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08/01/2005:

"Why the U.S. and France hate Haiti"

Let’s begin with 1492. Since that year, when it was “discovered,” no country in the Caribbean has suffered more pain per capita than Haiti.

In the 15th century, according to Columbus, Haiti was an island paradise. Now it is an ecological disaster. In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest colony in the New World. Now it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

In the early 1500s, Haiti’s indigenous people, the Taino, were rendered extinct. Alien disease took its inevitable toll. But it was the Spanish obsession with gold and Columbus’ brutal ways of extracting and extorting what little gold there was that sealed their fate.

Soon thousands of West Africans were imported every year to fill the labor vacuum. Africans, under the lash, were put to work raising indigo and then cane sugar.

So savage was the slave regime, at first under the Spanish and then under the French, that a slave’s life expectancy upon reaching Haiti was only several years. Slaves didn’t live long enough to assimilate “Western civilization.” To this day, Haiti remains essentially an African country.

In the 1790s, the Afro-Haitians revolted. In 1804, led by the slave Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Africans succeeded in whupping Napolean’s army and driving it off the island.

This was the world’s first successful slave revolt. Ignored in our history books, it was an accomplishment as significant and as liberating as the French or U.S. revolutions.

Western civilization – France and the other white colonial slave-holding powers – has yet to forgive the Afro-Haitians. Like Sandinista Nicaragua and Castro’s Cuba, liberating itself was Haiti’s original sin. Two centuries later, the forces of counter-liberation are still relentlessly applied against it.
Full: sfbayview.com