“It seems as if we could write the history of the nearly the whole of the Western World by detailing the history of the island that I believe Cristobal Colon dubbed Hispaniola, or perhaps it was Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar who deserves the credit for this. And the naming of the Island itself is a microcosm of conquest or imperialism. The Taino Amerindians, according to de las Casas, called the island ‘Haiti’ or Mountainous Land,” and in 1804 revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines recovered it as the official name of independent Saint-Domingue, as a tribute to the Amerindian predecessors. Gerald Horne, in Confronting Black Jacobins, has given us the Western World placed under a microscope–Haiti is the smear mounted on his glass slide…”
WFHB’s Doug Storm talks with Gerald Horne about Horne’s latest book:
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