Haiti:
Dare to Rebuild Vertières!

Dec 16, 2024

This article is translated from the November issue #320 of La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers Voice), the journal of the Organisation des Travailleurs Revolutionaires (Organization of Revolutionary Workers) active in Haiti.

Every year on November 18, political leaders take the opportunity to celebrate Vertières, which they present as the Army’s feast day. But the Army of slaves that defeated colonial France was at the service of the poor, the classes oppressed by the slave system, whereas today’s Haitian National Police and army are nothing more than watchdogs trained to protect the lives and property of the rich, and to repress the poor classes, whether in struggle or not.

On November 18, 1803, at Vertières, the indigenous slave army soundly defeated Napoleon’s army, known at the time as the best equipped and strongest in the world. An army of over 22,000 well-trained and armed French soldiers was routed and defeated. The va-nu-pieds (literally, “those who go barefoot”), poor people with nothing to lose and everything to gain, buried Napoleon Bonaparte’s mad dream of re-establishing slavery, already abolished since 1793, by force of arms and the struggle of the slaves. The beating was so severe that even the word “Vertières” was banned from French vocabulary and books, until it was recently reintroduced.

It was one of the greatest revolutions of modern times, both anti-slavery and anti-colonial. The slave army tore down not only the slave system, but also the white colonists, the representatives and profiteers of this social organization in the colony of Saint-Domingue, the richest and most prosperous at the time. In the United States, in 1776, the English colonists had been expelled from American territory, but slavery was maintained, particularly in the south of the country. This is why the U.S. joined forces with the colonial powers of the time, including France, to isolate Haiti, suffocate the former slave population and prevent the revolution from spreading to other colonies. These powers have never been able to digest the crushing defeat of the French army, which they considered their own, and have done everything in their power to make Haiti pay for its audacity, right up to the present day.

This victory, attributed exclusively to the chiefs and generals of the indigenous army, was indeed the work of the determined, angry slave masses, ready to do anything to put an end to slavery. At Vertières, the former slaves shed their blood and gave their lives to put an end to the barbarity of slavery and to appropriate this land and its resources.

Every year, the property-owning classes, their minions in power and the pack of diplomats at their side, who celebrate this date, are instead sullying the memory of Vertières.

Those who plunder the public coffers, who kneel to receive the diktats of the rich and foreign diplomats, who make pacts with gangs, should not allow themselves to celebrate Vertières. It’s a mockery and an insult!

This is why, faced with the barbarity of gangs, the dictatorship of the wealthy classes and the plundering of public coffers, urban and rural workers, like their slave ancestors, have a great interest in mobilizing to forge their own army, to give themselves their own instrument of struggle, to dare to reclaim and renew Vertières. This is the only way to defeat the property-owning classes, their political henchmen and the criminal hordes who sow grief in the neighborhoods on a daily basis. The people’s ordeal has gone on far too long!