By Geraldina Colotti on August 24, 2026
Toussaint Louverture
There is a red thread—of blood, fire, and dignity—that connects the axe of the maroons in Our America with 21st-century anti-imperialism. This thread was born on the night of August 13–14, 1791, in the clearing of Bois Caïman, Haiti. There, under the spiritual and political guidance of the Voodoo priest Dutty Boukman and the mambo Cécile Fatiman, hundreds of enslaved people broke the chains of colonial alienation. The Bois Caïman ceremony was not a mere folkloric rite, but a true clandestine political-military congress: the sovereign response of the oppressed to the “benevolent” universalism of the French Revolution. An enlightened bourgeoisie that proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” in Paris, while accumulating mercantilist capital through sweat, torture, and death in the sugarcane and coffee fields of Saint-Domingue.
With the tactical genius of Toussaint Louverture and the unyielding determination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian Revolution marked, in 1804, the birth of the world’s first free Black republic. It was no concession: it was a victory won on the battlefield by successively defeating three empires (Spanish, British, and French). As Louverture recalled before being deported, the Tree of Liberty, cut down at the trunk, would take deep root. Haiti became the cradle of continental maroonage and the logistical-military beacon without which Simón Bolívar’s epic feat would never have seen the light of day. But the capitalist mode of production shows no mercy to those who expose its racist and coercive roots. Haiti’s “original sin” was having demonstrated that enslaved people were not commodities, but historical subjects of liberation.
The Original Extortion and the Continuity of European Dispossession
The punishment inflicted on Haiti marks the birth of modern odious debt as an instrument of primitive accumulation and systemic subordination. In 1825, under the direct threat of warships, the France of Charles X imposed on Haiti “compensation” of 150 million francs to indemnify former slave owners for the loss of their “property.” To settle this extortion, the young Republic was forced to take out usurious loans from French banks (the so-called Double Dette).
This financial drain, which lasted more than a century, transferred billions of real dollars from the coffers of Port-au-Prince to the fortunes of European oligarchies, nipping in the bud any possibility of public infrastructure, food sovereignty, or autonomous industrial development. France and the powers of the European Union have never paid historical reparations for this financial crime; on the contrary, they have transformed the old, overt colonialism into a sophisticated neocolonial apparatus.
Contemporary plunder: the role of the Paris-Brussels-Washington axis
Today, the plunder of Haiti occurs not only through occupying troops but also through the symbiosis between U.S. imperialism—coordinated via the Southern Command and the CORE Group—and the diplomatic and economic interference of the European Union. Under the guise of “humanitarian aid” and externally driven security missions lies a true economy of plunder that operates on multiple predatory levels.
Northern Haiti is home to vast, untapped deposits of gold, copper, and bauxite, with an estimated value of tens of billions of dollars. Canadian and European multinationals have been operating there for years to secure mining concessions in collusion with local puppet governments, guaranteeing themselves access at ridiculously low extraction costs while disregarding labor rights and environmental protections.
At the same time, the European Union and the U.S. are promoting the creation of “export processing zones” on the border with the Dominican Republic, such as the Caracol industrial park. In these complexes, the Haitian working class is subjected to subsistence-level wages and deprived of union rights, with the sole purpose of supplying the textile and manufacturing value chains destined for Western and European markets.
Compounding this situation is the trap of privatized welfare, in which hundreds of French and European NGOs effectively manage the delivery of basic services in place of the Haitian state. This “aid industry” drains international funds that regularly flow back to their countries of origin in the form of salaries for foreign experts, further impoverishing the social fabric and privatizing public sovereignty.
The Current Political Crisis: Between Armed Gangs, Imperialism, and Popular Resistance
The dramatic contemporary political situation is the direct result of this strategy of permanent destabilization. The deliberate dismantling of the Haitian state by local oligarchies and their overseas protectors has created an institutional vacuum filled by the outsourcing of terror to armed gangs and criminal groups (gangs). Far from being a spontaneous outburst of violence, many of these paramilitary factions have historically been armed and employed by factions of the comprador bourgeoisie and corrupt political sectors to dismantle community organization, repress popular protests, and depopulate working-class neighborhoods such as Cité Soleil.
The constant flow of high-caliber weapons continues unabated, while the international community formally imposes sanctions on the country only to then propose the deployment of foreign police forces as the sole solution. International interventionist missions, disguised as security assistance, do not seek to give the Haitian people a voice, but rather to freeze the crisis to prevent the emergence of a truly autonomous and sovereign constitutional process.
Haiti is not a “failed state,” as the racist and Eurocentric narrative of transnational capital would have it; it is an occupied and plundered country because it was never forgiven for the example set in 1804. The only way forward for the Haitian people lies in reclaiming political sovereignty and in organizing their own popular, peasant, and proletarian forces.
Internationalist solidarity in Europe and Latin America must not take the form of pietism or NGO paternalism, but rather that of a militant denunciation of imperialist plunder. The restoration of historical reparations, an end to the interference of the CORE Group, and the self-determination of the peoples: only in this way will the branches of the Tree of Liberty sprout anew with the ancestral strength of Bois Caïman.
Source: Cuba en Resumen