Haitian Bridge Alliance Govt Director Guerline Jozef
HBA/Guerline Jozef
The San Diego, CA-based Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) on Thursday honored the 233rd anniversary of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony of August 14, 1791—the historic gathering that ignited the Haitian Revolution.
“It was right here that enslaved Africans, led by Dutty Boukman and Cécile Fatiman, pledged unity and resistance in opposition to the brutal system of French colonial slavery,” HBA Co-Founder and Govt Director Guerline Jozef instructed Caribbean Life.
“This act of defiance launched a revolution that, by January 1, 1804, birthed Haiti as the primary free Black republic on the earth and the one nation in historical past based by a profitable slave revolt,” she added.
But within the centuries that adopted, Jozef lamented that Haiti has confronted “relentless punishment for daring to be free—from the crippling 150 million gold franc ‘independence debt’ extorted by France in 1825, to US army occupation from 1915 to 1934, to ongoing overseas interventions and neoliberal insurance policies which have deepened inequality and dismantled native governance.
“Bwa Kayiman was our ancestors’ declaration that we might not reside or die on our knees,” she mentioned. “However two centuries later, Haiti stays trapped within the vise of imperialism—its land plundered, its democracy undermined, and its folks displaced.”
Jozef claimed that “each coup, each occupation, each IMF (Worldwide Financial Fund) austerity measure is a part of the identical mission to interrupt Haiti’s spirit and management its future.”
She mentioned HBA rejects “the lie that Haiti is ‘damaged.’
“What’s damaged is the worldwide system that calls for our subjugation whereas benefiting from our struggling,” Jozef mentioned.
On the 233rd anniversary of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony, she mentioned HBA reiterated its recommitment to “defending Haiti’s sovereignty, strengthening US-Haiti bilateral/commerce relations, and demanding reparations from France for historic and ongoing exploitation.”
Jozef mentioned HBA honors “the revolutionary imaginative and prescient of Bwa Kayiman—a imaginative and prescient of liberation that extends past Haiti’s shores to all oppressed peoples preventing for dignity and self-determination.”
