Obama invaded Haiti to secure U.S. capitalists’ access to energy supplies, not to aid the working class there, as token relief efforts show. (See CHALLENGE, 3/3.) Haiti may itself possess significant oil and gas reserves. Bloomberg News (2/26) reports, “The January 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface….
“The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas....”
It’s hardly a coincidence that a month after Cubapetroleo announced discovery of one of the world’s largest oilfields in the deep waters off Cuba, Russian President Medvedev flew to Cuba to sign an agreement to develop Cuban oil. And a week before that, China’s president Hu Jintao met Cuba’s president Raul Castro to sign an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and undoubtedly discussed the country’s oil discovery.
Obama’s Main Target:
Venezuela’s Oil Treasure
But while the jury may be out on Haiti’s possible hydrocarbon bonanza, U.S. rulers have identified nearby enemy Venezuela as potentially another Saudi Arabia. Britain’s government-controlled BBC noted (1/23), amid the U.S. build-up in Haiti, “Scientists working for the U.S. Geological Survey say Venezuela’s Orinoco belt region holds twice as much petroleum as previously thought....[T]he area could yield more than 500 billion barrels of crude oil.... Saudi Arabia has proven reserves of 260 billion barrels.”
By establishing U.S. army, air and naval bases in Haiti moments after the quake, Obama sent a clear message about U.S. military supremacy to his oil-soaked, fake leftist Venezuelan foe Hugo Chavez. To hammer home the point, Obama diverted the first of the Navy’s brand-new fleet of Littoral Combat Ships — specifically designed for U.S. imperialism’s latest naval need for coastal invasion of oil-rich nations — from California to the Caribbean shores of Colombia and Venezuela.
“The USS Freedom (LCS 1), has entered service in the Caribbean, joining the U.S. Navy drug interdiction patrol..... [T]he Freedom headed south on February 15th and [on] the 22nd intercepted its first drug-smuggling boat off the Colombian coast.” (Strategy Page, 2/28) Drugs are secondary to U.S. bosses. They use them to help control their domestic working class. On the other hand, U.S. imperialists use oil to control dependent nations and wage war on rival states.
