HAITI, January 1—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Haiti organized its annual solidarity soup in two working-class neighborhoods in a provincial town. Many people had the opportunity to drink the cauldrons of traditional January 1 independence pumpkin soup (soup joumou) with us. The tradition celebrates the victory of the revolutionaries of Haitian independence in 1804 over racism, slavery and colonialism, and therefore against the domination and exploitation of capitalism. To share the soup of independence is therefore to say no to capitalism and yes to communism.
Capitalism: the Haitian working class’worst nightmare
This year, the socio-economic situation marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of the dollar on the foreign exchange market, kidnapping, gang wars, etc., has shocked the working masses. For some families, it would have been impossible to drink the traditional soup, as evidenced by the pleas of many people asking Party comrades if “there will be the solidarity soup for this year.”
There has been a surge in insecurity throughout Haiti: theft, rapes, assassinations and kidnappings all add to the daily burden on the workers. Poverty continues to increase, we are in need of everything, mainly the subsistence minimum. About 60 percent of the population is food insecure—the bosses’ sanitized term that means hungry—with a high percentage severely food insecure—starving. The unemployment rate, for its part, cannot even be quantified. One could ask, “How do they manage to stay alive, these Haitian workers who have no access to health care, electricity or even drinking water?” Despair is written in big letters on the faces of the people you meet in the streets.
With mass misery at its height, and corruption and crime well established, the rulers are implementing a dictatorship worthy of the monarchies and aristocracies of past centuries. Executions, militias, federations of gangs: they have installed terror in all forms. The ruling class, for its part, wages war through groups of armed gangs in working-class neighborhoods. It’s a mess. The race for profit never ceases to craze those in power, or those who long to usurp power.
Life is becoming cheaper for the bosses, who try every which way to topple anything that stands in their way. The working class without  communist  leadership wanders among the tumult of power struggles. Everything is scarce for workers, everything except death!
Working class solidarity illuminates dark night
PLP, our international communist party, understands the suffering and peril of the working classes of the world. Alongside workers in struggle, from near and afar, we participate in and promote the concept of mutual aid and sharing, of putting into practice the communist idea of “from each according to commitment, to each according to need.” It is an awareness of our equality as a class.  As proof, our comrades and friends in the U.S. and in Paris, France, even in their coronavirus isolation, have contributed financially to our solidarity soup.
Long live sharing, long live solidarity, long live the class struggle. Communism is the future of our world. Let's join PLP to build it.