Initial reports and response to the Les Cayes massacre of demonstrators by U.S. marines on December 6, 1929 after increasing protests against fourteen years of U.S. occupation and its puppet regime.

‘Haitian Masses in Revolt Against U.S. Imperialism’ from The Daily Worker. Vol 6 No. 236. December 9, 1929.

HAITIAN MASSES IN REVOLT AGAINST U.S. IMPERIALISM, BATTLE MARINES, WHO FIRE ON PEASANTS, MURDER FIVE

Hoover, the Fake “Peace Angel,” Sends More Marines and A Message to Congress; Borah Snivels Approval of Imperialist Massacre

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8. It was admitted yesterday that the Haitian workers and peasants have risen in a nation-wide revolutionary movement to drive out American imperialism, and that U.S. Marines have murdered five Haitian peasants and wounded twenty in a clash at Aux Cayes during which the peasants, armed only with machetes (sugar-cane knives used in cutting the cane) and stones, had heroically thrown themselves into hand-to-hand fighting.

At the same time, a U.S. warship, the cruiser Galveston, was ordered rushed from the U. S. naval station at Guantanamo, Cuba, (Cuba being another colony of American imperialism) to the Haitian port of Jacmel, while the airplane carrier “Wright” is speeding South with 500 marines to reinforce the 700 marines now occupying Haiti, and bombing planes meant to spread death and destruction among the Haitian towns to hold the so-called “independent republic” in the grip of Wall Street.

For months, the administration of Hoover has concealed the rising wave of popular anger at the despotism of American imperialism, and the so-called “impartial” news agencies of the capitalist press have hidden it from knowledge in collaboration with the military forces of repression. Now Hoover’s message to Congress merely tries to justify the present war against the Haitian people with evasive indications that something has been wrong in the past and a pretense that the “solution is obscure,” when the solution is very simple and plain–to get out of Haiti and stay out.

Imperialist Commission.

But as getting out of Haiti is far from the thought of the imperialist Hoover, he is sending more marines and warships and bombing planes–and a “commission” is asked from Congress, in the hope that if it will not placate the Haitian masses to learn that they are to be “investigated,” it will fool the American workers into believing that the commission will “do something.” The commission is meant to “do something”; it is meant to serve as a camouflage behind which the Haitian people will be slaughtered and the despotism of Wall Street imperialism will be whitewashed after years of “investigation.”

All the pretenders of “opposition” to imperialist crimes, led by hypocrite, Senator Borah, are rushing into print to “criticise,” but to approve of the warfare against the Haitian people and the massacres past, present and to come of Haitian workers and peasants.

Borah states: “It does seem to me that if we are going to stay in Haiti, the least we could do is to compel the government of Haiti to be just and merciful to these unfortunate people.” Borah by this, clearly endorses staying in Haiti, and cannot plead ignorance of the fact that the so-called “government” of “President” Luis Borno would not last twenty-four hours if the U.S. marines were to be removed, that the Haitian people never elected Borno, but that he was forced upon the republic by armed compulsion of the U.S. marines. Hence all Borah’s crocodile tears about “these unfortunate people” is the dirtiest hypocrisy possible, and is deliberately deigned to support the war being made at present on the Haitian people.

This unspeakable Borah is the same who “protested” at marines being sent to Nicaragua, but after they were there not only ceased to “protest,” but has supported their massacres on the Nicaraguan workers and peasants. Of a like type are the hypocritical “oppositionists” among the fake “progressives” such as Wheeler of Montana, Blaine Wisconsin and all the tribe of the so-called “Farm Bloc.” Another is Senator King of Utah, who the last whitewashing “committee” that “investigated” Haiti five years ago, even “criticizes” American occupation. But King and his kind have, for all that, allowed occupation to continue during those five years, and now King says, “I shall support the recommendations of the President.” And the president sends more marines to commit more murders of the Haitian workers and peasants!

The Battle at Aux Cayes

Only last January, the customary lying report of Brigadier General Russell, who rules Haiti with marines under the typically imperialist title of “High Commissioner,” stated that “the ignorant peasant no longer looks upon the intervention with distrust, but now rather regards it as friend.” This after the Haitian claim that the marines have killed some 3,500 Haitian people!

The state department, disappointed in the effort, so far, of making war on the Soviet Union behind the fuss about “maintaining peace with the Kellogg Pact,” gave out a statement admitting that war was being made on workers and peasants of Haiti.

The fact that the cruiser Galveston was ordered from Cuba to Jacmel, together with the report that arms were reported being smuggled at Jacmel, Haiti, indicates that American imperialism is trying to forestall arms being landed in hail from the only neighboring island not already ruled by the U.S., British Jamaica, less than 100 miles away, though reports state that arms came from Guatemala. The battle at Aux Cayes, as reported, shows that while the puppet Borno’s officials naturally are aiding the marines against the people, and that bourgeois elements are wavering, the peasantry are seething with revolt and ready to fight with supreme heroism out the Yankee oppressors, who have robbed and impoverished them for 14 years. The native magistrate at Aux Cayes, an underling of “President” Borno, informed the marines there that the countryside was in open revolt and a group of peasants was marching on the city. A marine patrol of twenty, with an undisclosed force of the so-called “national guard,” every officer of which above second lieutenant is a U.S. marine, was posted at the roadway entering the city.

The Haitian peasant forces numbered only 150, and demanded to enter the city and join the strike. They would not believe the strike was called off, reports state, and were allowed to send two of their number into town. When these returned with the word that the strike leaders had called off the strike (undoubtedly because they had been facing death at the hands of the marines), the information greeted with curses and jeers. In spite of the lack of other weapons than machetes, clubs and stones, the reports state that the peasants took the offensive and penetrated into the marine positions heroically fighting until death.

Peasants Impoverished.

The peasantry, which has been steadily impoverished during Yankee occupation, were recently subjected to additional taxes on tobacco and alcohol, and were being forced by law to standardize the quality of the coffee they market, by such rigid rules that their income, already miserably low, was cut down still further. This measure, by which American coffee interests hoped to compete on the world market with British coffee interests in Jamaica and Brazil, and Dutch imperialist coffee interests in Indonesia, was enforced with the authority of the hated Haitian “government” of Borno.

While nothing but reports of “resumption of peace” came out of the martial law censorship, the fact that the bulk of the Haitian people are in revolt can be seen by the array of armed forces being sent against them by the Hoover administration. Wires have been cut throughout the country, which is the western end of the large island of which the Dominican republic, also ruled by Yankee marines, is the eastern and larger part. The people of both are Negroes, and almost all are peasants.

***

Stand by Haitian Revolution!

Among the many crimes of American imperialism, none is more brutal and bloody than the war being waged by the Hoover-Stimson administration against the Haitian workers and peasants. And no resistance to oppression has been more heroic and persistent than that of the impoverished and disarmed Negro toilers of Haiti in the fight for their own republic, independent of imperialism and against its lackeys, such as the despicable scoundrel whom the bayonets of the U.S. Marines have made “president.”

The Negro masses of Haiti have a record of over a century of brave struggle. It is their country, and they drove from its shores in the past the best troops which imperial France could throw against them. Continual attempts by one or another imperialist power to gain control by corruption of Haitian rulers led to as continual overthrowal of these rulers, and in the drive of American imperialist expansion to make the Caribbean an American lake on the road to conquest of all Latin-America, the United States armed forces invaded Haiti on July 28, 1915.

And the United States Marines have remained in Haiti ever since, but not without meeting fierce resistance which the repeated blood baths and massacres of thousands of Haitian independence fighters have not quenched. True the movement has been rather formless and led by bourgeois politicians, but the deep fervor of the masses, always present, is again rising to struggle, rejecting the so-called “treaty” signed between imperialism and the corrupt native puppet enthroned by imperialism itself.

Sardonic indeed, it is, that the pasteboard angel of peace behind which Hoover advanced his war threat against the Soviet Union on December 3, was so soon revealed by Hoover himself, also to mask the ruthless butchery of the unarmed Haitian peasants. The situation may well embarrass those who tried to advise the Soviet Union on “maintaining peace,” and Hoover tries to escape from it by falsely claiming that the “solution is obscure,” as though there were some third force that “prevents” him from ordering the Marines to get out of Haiti.

There is a force, though Hoover will not admit it, and that force is the imperialist interests which he himself represents. American imperialist interests insist that the Marines, American working class lads from farms and factories where their families are having their wages cut, where they are speeded up and their farms lost by mortgage foreclosure, butcher their brother workers and farmers of Haiti to insure continued Yankee control. Such control is desired in Haiti, not only to rob and oppress the Haitian people, but to shut out America’s rival robber, imperialist England, and to fortify America’s position for war with England, against the British naval base in Jamaica, the neighboring island.

Obviously, the scope of United States imperialist interests have a wider range than this part. England, squeezed out of power but not out of interest in Mexico by United States intrigue, gaining control, is fighting back. All Latin-America is becoming, as China already is, a battle ground of imperialist rivals, whose robbery and oppression of the masses produces at the same time a rising tide of popular revolt against imperialism by the toiling masses.

The force which the hypocrite in the White House represents, then, is not a third force preventing him “against his will” from ordering the Marines out of Haiti. On the contrary Hoover is the personification of the force of imperialism which keeps them there. That is why he orders more Marines and more airplanes to Haiti. But the workers and farmers in the United States have no interest in supporting, but rather in opposing this imperialist banditry and murder of the Haitian people. The Marines themselves, sons and brothers of the workers and farmers who are exploited on American soil by the same imperialism which sends them to Haiti, will learn that they have more interest in common with the Haitian people than with the American capitalist class for whom they are asked to shoot.

The Haitian workers and peasants, whatever the outcome of the present revolt, will learn that they, and not the bourgeoisie of Haiti, must take the leadership of their struggle. They will learn to unite their struggle with that of other Latin-American workers and peasants, and particularly with the workers and farmers of the United States. It is for the workers of the United States to give every encouragement to the heroic fighters for Haitian independence and, with the leadership of the Communist Party, to go forward to the revolutionary overthrowal of imperialist government, not only in Haiti, but in the United States.

Down with American imperialism! Withdraw the marines from Haiti, Nicaragua and China! Fight the imperialist plot to make war on the Soviet Union and on oppressed nations! Fight for a Soviet Government of workers and farmers in the United States!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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