Hands Off Haiti! stands with a nation whose people carried out the only successful revolution of enslaved Africans in history and have been punished by the Western powers ever since. Beginning with the uprising of 1791, the formerly enslaved people of Saint-Domingue defeated the armies of France, Spain, and Britain. On January 1, 1804, they founded Haiti, the first free Black republic and the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery. The empires of the world never forgave them. In 1825 France forced Haiti, under threat of invasion, to pay a crushing indemnity to its former slaveholders for their “lost property,” a debt Haiti paid for more than a century, draining the wealth it needed to develop.

The United States has intervened in Haiti again and again. From 1915 to 1934, US Marines occupied the country, rewrote its constitution to allow foreign ownership of land, imposed forced labor, and killed thousands of Haitians who resisted, among them the guerrilla leader Charlemagne Péralte. Washington later backed the Duvalier dictatorships for nearly three decades. When Haitians elected the popular priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he was overthrown in a military coup in 1991. In 2004, he was removed again in an ouster supported by the United States, France, and Canada. A UN occupation followed, and its peacekeepers brought a cholera epidemic that killed thousands. Each new foreign mission has been presented as rescue, and each has deepened Haiti’s dependence and denied its people the right to govern themselves.

Haiti’s crises are not the result of a people unable to rule themselves. They come from centuries of debt, occupation, coups, and foreign control designed to keep the first Black republic subordinate. Haitians have never stopped resisting, organizing in neighborhoods, peasant movements, and unions for sovereignty, dignity, and a future of their own making. This print calls for an end to imperial intervention in Haiti, for the closing of US military commands like SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM that project power across the Global South, and for international solidarity grounded in respect for the Haitian people’s right to self-determination.