My sense is that people who think about such things consider Paris, the capital of France, to be the most romantic city on earth. It seems to me that the French are considered a highly civilized and cultured people.

Personally, I am not a travelling man, so I know very little about such things. I’ve never been to the Caribbean or South America or Europe. I spent a few years in the United States going to school, and I visited Guatemala City for a few days in 2012 for medical attention.

I’ve travelled through Mexico by road several times — in 1971/72; 1979; and 2012. Merida is a pretty classy city, and I liked Vera Cruz, mostly because it is a sea port, I guess. Vera Cruz’s offshore island, San Juan de Ulloa, used as a prison by the conquering Spanish to confine rebellious Indigenous people in the sixteenth century, and later for political prisoners, is of historical interest to me.    

The previous paragraphs are by way of introduction to this column’s topic: the supposedly high-cultured French enslaved and wreaked havoc on millions of my African brothers and sisters, on a Caribbean island they called San Domingo. Today, we know this island as Haiti. 

After the African slaves in Haiti successfully revolted between 1791 and 1804, the French state then subsequently extorted huge amounts of money from Haitian governments as “compensation” for the money the French “lost” because of the Haitian Revolution.  

Haiti has been essentially a pariah in this region ever since that revolution more than two and a quarter centuries ago. In the black Caribbean, of which British Honduras was a part, we grew up with the vague idea that Haiti was a weird place where voodoo/witchcraft was practised, and that the Haitian people were suffering terribly because they had not accepted European slavery docilely, and because they had not given their allegiance to Europe’s Christian religions. Plus, there was a Papa Doc.

When they reach the United States, by whatever means, and gain access to higher levels of education, the Haitians, it seems to me, achieve highly. Bill Lindo had a Haitian stepfather who was an engineer on the New York City subway system, the largest such system in the world. I have a great granddaughter whose father is a Haitian: he is an aircraft engineer. 

But, the news we get coming out of Haiti has been all bad for all of my lifetime. Today, the news from the Western press is all about gangs and famine and cholera in Haiti. In fact, an American white Christian televangelist, Pat Robertson, actually has claimed on air that terrible things like earthquakes happen to Haiti because their slave rebellion leader in 1791, Boukman, swore an oath of allegiance to the Devil.

A couple years ago, Ya Ya Marin Coleman had as her guest for Emancipation Day events a Haitian lady intellectual/activist who explained to Belizeans that there was great mineral wealth in Haiti, and that the developed countries were all greedy to control that wealth.

Our Belizean people do not understand capitalism. All we know is that this is the economic system we practise in Christian countries like Belize. The important bottomline, however, is that capitalism only cares about money: human beings are disposable commodities, especially if they are black, Jack.

I respect the Europeans for their economic success, because I know they began to achieve their success five centuries ago by pooling their resources in companies and corporations. We Africans have not historically displayed an ability to pool our resources.

Fidel Castro said that Mobutu Sese Seko, who died of prostate cancer some years ago, stole forty billion dollars from the Congo, which is the richest territory in the world where minerals and metals and gold and diamonds are concerned. Where did that forty billion dollars go? It went into the banks of European countries, like Switzerland, while millions of Congolese were starving to death. This is the way of capitalism. But the capitalists say they are Christian in belief. I do not understand the teachings of Jesus Christ to encourage this capitalist way.

In any case, the Haitian people are suffering. In fact, if you want to look around, you can see thousands of our own Belizean people starving while their super wealthy black colleagues stash millions in American and other foreign banks. Capitalism, Jack. Only the strong survive. But it’s all done in the name of Jesus. I do not understand.