By Atilio Borón on January 6, 2025
Jean Jacques Dessalines
Days ago we deservedly commemorated the triumph of the 26th of July movement, the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista and the advent of the Cuban Revolution. All this happened in 1959.
But let’s not forget that also on January 1, 1804, the first popular, anti-slavery and anti-colonial revolution in the Americas culminated victoriously.
It was on that day that Haitian patriots defeated the French who had occupied and plundered the island for more than a century. Under the leadership of Jean Jacques Dessalines and following in the footsteps previously opened by Toussaint Louverture, who died a year before the triumph, the Haitian revolution abolished slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and founded the first black republic in the world. Haiti paid with more than two centuries of neocolonial oppression, backwardness and unusual doses of political violence for its republican and democratic daring, and for believing that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, born of the French Revolution, would apply equally to the blacks and mulattos who populated its colonies.
It is seldom remembered that Haiti is the country that has suffered the longest U.S. occupation in the Americas. The Marines arrived in 1915 and formally withdrew in 1934, but the White House’s practical influence in the affairs of the Haitian government lasted until 1947. Barely a decade later Washington would regain control of Haiti through a convenient lackey: the bloody dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who left a legacy of some fifty thousand Haitians murdered. Duvalier was succeeded by his son, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, so that the U.S.-imposed reactionary dynasty lasted until 1986, when “Baby Doc” was overthrown in a coup d’état. The justification for installing the ferocious tyranny of Duvalier Sr. was the need to contain the “expansion of communism” in the Caribbean and Central America, which shortly before, in 1954, had provoked the CIA coup in Guatemala -the first of the “Agency” in the region- overthrowing and exiling its legitimate president, Jacobo Arbenz. The United States invaded Haiti again in 1994 and again in 2004. Since then, its presence, directly or indirectly, has been a constant in the long-suffering Caribbean island, an absolute precursor of the struggles for independence and national sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a matter of honor to remember and honor, as José Martí did in his time, the forerunner struggle of the Haitian people and their historic victory of January 1, 1804.
Source: Cuba en Resumen