Eight days af­ter the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake of Jan­u­ary 12, 2010 when hope had al­most died in a world anx­ious­ly scan­ning the ru­ins of Port Au Prince through the cam­eras of for­eign me­dia, res­cuers slow­ly pulled a breath­ing vic­tim from the rub­ble of the Catholic Cathe­dral. Un­be­liev­ably 70-year-old Ena Zizi smiled, raised her arms and sang. Her son's re­ac­tion, "I al­ways knew my moth­er would come out alive. She was too strong to die." An­oth­er two weeks pass, a few more mir­a­cles of sur­vival cap­ture head­lines along the way, but the work of the res­cue teams is over and the world is on­ly fo­cused on sup­port for the sur­vivors, the mil­lion and a half home­less, des­per­ate for wa­ter and food that are reach­ing them too slow­ly.

Two young Hait­ian men run to a hos­pi­tal car­ry­ing an old man they have just dug out from the ru­ins of the mar­ket, de­hy­drat­ed, dis­ori­ent­ed, but alive. This is Haiti. In the midst of un­fath­omable tragedy, unimag­in­able hope, un­daunt­ed courage and de­ter­mi­na­tion, the un­con­quer­able spir­it that, just over two hun­dred years ago, con­quered those who had en­slaved Africans im­port­ed in­to Haiti.

SAY­ING THANKS TO HAITI

For eman­ci­pa­tion 2010, in sol­i­dar­i­ty with our Hait­ian broth­ers and sis­ters and in thanks­giv­ing to them, we cel­e­brate this courage, this in­fi­nite will to tri­umph over all ob­sta­cles. We owe our own eman­ci­pa­tion to them. Their sac­ri­fice in a gru­el­ing war of lib­er­a­tion that last­ed for 13 years, and their vic­to­ry, broke the morale of the en­slavers and boost­ed the morale of our en­slaved fore-par­ents in oth­er parts of the Caribbean and the Amer­i­c­as.

By win­ning that war, which pro­por­tion­ate­ly was far more dev­as­tat­ing than the earth­quake in terms of lives lost and eco­nom­ic ru­in, the Haitians laid the foun­da­tion for our free­dom.

RE­MEM­BER­ING 1970

Both the tri­umph and tragedy of Haiti will be in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to our mes­sages and our pro­gram­ming as we al­so com­mem­o­rate the 40th an­niver­sary of an­oth­er mile­stone in the quest for a bet­ter Caribbean, the Black Pow­er move­ment of 1970. This move­ment, among its many achieve­ments, broke down sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­ers of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in our so­ci­ety, most vis­i­bly by open­ing up jobs which were pre­vi­ous­ly in­ac­ces­si­ble to peo­ple with dark­er skins; it gave rise to cul­tur­al re­vivals in African and In­di­an com­mu­ni­ties, re­stored African pride, stim­u­lat­ed ideas of peo­ple's par­tic­i­pa­tion in pol­i­tics, in­creased na­tion­al self-con­fi­dence and the will to self-re­liance, and shift­ed our econ­o­my to­wards greater in­dige­nous con­trol.

Of di­rect sig­nif­i­cance to our an­nu­al fes­ti­val is the fact that the Black Pow­er move­ment led di­rect­ly to the re­vival of the com­mem­o­ra­tion of eman­ci­pa­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go, af­ter it had been large­ly ig­nored for sev­er­al decades. Cur­rent chal­lenges to Haiti's sov­er­eign­ty are chal­lenges to our own in the rest of the Caribbean. The dead­ly ex­am­ple of re­mov­ing a de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed and pop­u­lar gov­ern­ment by force in 2004 can­not be lost on all of us. The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the Hait­ian state and the im­po­si­tion of ex­ter­nal con­trols that cre­ate a vir­tu­al pro­tec­torate in the wake of the Jan­u­ary earth­quake are very much a part of the con­tin­u­ing venge­ful as­sault on Hait­ian dig­ni­ty and sov­er­eign­ty.

But it is al­so an as­sault on our own dig­ni­ty and sov­er­eign­ty as a re­gion­al group­ing, un­der­min­ing our fu­ture in­de­pen­dence to the ex­tent that we are not able to stand up with Haiti. To have and pre­serve the right to self-de­ter­mi­na­tion, we must be alert to the pit­falls that sur­round us and let our re­flec­tions on Haiti and the Black Pow­er move­ment re­sult in: Reawak­en­ing the Spir­it of Lib­er­ty.