Jamaica's first female prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller.

By Barry Weisleder, Montego Bay, Jamaica

January 6, 2012 -- Socialist Action (Canada), posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- Car horns blared, orange flags waved and campaign reggae jingles pulsated. Youthful political celebrants blew vuvuzelas from roving car caravans on the evening of December 29, 2011, continuing well past sunrise, across the Caribbean island nation of Jamaica.

A snap election called by the governing Jamaica Labour Party catapulted the opposition People's National Party into government after a five-year hiatus. In terms of seats in the House of Representatives, it was a landslide, 41-22 for the PNP. In terms of votes, it was a 3 per cent shift from the very close 2007 results. This time the PNP won 53 per cent, the JLP 47 per cent. Political pundits were equally surprised by the relatively large margin of victory, and by the record low 52 per cent turnout.

Overview of the march. Photo: Petermann/GJEP-GFC.

[For more on the COP17 Durban climate talks, click HERE.]

Photo essay by Orin Langelle (Global Justice Ecology Project) and Anne Petermann (Global Justice Ecology Project-Global Forest Coalition).

December 3, 2011 – Climate Connections -- Around 12,000 people from South Africa and around the world hit the streets of Durban, South Africa, to protest the UN Climate Conference of Polluters on December 3.

Photo: Petermann/GJEP-GFC.

Dr Jorge Balseiro Estevez, of the Henry Reeve Cuban Internationalist Medical Brigade, interviewed by Roger Annis

October 30, 2011 -- Canada Haiti Action Network -- Dr Jorge Balseiro Estevez is director of the University Hospital of Psychiatry in the city of Camaguey, Cuba. He is a specialist in psychiatry and health administration and auxiliary professor of medical sciences at the university. He is a member of the Henry Reeve Cuban Internationalist Medical Brigade[1] and a director of the brigade’s field hospital in the city of Leogâne, Haiti. Leogane was the epicentre of the earthquake of January 12, 2010.

Estevez was invited to Canada on a speaking tour to some 15 cities across Canada in October and November 2011. The tour was organised by the Canadian Network on Cuba and its local affiliates, with sponsorship from a broad range of trade unions, health professionals and Haiti solidarity groups.

Roger Annis of the Canada Haiti Action Network sat down with Estevez on October 30 in Vancouver for an interview about the Cuban medical mission’s accomplishments in Haiti and the challenges that lie ahead.

Cuban and Cuba-trained Haitian doctors at work in Haiti.

July 26, 2011 -- Canada Haiti Action Network -- Three Canadian solidarity activists conducted a 10-day fact-finding and solidarity mission to Haiti from June 20 to 30, 2011. The delegation, organised by Haiti Solidarity BC, the Vancouver affiliate of the Canada Haiti Action Network, travelled throughout the earthquake zone, including Port-au-Prince, Léogâne and Jacmel.

We visited neighbourhoods, camps of displaced people, medical centres and human rights and social organisations there to gain an overview of the most pressing needs in Haiti. During some of our visits and interviews, we were joined by other Canadians working on aid projects.

January 9, 2011 -- Socialist Voice -- Of all the commentaries and interviews coinciding with the anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake, none are likely to exceed in significance the interview granted by Organization of American States representative to Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, to the Swiss daily Le Temps on December 20, 2010.

The critique he delivered to the newspaper is especially significant for Latin America and the Caribbean because Seitenfus is Brazilian. Sensitivity is running high in the region over the evident failure of the international relief effort led by the big powers – the United States, Canada and Europe – whose interventionist policies had already done so much harm to Haiti before this latest catastrophe.

[See also "Cuba: Reversing the medical `brain drain’ – the many faces of ELAM".]

By Nina Lakhani

Castro's doctors and nurses are the backbone of the fight against cholera

December 26, 2010 -- The Independent -- They are the real heroes of the Haitian earthquake disaster, the human catastrophe on America's doorstep which Barack Obama pledged a monumental US humanitarian mission to alleviate. Except these heroes are from [the United States'] arch-enemy Cuba, whose doctors and nurses have put US efforts to shame.

A medical brigade of 1200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti, as part of Fidel Castro's international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends, but little international recognition.

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The popular Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from the November 28 Haitian elections.

The following article appeared on the op-ed page of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper, on December 1, 2010. Kevin Edmonds is a freelance journalist and graduate student at McMaster University’s Globalization Institute. Roger Annis is a coordinator of the Canada Haiti Action Network.

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By Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds

December 1, 2010 -- Those who counselled against holding a national election in Haiti in the midst of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis will take no comfort in the debacle it became. Our thoughts rest squarely with the tens of thousands of people afflicted with cholera, and the hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims still without shelter, clean water and hope. How much suffering could have been alleviated with the tens of million of dollars spent on a wasted electoral exercise?

By the Canada Haiti Action Network

November 12, 2010 -- The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) is once again expressing its grave concerns about exclusionary elections in Haiti.[1] It joins with the many Haitians as well as human rights organisations in Haiti and abroad in condemning these elections as serving the interests of Haiti's wealthy elite and the foreign powers that have dominated Haiti's past and present.

With Peter Hallward's permission, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is making available the Afterword to the 2010 paperback edition of Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2010), published in November. Readers can download the essay HERE, or read it on screen below.

Links' readers are urged to purchase Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment. Click here to do so.

Read more on the situation in Haiti HERE.

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By Peter Hallward

By Isabeau Doucet

October 28, 2010 -- Pambazuka News -- "Nothing! Nothing! We’ve seen nothing!", chanted the crowd of internally displaced people (IDP). They were pursuing former US president Bill Clinton from his photo-op in their squalid camp on his way to the third Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) meeting in downtown Port-au-Prince on October 6, 2010.

The crowd protesting Clinton was from the IDP camp on the golf course of the former Pétionville Club, a bourgeois enclave created by US marines when they first occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Ironically, the camp is considered one of the capital’s best, thanks to the attention brought to it by actor Sean Penn.

Earthquake damage in Christchurch. Although similar in magnitude to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed 250,000, nobody died in the September 5, 2010, New Zealand quake.

By Reihana Mohideen, Manila

September 8, 2010 -- Comparisons must be made between the impact of the September 5 earthquake on Christchurch, New Zealand, and the quake that hit Haiti in January. The nature of a global system that maintains these inequalities should be exposed over and over again. In Haiti – with a population of around 9 million – some 250,000 people died in the earthquake and (according to government figures) 200,000 were injured and 1 million were made homeless. Some eight months later disaster still grips peoples lives. Fortunately, but in a staggering contrast, no lives were lost in New Zealand, although the earthquake was of a similar -- but slightly more powerful --- magnitude (7 on the Richter scale).