Across Haiti today, commemorations are underway to honor the 35th anniversary of Haiti’s first democratic, free and fair elections on Dec. 16, 1990 that brought hope to Haiti’s people with the election of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by over two-thirds of the vote after decades of dictatorship under the Duvalier family. The election of a progressive government represented a massive victory for the Lavalas movement that had championed Haiti’s impoverished and excluded majority. Twice overthrown by the United States, the second time joined by France and Canada, President Aristide and the progressive agenda of Lavalas continue to represent the aspirations of Haiti’s people for democracy, dignity and justice despite 21 years of foreign occupation.
To understand the significance of this election, here is a powerful recollection from President Aristide’s 1992 Autobiography:
“Never will I forget that night of December 16th! It was Dec. 16, 1990, an almost cool evening in the Caribbean winter: an electric evening, even if the electricity, like so many other things in Haiti, was often lacking. In fact, it was an evening glowing with the hope and the fervor of a whole people.
Even if we did not really doubt it, we waited. We awaited the results of the first free elections in our history. All day long Haitians had been voting in overwhelming numbers. How many people had whispered or shouted it to me: dodging bullets, skimming over walls, on all fours or with heads held high – ‘we are going to vote.’ Even if the candidate is called Titid, his affectionate nickname, the people had for the first time the feeling of voting for themselves, for their own demands, for their own vision of the world. From the springs of many organizations, from an infinite number of rivulets had been born this torrent, ‘lavalas’ in Creole, that would sweep away the loathsome debris of successive dictatorships.
At times, there were thousands waiting to vote on the borders of the slums, standing in line, sometimes in whole families, with patience and beauty. Beauty? Indeed, because even in the worst of times the Haitian people have cultivated this sense with zeal and extraordinary perseverance. Sometimes they waited for hours in the blazing sun, all my illiterate brothers and sisters, outside their miserable huts. They waited as long as necessary, armed with their little cards marked ‘NS,’ the mark for the Lavalas list, colored as red as a prize rooster. Even in the residential districts of Petionville, several kilometers outside Port-au-Prince, farther from the unhealthful miasmas of the central city, we were winning. The immeasurable crowds that had gathered throughout the campaign were witnesses. Never in the memory of black people had anyone seen sixty thousand people at Cap Haitien, the second-largest city, in the north of the country.
There was hope on their faces, and success was flashing forth every moment, from the bottom of the ballot boxes. Still, for five years, from Namphy to Avril, the generals assisted by the Tontons Macoute and corrupt politicians had again and again stolen the popular victories: by delaying elections or massacring the voters. They had clothed themselves in the garments of democracy in order to laugh at international opinion, while wielding the machete or the revolver against genuine democrats. They spoke of elections, but whispered that an illiterate nation did not have the necessary maturity to vote. And yet there had never been a genuine literacy campaign or even an attempt at schooling: only one child in three ever goes to school. The vicious circle of ignorance and oppression could perpetuate itself ad vitam aeternam!
But this time the balloting took place without a major incident, and the hundreds of international observers and dozens of journalists appeared to be armed against fraud or intimidation. There was a group of us, friends, who were waiting, imagining what Roger Lafontant, a leader of the Duvalierists, and his associates, could be preparing. At eleven o’clock the telephone rang one more time: ‘We cannot yet proclaim the official results, but the numbers are such that, practically speaking, you have been elected. Elected! The journalists want to see you.’”
- Aristide: An Autobiography,” Jean-Bertrand Aristide with journalist Christopher Wargny. Orbis Books, 1992, pp 23-25.
