“He has a desire to humiliate the Caribbean” – L’Express

Facing Kamala Harris on Tuesday, September 10, Donald Trump loudly repeated a conspiracy theory claiming that Haitian immigrants eat domestic cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio… Immediately corrected by a journalist on the set, the former president maintained his false statements, taken from far-right social networks. A symbol of his confinement in the most extreme bubbles of the American Internet, but also of his uninhibited racism as an electoral strategy.

As Jean Marie Theodat, a Haitian author and professor at the Sorbonne, points out, this is not the first time the New York billionaire has insulted the Caribbean country, which he called a “shithole” during his presidency. The author of Port-au-Prince Frenzy (Parole editions, 2021) recounts the impact of these remarks on the large Haitian community in the United States and the role of the American superpower in the crisis facing its country.

L’Express: During his debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump took up a conspiracy theory that has been popular among Republicans in recent days, which says that Haitian immigrants eat Americans’ cats and dogs… Has there ever been such an outpouring of hatred against the Haitian diaspora in the United States?

Jean Marie Theodat: Donald Trump is no stranger to this. During his presidency, he used even more vile language when he spoke of Haiti, El Salvador and Guatemala as shithole countriesthat is, “shitholes”, to say that it was better to go and find Norwegians or “civilized” people to come to America.

This is not new, it is recurrent and doubly insulting. We experience this in a very sensitive way, since there are more than a million Haitians in the United States, between Florida and New York. Many have dual nationality and this will result, I think, in a massive vote by Haitians in favor of Kamala Harris.

As you point out, the Haitian community is particularly important in Florida. Can it have an impact on the election?

American elections are decided in a few states, by a few votes. Of course, Florida is not a swing state [NDLR : un Etat pivot, susceptible de faire pencher l’élection d’un côté comme de l’autre]since it is a Republican stronghold. This is also why Trump can allow himself to make such blunders. But I think that these remarks were strongly felt within the Haitian community. And beyond the Haitians, it is all the Caribbeans who must feel threatened, because the Jamaicans, the Trinidadians and the Puerto Ricans feel that behind this statement by Donald Trump there is a clear desire to hurt, to humiliate the Caribbeans.

How dangerous is it that a former president, who could become one again, would spread such absurd and racist lies?

As Kamala Harris said very well, Donald Trump belongs to the past, that is to say to a political register that considered overseas, other countries, as a negligible weight in the conduct of a national policy. Today, by the massive presence of Haitians and other immigrants in the United States, the president should understand that the world has ceased to be partitioned by borders, by identity barriers.

We live in a global world that completely escapes Mr. Trump’s twisted intelligence. The feeling of belonging, the feeling of dignity, the feeling of citizen cosmopolitanism has completely crossed borders. And this is where Donald Trump is in the wrong era and election, because the American election cannot be a strictly American affair. The rest of the world is watching them.

And Donald Trump’s message directly affects millions of people, who often follow him blindly…

The problem with Donald Trump is that he is the expression not of a will turned towards the future but on the contrary of American nationalist rancors totally turned towards the past. It is a position that is both detestable, which means that he will follow the most absurd passions of his electorate, but it is also proof that American democracy, the standard-bearer of the Western world, is today tired, with a political leader who exploits the saddest passions, the most foolish obsessions of a completely disoriented part of the electorate.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Haiti last week. What is the weight of the United States on the ground and can they contribute to a way out of the crisis?

The United States is first and foremost the country that has entangled us in the crisis. In this part of the world, the United States has uncontested leadership, it is not like in Asia or in the Indian Ocean where there are rival powers. There, they reign without any form of opposition, Cuba being a harmless geopolitical parenthesis in the Caribbean.

The Americans have control of the air, seas, and land networks because they are able, thanks to telecommunications, to know exactly what is being said, where and when in the country, but they let shiploads of completely illegal weapons enter Haiti. The United States itself is a country where there are more than two weapons of war in circulation per inhabitant, that is to say more than 600 million weapons of war. Well, in Haiti, we have 600,000 weapons of war in circulation, type AK47 or AR-15, that is to say destructive weapons that all come from the United States.

At the same time, the United States allows a large portion of the drugs that come from South America and transit through Haiti to enter their territory. It is estimated that more than 27% of the drugs that enter Florida pass through Haiti, which gives us the feeling that the United States, perhaps out of concern to control drug trafficking, has transformed Haiti into a sort of sieve. That is why I sometimes talk about a black hole in which dirty money, drugs, and also money from human trafficking are mixed. It is as if they wanted to keep a sort of Pandora’s box under a bell jar to prevent it from exploding in everyone’s face. But the United States is doing absolutely nothing that could allow for a sort of de-escalation of the criminal violence that is taking place in Haiti because weapons continue to flow and, above all, they are doing nothing to punish the main culprits even though they have the means to do so.

Will the Haitian issue be handled differently depending on who wins the American presidential election?

Unfortunately, in Haiti, we have stopped looking at the United States with the eyes of hope. During the eight years of the Obama presidency, he never made a favorable gesture for Haiti, even though we are the first black republic in the entire New World: Haitians helped in the American War of Independence against England by sending troops. Of course, it was Santo Domingo at the time, but Haitian blood was shed for the independence of the United States. And today, we are paid with absolutely filthy ingratitude. So we do not expect anything from this country. We would rather need a broader international solicitude, in order to escape from the clutches of a hegemon that does nothing to improve the living conditions of Haitians.