Long before last week’s earthquake, Haiti already lay at the epicenter of one of world history’s great fault lines, where it has been precariously located ever since Christopher Columbus first set foot on the great tropical island that he named Hispaniola. With his personal appetite for fame and riches, backed by the rising power of mercantile capitalist Europe, the self-proclaimed “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” set in motion a prolonged earthquake called the Spanish Conquest. Spain itself eventually handed over control of Haiti to France and, later, Britain and the U.S. became the country’s puppet-masters. Columbus was the earthquake, but the after-shocks lasted for 500 years.

At the time that Columbus established foreign dominion over the lush island that would eventually be divided between French-speaking Haiti in the west and Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo in the east, back in Europe entrepreneurship and individual wealth accumulation were rapidly taking precedence over collective human need. So, in due course, setting aside any presumption of humanity in their victims, European colonists devised myriad creative ways to systematically extract wealth from their colonies. Marx put it very well: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” It was the wealth of colonies, based on plantation crops and mines, slavery and genocide, that impoverished them and, in so doing, provided the trigger for the rise of modern capitalism—though we persist in believing that it was the other way around, that it was capitalism that first gave the hope of “progress” to what is now called The Third World.

Haiti was the product of that era of capitalist globalization. Initially conquered by the Spanish, who wiped out its indigenous inhabitants within a century, by 1700 legal control of western Hispaniola had been ceded to the French who called their colony Sainte-Dominigue (it was subsequently changed to Haiti, after its aboriginal name, “Ayiti”) and turned it into one of the most lucrative colonies the world would ever know. Before the end of the 18th century, Sainte Domingue contained almost half of the Caribbean’s many African slaves who, as Eric Williams (historian and once prime minister of Trinidad) brilliantly described in his classic, Capitalism and Slavery, were the human basis of an economic system that produced three-quarters of the world’s sugar.

Haiti itself became the indispensable ingredient of the prosperity of pre-revolutionary France. As Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), has noted:

“Haitian wealth helped maintain the ostentatious living conditions of the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie, as well as the financing of French industrial might…This massive transfer of wealth toward France, and away from local investments, is at the basis of Haitian underdevelopment (1984).”

It is amazing that, with such a past, so many people in recent times have discounted the country’s plight as the singular fault of the Haitians themselves. This “blaming the victim” approach takes many forms, the most recent of which was declaimed only last week by right-wing evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, speaking on his television show on the Christian Broadcasting network. He claimed that the Haitian earthquake was simply the most recent tragedy that had afflicted Haiti because, in the late 18th century, the Haitians “swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French…But, ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” Presumably, in Robertson’s mind, the people of Bolivia, Malawi, Mozambique and West Virginia –and anywhere else that people suffer from extreme poverty– must have made similar pacts.

Of course, the Haitians might as well have made a pact with the devil, for all the good that independence did them. For the fact is that real independence never happened. After Haiti, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, won political autonomy from France in 1804, showing that ex-slaves could effect real political change, their former rulers refused to let go –Haiti was too good for that– and continued to appropriate most of the country’s wealth, which increasingly came, not from colonial sugar plantations, but from free small-holder coffee production. As Paul Farmer, anthropologist and doctor, has written:

“Napoleon kept troops in neighboring Santo Domingo until 1808. After the fall of Napoleon, France continued to refuse to recognize Haiti until the former plantation-owners had been indemnified for their losses…Charles X, the King of France, demanded of Haitian president Boyer 150 million francs and the halving of customs charges for the French trade. These conditions, accepted in 1825, led to decades of French domination of Haitian commerce. Payments to France had a catastrophic effect on the new nation’s tottering economy.”

These are established facts. Yet, even many people who acknowledge that Haiti was once a source of great wealth, typically ignore the realities that independent Haiti faced and describe how it became poor in a way that ascribes almost everything to its people’s intrinsic failings. It is as if, having been the first example of a colony of former slaves liberating itself, the country could never be allowed to stand as a model, so Haiti’s poverty has variously been blamed on the irrationality of Haitians (of which Hollywood’s portrayal of voodoo is taken as evidence), on a propensity for violence (supreme evidence for which, the era of Papa Doc Duvalier, is never seen in terms of U.S. support for his repressive regime) and, above all, on an unchecked tendency to reproduce beyond their means, that is, the classic Malthusian myth of underdevelopment, which, of course, is not only applied to Haiti.

Thus, in Famine–1975!, published in 1967, the brothers William and Paul Paddock described Haiti as an exemplary case of a country in the throes of an insoluble Malthusian crisis, suffering extensive and perhaps irremediable environmental degradation which they, like others, attributed to high fertility. “Its population,” they wrote,

“long ago exploded beyond the level of what the nation’s resources can provide for a viable economy. There is nothing whatever in sight that can lift up the nation, that can alter the course of anarchy already in force for a century. At one time Haiti was one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world, but now its fecundity has out-stripped the country’s resources…Now it is too late for an energetic, nationwide birth control program…It is too late for intensive agricultural research efforts. The people are sunk in ignorance and indifference, and the government is entrapped in the tradition of violence.”

The Paddocks never offered any empirical or historical evidence for their argument. But, Haiti’s principal problem has never been demographic. All of the problems –poverty, environmental degradation, violence– that have been variously blamed, in some way, on overpopulation can be readily understood in terms of the island’s history, during which its descent from rich colony to one of the poorest countries in the world cannot simply be ascribed to vague traditions that are somehow uniquely Haitian. On the contrary, it occurred as a result of changing circumstances that successively defined Haiti’s role in a larger world economy. But, why try to understand that?

The huge debt that independent Haiti built up and owed North America and Europe drained the newly independent country of most of its national revenue and was only reduced when the U.S. took over and, for the first time, took command of the island’s fate. During all this time, against extraordinary odds, Haiti’s peasant cultivators remained, unique for Latin America, independent, and have even been described by Bellegarde-Smith as having “the highest standard of living of any peasant society in Latin America.” But, the conditions under which they toiled worsened as the 20th century advanced, not least because of increasing U.S. influence. The U.S. had already intervened militarily in the country some 19 times since 1857, to back up the commercial interests there. But, in 1915, under Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile defender of the “self-determination” of nations (but who had also sent U.S. troops into the new Soviet Union, to attempt to stifle the revolution), the US marines actually occupied the island. They remained for almost two decades.

During the years of American control, the economy of Haiti was wholly subordinated to that of U.S. business interests, with dramatic consequences for the distribution and use of land resources. Where, previously, unlike so much of Latin America, Haiti’s rural economy had been characterized by small peasant cultivators, with the occupation, a new constitution was imposed, in 1918, which lifted previous restrictions on foreign ownership of property. As a result, North American companies soon acquired several hundred thousand hectare of Haitian land on which to produce sugar, bananas, sisal, etc.

As Patrick Bellegarde-Smith wrote:

The Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO), the United Fruit Company, and the Haitian-American Development Corporation established a monopoly in their respective fields, sugar, bananas and sisal, helped by the Haitian government which appropriated 120,000 hectares for such use. Seven years after the occupation had ended, the Societe haitiano-americaine de developpement agricole (SHADA) received 133,400 hectares of prime land, nearly 22% of the country’s cultivated area for the monopoly planting of rubber and the exploitation of timber…The immediate impact upon the peasantry, predictably was scarcity of land and food, leading to a breakdown of the land tenure system, the diversion of members of this class into cheap labor power for the new corporate landowners, and an idle surplus population in urban centers.

When the marines finally left in 1934, the Haitian peasantry was even more dependent on coffee production than at the turn of the century and many U.S. companies had established industrial operations in the country, to profit from the huge reserve of cheap labor, as around 70% of the population was now unemployed. This was one of the chief legacies of Washington’s rule.

Clearly, declining access to land was more than a simple function of overpopulation. In light of Haitian history, it would be more reasonable to suggest that it was the systematic removal from the peasant sector of prime arable land that compelled peasants to cultivate more marginal lands that were inherently susceptible to degradation. In the absence of capital resources, peasant households were compelled to rely increasingly on their own domestic labor capacity, which could only be enhanced through increased fertility.

There is no doubt that, over time, peasants were compelled to overuse their increasingly limited supply of certain essential resources, such as firewood. But, this does not mean that the massive deforestation of Haiti is a symptom of population pressure in a Malthusian sense. Long before there was any significant population growth in Haiti, the sugar plantations of the colonial economy had begun the destruction of the country’s once lush forests. As Moreno Fraginals has shown in his classic account of the Cuban sugar industry, El Ingenio (The Sugarmill, 1964), sugar manufacture has an insatiable need for great supplies of fuel wood. If he could write of Cuba, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, that “Large-scale manufacture [of sugar] rang the forest’s death knell,” how much truer was this for Haiti when it was producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar?

But, forest destruction didn’t end with independence, as French planters moved from to Cuba’s late in the eighteenth century. Now, large numbers of trees began to be felled to provide lumber for export to the United States. As Swedish economist Mats Lundahl, has noted, “By 1780, the forest reserves had been substantially reduced to some isolated areas.” Lumbering continued, however, and, in the 1830s and ’40s, between four and eight million board feet of mahogany are estimated to have been exported yearly, dropping to 3 million annually by 1859 as supplies began dwindling. Yet, even in the period, 1887/88 to 1891/92, according to Lundahl, logwood exports generally amounted to 419,300 metric tons and remained high until the early 1920s. This hardly makes the Haitian peasant uniquely responsible for the island’s deforestation.

Still, Haiti continued to be described, in the words of journalist Paul Harrison, in his book, Inside the Third World (1979) as “overcrowded, under-resourced.” But, foreign landowners and North American sugar companies who occupied prime valley lands, certainly didn’t complain that Haiti lacked resources. Nor has the Dominican Republic, which, since World War II, has exploited cheap Haitian workers to harvest its sugar cane. So, the more dismal the state of the Haitian economy, the more rich it was seen in terms of at least one resource –-labor– on which the Dominican sugar industry had become dependent. This was another major result of U.S. military occupation, when Haitian workers began to be regularly imported. Indeed, as foreign investment in Haiti increased during the twenties, as companies such as HASCO accumulated land at the expense of small Haitian farmers, the latter were increasingly compelled to seek off-farm work. As the competitiveness of the relatively backward, low productivity, under-capitalized Dominican sugar industry primarily depended on cheap labor, the marginalization and displacement of rural Haitian workers was just what it required. (Indeed, so long as it had access to Haitian workers, there was little incentive to modernize.) But, as one might expect, the companies that dominated the Republic’s sugar sector were not even Dominican. In 1967, the Gulf & Western bought the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (it sold it 17 years later), most of whose operations were in the Dominican Republic, where it owned 300,000 acres of land, of which almost half grew sugar cane and depended on Haitian labor for its harvest. A truly vicious circle was complete.

Despite all it has suffered, Haiti is a remarkable country where most people are peasants who actually have managed to retain some access to land. Much has been written about the circumstances that have made this possible. But, still, plots of land are small — 70% of all farms are less than one hectare– and often highly dispersed, so that people cannot realistically engage in productive and sustainable land-use practices. The situation is compounded by the fact that large landowners (grandons) continually fight against any effective land redistribution. As a result, there has been a steady drift of the poor from the countryside into Port-au-Prince, making it the over-stretched city we’ve seen in rubble

After the immediate crisis is addressed –-after lives are saved, basic services restored– the chronic conditions and structural causes of Haiti’s poverty need to be addressed. The solution lies in some process of reconsolidation of holdings that brings large tracts of land back into popular use. But, this will depend on major changes in the shape of the Haitian economy. It will require debt cancellation and massive infusions of international aid, to develop the rural infrastructure, including irrigation works and roads.

But, finally, let me put things in perspective, to define the magnitude of the problem that really needs to be systematically addressed. According to the World Bank, Haiti’s GDP in 2008 (in current U.S. dollars, not adjusted for inflation) was only $6.95 billion. It will certainly be far less now. But, compare it to reports that Goldman Sachs alone –just one of a small number of financial giants that brought the world economy to the edge of melt-down– is expected to announce executive bonuses for 2009 that will total more than $20 billion (most of which, incidentally, will comes out of federal subsidies to the company). Haiti, in contrast, has never hurt anyone. Far from it, it has enriched others over the years, while its own people descended into abject poverty. The pay-out at Goldman Sachs is simply another symptom of the callous injustice of the way our world economic system is organized.

It is inherently unjust. Even before the earthquake, the average Haitian worked harder just to stay alive than, by any stretch of the imagination, a Goldman Sachs executive does to live in a New York penthouse apartment. What that tells you is, not that Haitians are doing anything wrong, but that the world system, dominated by capitalist logic, routinely smashes human dignity, defines a large proportion of our fellow humans as undeserving of basic justice, while, at the same time, it provides inflated remuneration to those who actually profit by killing other people’s dreams. It’s time to look at the world in a way that doesn’t regard the mandarins of Wall Street as deserving of such rewards.

When the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin died in 1940, fleeing with other refugees from France into neutral Spain, he left behind his last work, which was posthumously published as Theses on the Philosophy of History. The ninth thesis, “The Angel of History,” is about precisely how differently events over the past centuries may be viewed by the occupants of New York penthouses and of the devastated homes of Port-au-Prince. It is so brief that it was incorporated into a song, “The Dream Before,” by the brilliant Laurie Anderson. I quote it here in its entirety:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

If any place on earth got caught in that storm it was Haiti. So, let me propose a small nod in the direction of retributive justice: The president is having trouble managing to impose any limits or penalties on Wall Street avarice. But, if Goldman Sachs executives, the people –Pat Robertson take note– who really made a pact with the devil, want to retain their obscene bonuses, make them do what the Angel of History wanted–to help make something whole. They should give at least half their bonuses to Haiti and do three months’ community service there.