Gonave about a one-hour ferry ride from Port au Prince. A US business group, Global Renewable Energy, hoping to establish themselves as the "La Gonave Development Authority – LDGA" details in the video below their wish to take over La Gonave “to create an international multi-cultural Island paradise and business Mecca.” Gobal Renewable Energy makes no bones about Haiti as a plantation. None at all. (See also, Ezili Dantò's The Plantation Called Haiti: Feudal Pillage Masking as Humanitarian Aid.)
Haiti For Sale
La Gonave - The Vision
Fred E. Rice, CEO,
Global Renewable EnergyFred E. Rice, Chairman and CEO of Global Renewable Energy, Architect and Master Planner, presented his visions for La Gonave and Haiti to members of the media at a Friday, June 26, 2009 Press Conference held in the Edna Room of the Hotel Montana in Haiti. Several VIP leaders of Haiti spoke in support of the project and the La Gonave Movement for a New Haiti.
Source: Global Renewable Energy
Initial Presentation of LGDA Concept for Development of La GonaveFred E. Rice meets with President Rene Preval of Haiti for the purpose of explaining his master plan for the Island of La Gonave. The meeting occurred in the National Palace of Haiti located in Port-au-Prince.
Source: Global Renewable Energy
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The video is a sale pitch for a PLANTATION on La Gonave in the 21st century and to bring back the days when Haiti was the "Pearl of the Antilles." France's pearl, that is! The plantation system, vile values and exact "Pearl?" that Jan-Jak Desalin, Haiti's founding father, ripped out of the French flag to create the red and blue Haitian flag; the false goodness, benevolence and purity-Pearl Dessalin's children have been ripping out of the arsenals of ideological tools of enslavement ever since 1806; the Pearl that cared not for the suffering of ordinary human beings because their skin is black and bloodlines more directly African than the rest of the human race; the Pearl our Haitian gran-grans fought against and lost over 200,000 lives in a 13-year bloody revolutionary war against the enslaving super-powers of France, Britain, Spain and a US embargo to break their chains. That is, after 300-years of brutal enslavement where Desalin’s people were considered sub-humans and Haitian women were worked like beasts of burdens so that French and Spanish homes overseas could have coffee, sugar, gold and glitter; and our grans were routinely sexually abused, raped and bred like mares to satisfy the other gross appetites of said plantation owners and their other such "civilized" ilks. That Pearl, proped up and encased in the same racist and gross marginalization of Desalin's descendants is , once again, being pitched as the ultimate in golden progress.
It's a pitch for making a home in Haiti, not for Haitians; not for planting food for malnourished, starving Haitians to eat; not for biofuel for Haitians to gain fuel sovereignty, but a pitch about making the Island of La Gonave Haiti, a “home for international business and the destination for world travelers."Today, the Pearl shall be about disposing enormous cruise ship waste! Today, over 206 years post independence, no shame is expressed as the literate, civilized and well privileged, with no clue as to their general repugnance and Haiti’s original rejection of bourgeois democracy, blithely make a pitch, right in our faces, for a PLANTATION on Haiti. And, for already over-exploited and environmentally-devastated Haiti to be a waste disposal receptacle for jaded Northern tourists, cruise ships colonies, toxic oil refineries and generally a pleasure paradise and foreigners' profit-farm. This vision for Desalin's land? A land fought for, won in combat by the enslaved in a deadly war with the most powerful powers in the world and then paid for, again, for 122-years through a Euro-US Independence Debt forced upon Haiti and estimated today at over $21billion dollars? A land still Ginen through 300-years of shattering Euro-enslavement and this over 200-years of agonizing post-Independence, containment-in-poverty. (Haiti, The Rebel and The Haitian struggle - the greatest David vs. Goliath battle being played out on this plane and Restitution to Haiti of French Ransom.)
For over 500 years we've toiled in this scorching furnace made of this earth for Desalin's descendants by the powers-that-be. It's been a long and tiresome struggle. But, Haitians -Ayisyen yo - are still the pioneers of this human rights struggle in this Hemisphere, pioneers of a more than 200-year struggle, post independence, and a pre-independence struggle that began in 1503 when the first African enslaved was forcibly brought to Haiti to work the Europeans' plantations. Someone ought to have told Global Renewable Energy that. Someone ought to have told these, uhmm "globalists" that neither our land, nor our bodies will be exhausted, ever again, on plantations or as waste receptacles and that the indigenous Haitian assured their "sell-by" date expired over two centuries ago..
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Years ago and before the earthquake, when I was fairly alone in writing that Haiti had large oil reserves and riches and that was the reason for two Bush Regime changes and exiling Haiti's democratically elected President, and for excluding the poor masses from the life of their own country with a UN occupation instead of participatory democracy, not many where paying attention. I wrote:There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti's deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. (Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery - an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers ; Oil in Haiti, reasons for the US occupation, Part 2; Haiti's Riches: Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti ; Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?; Oil, gas, gold, copper, etc., in Haiti equals US occupation, and Big Oil behind Haiti Earthquake?)
Indeed our research showed how La Gonave was singled out as a place known to Haitians to have large oil deposits and has being coveted by France and the US.
Who can argue against this now with the evidence in this La Gonave proposal: it talks about a 60-thousand barrel per day crude oil refinery. A 1,500-acre petroleum product tank farm, food processing plant, industrial port, as well as a residential and commercial units for foreigners with money. A private industrial airport, a port village, marina, golf course...A 65,000 acre Jatropa plantation (biodiesel plant and wind farm providing jobs for 18,000 Haitians). And, LDGA also needs 600,000 acres of Haitian lands to service the needs of cruise ships. More Haitian lands for spas, hotels and casinos for foreigners. What's note worthy is what this video doesn't say!Look at the Lavalas map of Haiti's riches (also below.)
See Ile de la Gonave - the Island of La Gonave - right there in the middle of the Gulf of La Gonave - Golfe de la Gonave and the LARGE red dash, running almost the whole length of the Island, showing the location of oil deposits (HYC) -hydrocarbons. The Global Renewal Energy proposal wants the Island of La Gonave, talks about sooo much but, uhmm FAILS to mention the oil reserves on the Island and offshore in the waters of La Gonave, just to mention a small sidebar!!!
Ohh, and by the way, the people of Haiti left on the Island will live in water front villages to provide "a cultural experience" for the tourists! But, get this...all this, is so these foreigners dreaming, envisioning still after 2006-years of Independence, the idea of "reclaiming" Haiti as the riches plantation island in the Western Hemisphere – as the Pearl of the Antilles - shall have this repugnant enslavement goal, “within reach!”***
Haiti has natural resources and a large labor force, as the La Gonave video begins to unravel. But those resources are denied or PREVENTED from being developed because they are labor, lands and assets belonging to unassimilated Black people. One set of white folks trains and outfits Haitian death squads, the tourism other or pharmaceutical other brings in the germs, and another set does "human rights," "objective reporting" and, "charity or evangelical" work to mitigate, cover-up the truth and explain the destruction of the first two groups. The results? Same old, same old - guns, germs and his-story...and the do-gooder image of the purveyors of death continuing. Once that protracted dance of death is done and Haiti is bowed and cowed to the grown and its labor, lands and resources are owned by whites and their subcontractors, like the rest of the Caribbean, than Haiti shall no longer be labeled “most violent, corrupt” or the "poorest." For the exploitation shall be complete. (Latin America's Richest & Poorest, April 27, 2009. See also, Does the Western economic model and calculation of economic wealth fit Haiti, fit Dessalines' idea of wealth distribution? NO! See also Haiti Forum Agenda ; Ezili Dantò's Vodun Re-memberment to honor Earthquake Victims and HLLN Delegation mobilizing Haiti-led Relief/Rebuilding; A message to Paul Farmer, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Dobbins and Rony Francois ; Haiti's Riches, and The Plantation Called Haiti: Feudal Pillage Masking as Humanitarian Aid.)
"Progress" as detailed in the video on "a vision" for La Gonave Haiti is not suppose to benefit the people and nation of Haiti. It’s about generating revenue for the shareholders of the La Gonave Development Authority – LDGA. For "progress" is always defined as "a colonial enterprise, like the Dominican Republic and the rest of the Caribbean islands where mostly Eurocentric-black overseers manage their Black and brown populations for the benefit of the white superpower nations. And where the Island peoples are set off as props in their own homeland - maids, butlers, prostitutes, gardeners, entertainers and housekeepers - servicing the foreign-owned white tourist industry while their masses live in abject poverty and total deprivation; their island resources exported to feed and further enrich said same foreign white countries as in the times of slavery. (Media Lies and the Real Haiti News, 2007)
***********************************Forwarded by Ezili's Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network***********************************
Comment on this posting from the Ezili Listserve:
Yvrose GillesThe promise of jobs and a better life makes this project appear appealing. But echoes of the past makes me fear for the people of Haiti. The use of the word "plantation" to describe the jathropa farms is bone chilling. When Haiti was the "Pearl of the Antilles" in the 18th century, the island was a plantation that belonged to France where our African forefathers toiled and died, without hope of a better future. Until 1804! But is this the future that they would have imagined for their descendants?Ezili DantòTwo insightful points Yvrose Gilles. Both are bone chilling to Desalin's descendants. A pitch for a PLANTATION on La Gonave in the 21st century? and to bring back the days when Haiti was the "Pearl of the Antilles?" France's pearl, that is!. Wasn't the plantation system what our grans fought against? It boggles the mind that the authors of this "vision" ... could be so insensitive...to the point of just laying it out as the best "Vision" for Desalin's land and descendants, with no veil! For then when Haiti was a plantation and the Pearl of the Antilles, our gran grans were enslaved, not considered human and being bred like mares. Bone chilling indeed! Maximum respect to you as always. (See also, The Plantation Called Haiti: Feudal Pillage Masking as Humanitarian Aid. - http://bit.ly/929NXS. )
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