In 2012, the White House will focus on the most important of international and national issues: the re-election of the President. U.S.-Cuba policy will fall into “Next Year’s” box—or the year after that. The National Security staff reverts to its familiar positions on relations with that troublesome island: ignorance and arrogance.

Do you have the right to live if you are not helping to produce profits for those already awash in profit? Who do you allow to determine what your life is worth? As we organize our fair trade enterprise, surrounded by an ever-expanding and increasingly ruthless empire of capital, we continually confront fundamental questions about the nature of human existence.

Since the First Supper served by the Community Kitchen last Wednesday, the organizers have been meeting with the discontented. Joegodson returned to his home community on Monday to help repair fissures that, left untended, threaten to topple efforts to rebuild and to unify.

Latin America’s current relations with the US as well as its present political and economic configuration can best be understood in the context of large scale changes over the past twenty years and the relative stability of the past five years.

Venezuelan business federation Fedecamaras warned on May 5 that Venezuela faces an “economic and social crisis”. The federation helped organize a 2002 military coup against Chavez that briefly installed Federcamaras leader Pedro Carmona president before a mass uprising restored Chavez.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Haitians bore the afflictions of foreign exploitation, deforestation, and their own corrupt leaders. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Haitian government was so ill-prepared to deal with the calamitous January 12 earthquake.

Everyone likes to be on solid ground. But it’s amazing what you can get used to. In Delmas 33, where my friend Vilmond is living with a group of forty people who have come together to see each other through the crisis, people started laughing. Someone joked that he was getting used to the earth rocking him to sleep. “It’s so comforting,” he said.

Sometimes, Haitians refer to the earthquake as spektak la. It means not only “the show” or “the spectacle,” but also “the dramatic event.” Everywhere, people have been assigning meaning to the spektak in appreciation of their target audiences. Bill Clinton and the poor of Port-au-Prince are all discussing what the earthquake means to them in the context of their lives.

Look at the front page of the New York Times (Jan 17), and you’d swear that chaos and violence are running rampant in Haiti, that everyone from journalists to relief workers must be risking their necks just to venture out into the streets…

For a very brief historical moment, all Haitians in Port-au-Prince found themselves in the same boat. But when President Preval announced to his compatriots that he was a victim like everybody else, they shook their heads in disgust.