22 July 2021 — Tricontinental

Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin Revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands: ‘The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history’. Thrice James uses the word ‘peculiar’, which emerges from the Latin peculiarisfor ‘private property’ (pecu is the Latin word for ‘cattle’, the essence of ancient property).

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