Does Haiti exist?
By Leonardo Padura Fuentes
From IPS
Haiti was the first independent nation in Latin America. The French colony of Saint Domingue, which occupied the western half of Hispaniola Island in the late 18th Century, saw the coffee and sugar plantations that so much wealth had provided for France go up in smoke.
The fires were set by the black slaves, brought from Africa or born in the colony, who were brazen enough to think that the enlightened dream of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was possible for all men, even themselves, the most exploited and unequal. But men, nevertheless.
The challenge directed at the world and history by the Haitian blacks and former slaves apparently was much too bold and soon reverted, like a secular curse.
Ever since then, Haiti has been a land of invasions and occupations, dictatorships and violence, misery, pain, ignorance, fear and fanaticism.
Once the dreams and the utopia were defeated, Haiti became the world’s window on hell.
Of all the countries in the Western world, Haiti is the poorest, the most illiterate, the worst afflicted by violence and disease, the most hungry and the most unsanitary. Nine million men, women and children, almost all of them black, live in a bare and hostile land where violence periodically surfaces in the way it is expressed among the poorest, uneducated and alienated – in a radical, unlimited way.
Every day, hundreds of children, old people and women die of hunger, malnutrition, curable diseases and desolation.
Until the fury of nature shook the Haitian capital and devastated it on Jan. 12, taking a still-indefinable toll of dead and wounded, who ever talked about Haiti? Who remembered Haiti and its eternal agony?
Today, the governments of many countries express their sorrow and deliver their humanitarian solidarity to a desolate country. Thanks to an earthquake that appears to have come from the curses of the Apocalypse (although a rage like that cannot be divine), there is talk about Haiti, aid is sent to Haiti, Haiti is remembered.
The aid that arrives and will continue to arrive in the country will surely save lives, feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But when the wave has passed, who will continue to aid Haiti?
The tens of thousands of dead who today lie under the rubble of a pauperized city, in pits dug any which way, and on the city’s very streets move us in a very special way. But who was moved by those who died of hunger and despair one day before the quake?
Today, when we talk about Haiti, we should use words not only of condolence but also (and above all) of hope. Haiti needs not only the help it’s getting today but also the help it pleaded for long ago, help that will allow it to emerge from its ancestral misery, its compact ignorance, its poverty, afflictions that are more devastating than the most devastating earthquake.
The fury of nature has reminded us all that Haiti exists. I pray that tomorrow, when the tragedy disappears from the newspaper headlines and the pleas from international organizations, after the dead have been buried, we shall not forget that Haiti will continue to exist, poor and wretched, and that its people will continue to die. Unless we change the tragic destiny that an unfair world imposed on the heirs of those slaves who, two centuries ago, fought for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity among men.
As if that were possible.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a famous Cuban writer.
