From “In The Diaspora”, Stabroek News, October 19, 2009
Melanie Newton is a Barbadian and Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto
In 2004 two events sent shock waves across the Caribbean Sea, presenting us with two radically different blueprints for future hemispheric relations. In February a combined force of American, Canadian and French troops slipped into Haiti in the dead of night, “convinced” President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to resign, and spirited him out of the country into exile. Over the past five years the United Nations has occupied Haiti, ostensibly helping to build democracy, but, in reality, crushing democratic opposition movements. In a historic turn of events, Brazil, which has emerged in recent years as a regional superpower, has led UN forces in Haiti since 2005.
Meanwhile, in December 2004, the governments of Venezuela and Cuba spearheaded the Bolivarian People’s Alternative (now the Bolivarian Alliance, or ALBA). ALBA has sought a new kind of relationship between independent Caribbean and Latin American states…
Haiti was not the only Caribbean country where Simon Bolivar sought refuge during the years he campaigned and fought for the liberation of Latin America. Jamaica was another Caribbean country that welcomed him in his self-imposed exile. Although it was was not an independent country like Haiti, that Jamaican exile and his Jamaica Letter, which is justifiably considered one of the most famous political manifestoes, are an important part of Jamaican history.
Simon Bolivar’s Jamaica Letter, entitled REPLY OF A SOUTH AMERICAN TO A GENTLEMAN OF THIS ISLAND, was written in 1815 during his stay in Jamaica in response to a request from an English gentleman (probably the island”™s governor) for Bolivar”™s thoughts about the background and prospects of the liberation movement. The Jamaica letter was addressed to that unspecified Englishman. The Venezuelan Republic, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1811 as a result of Bolivar’s efforts, had fallen four months earlier (May 1815) following a hard-fought Spanish counter-offensive. The principal contributory causes of that setback to Latin America’s independence were the divisions that arose among the revolutionaries and, particularly, the opposition to independence by many Indians, Blacks, and mulattos, who saw the Creole landowners, rather than the Spaniard colonizers, as their real oppressors. Consequently, Venezuela’s non-European population preferred Spanish rule to that of the Creole elites.
In her article, Melanie Newton observed that “BolÃvar”™s limited willingness to acknowledge his movement”™s debt to either Haiti or to Afro-Latin Americans is one source of modern Latin American elites”™ inability to come to terms with their own history of slavery and racial inequality”, I am not entirely persuaded by Newton’s argument that Bolivar’s decision to compromise on the issue of slavery with Latin American creole elites, in order to secure their politico-military support, is one the reasons for Latin American elites”™ inability to come to terms with their own history of slavery and racial inequality. In acting that way, Bolivar was applying one ofthe oldest, most fundamental principles in politics which can be summed up in the following terms: When a politician is faced with a situation where he has to compromise any of his political objectives it is more advantageous for him to compromise on objectives of lesser importance so as to better ensure attaining his principal objective.”
No one can doubt that Bolivar’s principal objective was independence for Latin America. Everything else, including his promise to Pétion to make general emancipation a central revolutionary goal, was subsidiary to that overriding goal. Bolivar realized that if he continued to insist on the abolition of slavery, he would not only forfeit the valuable (and perhaps indispensable) support of Latin American creole elites but he would also incur the enmity of the powerful United States, thereby seriously jeopardising his chances of successfully attaining his principal goal. But Bolivar was not entirely insincere or opportunistic. It was obvious that he reluctantly adopted a policy of Realpolitik. As Melanie Newton recognized herself, “Bolivar had freed his own slaves [and]“¦To some degree BolÃvar kept his promise to Pétion, promulgating a constitution in 1827 which denounced slavery as an outrage against justice and humanity.” Indeed, given the period he lived in, Bolivar had enlightened, progressive views on that issue, which was so crucially important for blacks everywhere. In the circumstances, I do not see how he could realistically have done more for blacks without becoming totally marginalized and thus ineffective.
The very deplorable attitudes of Latin American creole elites towards blacks, mestizos, and indigenous peoples not only pre-dated Bolivar but were also so deep-seated that they could not possibly be affected,one way or the other, by anything Bolivar did or said. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has this very perceptive comment on the problematic relationship creole elites “enjoyed” with the Amerindian population and their indigenous culture: “Most of the elites who ran post-colonial states in the New World could not usefully or convincingly adopt an indigenous self-image. They were too white, too close to their European roots and, in most cases, too implicated in hostility to the Indians”¦..Simon Bolivar, the ‘Liberator’ after whom Bolivia was named, imposed on the country a rhetorical tradition steeped in Caesar and Solon but innocent of Pachacuti and Tupac Yupanqui. Even the Andean republics were slow to exploit the indigenous past for creating national myths”¦..Only Mexico felt confident about returning to its pre-Conquest roots in search of a serviceable national myth.” (“A History of Our Last Thousand Years”, 1995).
The attitudes of Latin American elites towards blacks, were little different from those of their distant slave-owning American neighbours, to which there is nothing to add. I agree completely with Melanie Newton’s comment that we, in the Caribbean, can choose what lessons we draw from Haitian history and from ALBA”™s effort to forge a new regional solidarity. And that “we must come to terms with the fact that our own internalized racism ““ not just the racism emanating from Northern countries ““ has limited our chances for a better collective future. With that perspective, we should take particular note of the reason identified by Fernandez-Armesto for Mexico being the only Latin American state to seek a serviceable national myth in its pre-Columbian roots – its (cultural) confidence. Only if our Caribbean peoples recover/re-establish our cultural confidence, which would come not from rejecting our ancestral heritage, as we still do, but by wholeheartedly embracing it, would we be able to come to terms with (and overcome) the internalized racism which, as Melanie Newton’s rightly said, has limited our chances for a better collective future.
On that self-defeating internal racism (and our internalized feelings of inferiority) which has so undermined our self-confidence, Darcy Ribeiro has some disturbing (but broadly accurate) things to say in the unflattering cameo portrait he painted of “Antillean” society (Dutch, French, Spanish, and English West Indian society). Writing in 1971, he gave the impression, without actually saying so, that his portrait was still quite valid at the time of writing. In my opinion however, it appears to portray Antillean society before the Second World war and, possibly, for a decade or two after. The term “negro” for example would have been either outmoded in 1971 or on its way out, although Martin Luther King continued to use it right up to his assassination in 1968.
“Interracial comportment in the Antillean zones had a certain archaic tinge”¦.on one side, fluidity of sexual relations existed, and the Negro women’s pleasure in having lighter-skinned children, which reflected a prejudiced ideal of ‘whitening’, which in turn only admits the Negro as a future mulatto or white, but realistic, too, because of the clear social predominance of the dark over the Blacks; on the other side, the role of the mulatto, always capitalizing his paleness and his city speech, his education and his urbanity, as instruments of social ascent, doing all in his power to place himself on the white man’s team and against the vastly superior numbers of his own Black peoples. In this effort the mulatto became an arrogant snob,internalizing a greater and more odious Negrophobia than that of the white man, expressed in the fear of being identified as a Negro and in the revolt of the Negro against the oppressor, whose self-proclaimed whiteness makes him identify the mulatto and the white, rather than the system of exploitation, as an enemy.”
“The most painful aspect of the problem is, probably, the introjection of the white man’s discriminatory values and the cult of his superiority in the Negro and the mulatto”¦.. Furthermore, it is marked by ideas, beliefs, and values that have impregnated the whole population in the most brutal and subtle ways, making the Negroes in their own eyes as second-class people, a less noble subhumanity not made in the image of the white man or endowed by it with the same resources of ingenuity and experience or the same ‘beauty’. Therefore, looking at themselves with a repulsion based on a white aesthetic ideal, speaking a language considered a patois as compared with the mother tongue, worshiping syncretic divinities of a persecuted religion, the Negro mass can move only between rebellion and resignation without finding a dignifying self-definition or a road to emancipation.” (“The Americas and Civilization”, 1971).
Mervyn