On July 16, 2020 this world lost an exceptional and exemplary human due to COVID19. Daniel was a true revolutionary militant. We will commemorate his life and contributions to the struggle with an online memorial on Sunday, August 2, 2020 at 8pm EST. Please click here to RSVP.

Below is a note written by one of the many people Daniel impacted that we feel genuinely captures the experience so many had with him. It’s followed by a bit more about him, links to theory and writings he contributed to, and ways to get involved. 

I’ve always found it strange how the world seems to keep going, undisturbed, after a loved one passes away. An uncanny dissonance, hard to name and pin down, settles in as the awareness of someone’s sudden disappearance is contrasted with the birds chirping around us, the cars speeding in the road outside the window, and our neighbors’ dogs barking.

The world seems to be the same. Yet we know it isn’t.

While our lives may be fleeting moments in the history of the universe, each life is a universe in itself — with all the richness and limitless possibilities it entails. The hole created by the abrupt, unexpected end of life — the collapse of all those unfulfilled potentials, the closure of a future we will never know — leaves that indigestible feeling that a full stop has been placed before the sentence was ever finished. This feels magnified when the person we lost wasn’t an ordinary companion, but a fighter who dedicated his entire existence to bringing about a better world for all of us.

Daniel was that kind of person.

For those who didn’t know him, I could describe him in a million ways. I could tell, like he used to tell himself, how he came from a well-to-do family and abandoned college after deciding he wanted to commit to popular struggle. I could say how he worked in factories in upstate New York in order to build consciousness and organize among workers. I could tell how he would spend nights in the library studying theory so that he could be better equipped to struggle and share knowledge with others, even if they didn’t agree with him.

I could say all of that and still people wouldn’t be able to hear the sound of his deep voice, with that distinctly Creole accent we all cherished. They wouldn’t be able to laugh at how terrible he was with remembering names – of people, movies, anything with more than two syllables. They wouldn’t be able to see him walking up to a protest carrying flyers inside a little Publix plastic bag. They wouldn’t be able to feel the blazing fire that he lit within each of hearts whenever he delivered any of his presentations. His message was always loud and clear: “Be strong. Be determined. Struggle.”

Daniel had an uncommon ability to shake people from inertia. He could make us understand how much discipline and commitment it actually takes to change the world, but far from discouraging us, he would challenge and push us to do better. To do more. To continue after we stop, to rise after we fall. He would tell us, bluntly: you will fuck up. And then he’d add: It doesn’t matter — as long as, together, we learn to fuck up the system.

It’s hard to quantify how many people he influenced, how many lives he changed. His impact spreads across countries and continents. Now, it will span across time. The legacy he left behind is the unwillingness to accept a reality that bends, deforms, and dehumanizes us, turning us into either victims or beneficiaries of exploitation and domination.

Daniel was bigger than his own lifetime. Each of us who knew him will remember and miss him in their own, unique way. All of us have words left unspoken and goodbyes left ungiven.

What I will treasure the most, if I may share this with you, is that he saw in me something which I didn’t see myself.

Daniel saw in me — as he saw in many others — somebody who could fight. He saw the possibility of a version of me — a combative, purposeful, unwavering me — that didn’t even exist at the time we met… a version that is still going through slow birth pains to come alive.

Death makes us think about life, and about what is to be done with it. I believe I speak for several others in saying that Daniel’s passing has made us consider, with great concern, how to use the time we’re given. It’s made us cry, questioning whether we can really carry on the duty and responsibility that weigh on our shoulders.  It’s made us ask ourselves how to be productive, and above all, how not to let him down. Daniel would want us to keep walking, even if we’re afraid of what lay ahead on the road.

Writing this has not been easy. Every so often my heart pounds, my jaws clench. My hands get shaky and sweaty, and sometimes, I forget to breathe. I pause and come back later, resisting the urge to seek a distraction, to avoid confronting these difficult matters — facing the entanglement of life, death, and what the struggle for the end of this rotten system is demanding from us. There is no avoiding it. As a dear friend and comrade of mine used to say, about coming back to organizing: “all roads lead to Rome.”

If I could tell you, Daniel, one last thing before you departed, it would have been thank you — thank you for the privilege of meeting you, thank you for all you’ve taught us, thank you for your high standards, for your example, for your inspiration.

Thank you, also, for that pie you bought for us to share. It was delicious.

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Daniel was a lifelong revolutionary proletarian militant. This means he placed politics as his top priority, with one clear objective: the revolutionary destruction of the entire mode of production of capitalism/imperialism, under the leadership of the working class. In times when activists and paid organizers dominate the political scene, mindlessly reducing the concept of revolution to performative marches or electoral gains, Daniel asserted that revolution was about proletarian power.

He played a key role in building the current workers’ movement, Batay Ouvriye, in Haiti and helped construct the theory of the Intermediate Level — out of which One Struggle was born. His efforts served to reshape the concept of progressive, around which our work currently revolves —  reclaiming it from the halls of bourgeois reformism back into the hands of the people’s camp. Before passing, Daniel had been working to bring to the present anti-racist mobilizations an understanding of racism as an expression of class struggle, a phenomenon that runs through, but is much deeper than, skin color.

There is no better way to honor him, and all those who have fallen in this battle, than to make sure the struggle continues.