A Very Good Day for Haiti

By Robert Maguire, Focus On Haiti Initiative, 21 November 2016. If ever a country and its people needed a good day, it was Haiti and the Haitian people.  Over the past two months, they have been battered by a monstrous hurricane and, more recently, by widespread flooding and mudslides.  Over the past year, they have…

Building Haiti Back Better, V.2

By Robert Maguire, Focus On Haiti Initiative, 18 October 2016. As the painfully slow process of cataloguing the destruction wrought in early October by Hurricane Matthew and assisting its survivors continues, my in-box fills with emails from various organizations soliciting donations for hurricane relief.  I am struck that the messages are usually from the same…

Let the voices of the Haitian people be heard

By Sir Ronald Sanders, originally posted by Caribbean News Now. “International interests in Haiti, in addition to checking off an ‘elections done’ box, are largely defined by controlling emigration, maintaining stability, and managing poverty. The latter is approached either through the creation of low wage factory jobs or by channelling toward Haiti vast sums of international…

Liberated Haiti: Thirty Years After Duvalier

By Robert Maguire, originally posted by Latin America Goes Global. February 7, 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the ouster of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as President of Haiti, ending the 29 year Duvalier family dictatorship. When Baby Doc fled the country in 1986 for exile in France, massive street celebrations burst out, calling his departure…