Can't wait to see the report-back, photos, and video from the trip. The poor of Haiti can provide a powerful lesson to us in the US, where we have so many more resources for organizing.

Of course you have the powerful story of the original Haitian revolution. More recently, the early 90s, before the first US sponsored coup, Aristide was elected by 2/3 of the country, after he entered the election race, just a few months before the election. Then, following the election, after Aristide barely escaped for his life, the US's "cop-on-the-beat" Raoul Cedras and his hit-squad brutally terrorized Haitians in many ways, including by publicly hacking people to pieces with machetes. While the Haitian population was tortured, the exiled Aristide was told by Bill Clinton and his "rent-a-thug" Jimmy Carter that the terrorism would only stop and Aristide be allowed to return, if Aristide abandoned his radical economic reforms that would benefit the Haitian poor at the expense of corporate AmeriKKKa and Haiti's ruling class elite.

Over a decade later, Aristide was elected once again, and was promptly kidnapped by the US.

Haitian popular organizing is a huge threat to US global domination of the third world. As Noam Chomsky points out with his "rotten apple theory" (also used to explain US motivations in the Vietnam war and the War on Central America during the Carter-Reagan-Bush era) any positive example of poor people in the third world successfully organizing to liberate themselves is a powerful IDEOLOGICAL threat.

This is because others around the world will see that it is possible to resist US domination, it will inspire other people to do the same--challenging the overall stability of the US empire. That is the major way the US ruling class is threatened by the people of Haiti.

Like I said, can't wait to hear the report back.