Customer Reviews

Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup (Read and Reist)

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This relatively short book is titled incorrectly. The title is derived from a statement from Ambassador James Dobbins talk on NPR, but it does not relate the actual content of this book. Also, to say the authors of this book are Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, and Amy Goodman, is misleading. Noam Chomsky has a short introduction (9 pages), which is not really all that informative. Paul Farmer's portion was a bit more interesting. Paul Farmer has many years experience living and working with the Haitian people and has written more in depth analysis of Haiti and the occurence of oppresion of third world countries in his books The Uses of Haiti (1994) and Pathologies of Power (2005).
The majority of this book is made up of transcripts from Democracy Now! radio and television broadcasts, and while a good introduction to the situation as it occurred in 2004, it does not adress any thing about steps to remediate the years of US and French backed coups. It does not explain the statements made by either Aristide and his supporters or the claims made by US officials - such as claims of corruption, etc.
The coverage by average US media organizations of this entire event was rather poor, much like the current coverage of the elections taking place currently in Haiti.

For activists interested in learning more about the recent U.S. military intervention in Haiti which resulted in massive human rights violations and the kidnapping of left-wing president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, this brief anthology of essays and Democracy Now! interviews is an excellent introduction. As the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, Haiti, a former French colony and current victim of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs, has suffered years of U.S. sponsored dictatorships and paramilitary violence. As a former Catholic priest who preached liberation theology, Aristide fought to improve the lives of Haiti's enormous underclass who for centuries have endured horrific levels of poverty, illness, political repression, illiteracy, and environmental destruction. For this transgression, Aristide, like Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, was seen as a threat to mulitnational corporate interests and overthrown. As the global justice movement maintains its focus on Venezuela, Bolivia, Chiapas and the Middle East, it's important that we also not forget the situation in Haiti. Here, in the United States, we must also not ignore the plight of Haitian refugees who face criminalization and/or deportation as a result of racist immigration policies and who, like gay and bisexual men, have been scapegoated for the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Despite the poor reviews other people have posted on this website, I found this book to be a very educational and thought-provoking tool to help us better defend the poorest and most oppressed members of human society.

This book deals with the recent details of the perils or the crisis that have happened in this former slave island. The first democratically elected president Jean aristide has been kidnapped by US military ,and the nation has been handed over death squad paramilitary and drug trader;guy philies, chamblain,and US ciizen andy apaid. It simply says her sad history due to French and US military intervention, and also sad current situation that the first democratically elected(with 94 percent support),and more importantly, the rarest leader who cares about the interest of poor general population has been abducted and forced to leave the country due to US intervention. Most of the book was the interviews by DEMOCRACYNOW with journalists amy goodman, but the book begins with Chomsky's article(which made me buy the book) and paul farmer's description of the modern history of haiti.

I read every days LA and NY times,and had only vague idea about this island until this book. The book kept suprising me too much for me to stop reading. It shows grim current situation and future of the nation, and the clear violation of Human right and internation regulation by US contras.

I"m a big fan of Amy Goodman's work as a writer & a journalist but this book falls short. Perhaps Goodman sees Haiti through the lens of East Timor where she spent considerable time in the Nineties. But Haiti isn't as black & white a situation. There are many right & left wing factions with actors frequently changing sides. She also does not question Aristide's claim that he was kidnapped by the US govt. See Paul Farmer's The Uses of Haiti for a better intro to Haiti.

Although this book offered some interesting transcripts, I was interested in reading through a comprehensive set of issues matched with potential solutions (since that was what the title implied to me).

I also got the book mainly b/c Noam Chomsky is a co-author. He's only written the introduction though, which doesn't contain many hard facts. The second chapter by Farmer is interesting, but doesn't develop enough to get all aspects of the picture, such as what's behind the corruption allegations against Aristide.

All other chapters are interviews from the daily TV show "Democracy Now!". As the show itself, these interviews suffer from one-sidedness. The only people appearing in the talks are pro-Aristide, and show host Amy Goodman doesn't seem at all interested in asking tough questions to Aristide.

This is what I'm always noticing when I watch her show. While she does a good job in gathering interesting information that is deliberately or inadvertently ignored by the main-stream media, her guests are typically biased and you hardly ever have people in her show disagreeing with each other.

This is without a doubt the worst written account of the current Haitian political situation I have read to date, full of innuendo and unsupported opinions. If I wanted to read a political paphlet I would have gone to a rally.
The one redeeming feature of this pamphlet is the bodyguards account of what exactly happened in the hours prior prior to Aristide's force out, and the role of the Steele foundation.
If you want decent haitian history book look at "Written in Blood" and do not waste your money on this.