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Haiti
Born into statelessness in Haiti
By David Saba
The plight of Haitian workers’ families in the Dominican Republic is shocking
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For the better part of a century, the Dominican Republic has benefited from cheap Haitian labour. From the dawn of the Dominican sugar industry in the early 1900s, Haitians would cross the border to work the cane fields during the six-month growing season. This was a practical and almost symbiotic relationship. Haiti, with its chronic unemployment, and the Dominican Republic, with its labour shortage, both gained. But as massive expansion of the Dominican sugar industry coincided with the reign of the xenophobic dictator, Rafael Trujillo, Haitian workers became increasingly exploited and oppressed. And although Trujillo is long dead, his racist policies have endured. To this day Haitians are actively encouraged to migrate to the Dominican Republic and work the nation’s undesirable jobs, even as their human rights are systematically denied.
One end result of this ongoing injustice is that hundreds of thousands of Haitians, and Dominicans of Haitian heritage, are stateless. These people live in a state of permanent illegality. Without citizenship or national identity cards, called cedulas, they are unable to vote, and often cannot secure schooling or health care for their families. The stateless have no protection from exploitative work conditions, and they live in constant fear of bribery and deportation. And so they work long hours for low wages in the fields, the farms, the construction sites, and the homes of the wealthy. And when the day’s work is done, most retire to the batey.
Bateyes (pronounced bah-tays) resemble the shantytowns that can be found in many poor and tropical agricultural nations. Often hidden behind vast fields of sugar cane, bateyes are essentially workers’ barracks. Although built as temporary housing these structures are in some cases forty and fifty years old. Most of these dilapidated buildings have been repaired and modified countless times to accommodate the children and extended families that now live there. Indeed many bateyes have swollen to house populations comparable to that of a small town. I have been told that bateyes may seem pleasant to the uninitiated. They’re rural places, where families leave their doors open, and the smell of wood fires tingles the nostrils. Salsa music thumps from porch radios, and from the road the sounds of children playing mixes easily with the sounds of animals braying. But this pastoral calm is illusory. Outsiders come and commit rapes and acts of violence with impunity. Children exhibit signs of malnutrition and the effects of systemic poverty are unavoidable. Services that you and I would consider essential, like medical clinics and schools, paved roads, electricity, and even running water, are scarce in the batey. And without a voice in the ballot box, few champion the causes of the stateless or heed their complaints.
Sonia Pierre is one batey resident who has inspired change. She overcame amazing adversity to highlight the human rights abuses of her country’s government in front of an international audience. As a child Pierre was denied a nationality and a proper education. She was raised by her mother who as a widow, and on cane-cutter’s wages, managed to raise her and her eleven brothers and sisters in a single room portion of a barrack with a dirt floor. As a teenager she spoke at protest rallies and led lengthy labour strikes. She went on to form MUDHA (Movement for Dominican Women of Haitian Descent). And in 2005 MUDHA successfully lobbied before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the case of two Dominican children of Haitian heritage who had been denied birth certificates. The court found in MUDHA’s favour. It ruled that the government of the Dominican Republic was guilty of human rights abuses and was using racial discrimination to deny nationality and citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent. It ordered the government to grant the children birth certificates. Unfortunately the Dominican Supreme Court has attempted to overrule that decision and its wide-reaching implications. The Supreme Court claims that Haitian workers are in transit, and as such their children are not entitled to citizenship.
Although it’s likely that the efforts of people like Sonia Pierre will eventually shame the Dominican Republic into living up to its human rights obligations, the immediate needs of batey residents cannot wait. For many, baseball is seen as the best means to escape their predicament. Families pool their resources to buy equipment and training for their boy who shows the greatest athletic ability. They lobby baseball teams and clubs and schools, hustling and pitching the talents of their greatest hope. This is not unwise. Scouts with deep wallets have been tapping local stars since the 1950’s and US$84 million enters the country each year because of baseball. In Major League Baseball (MLB) no foreign country has more players than the Dominican Republic. And teams in Japan, Korea, and Mexico also boast of their Dominican talent. Twenty-eight out of thirty MLB teams have established academies in the Dominican Republic, academies that train and educate young players. And aside from the obvious financial incentives, many schools and academies will assist players in getting their citizenship papers and cedulas. But while these prospects are a source of excitement and hope for stateless Dominicans, the odds of landing a contract or signing bonus are miniscule.
Those who don’t hit this jackpot are forced to rely upon their own tenacity and the support of charities to get the services they deserve. The residents of Batey Arroyo Indio are one such example. They erected Colibri School twenty years ago in an effort to provide a basic primary education for their children even though the Dominican government refused to acknowledge the school or provide any funding for it. The Secretary of Education insists that the children can attend a government school. Yet even if they were accepted, the cost to bus the children to the closest school would amount to more than half the average family’s income. Families would then have to choose between forcing their children, some as young as five, to walk a potentially dangerous 15 kilometers each day, or forgo their education completely. Colibri School persevered. It stayed open even as the sole teacher’s salary went unpaid, the building verged on collapse, and they ran out of school supplies. Luckily for these residents, the situation improved dramatically because Miguel Batista, a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners, hails from the area. Through the Miguel Batista Foundation, the classroom was rebuilt, the teacher’s wages were paid, and funding was provided to hire a second teacher. UNICEF and other charities have also provided assistance for Colibri School. Most bateyes are not so fortunate. They shouldn’t have to be.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
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