'THERE, in that high and mountainous land, is the land of God." The date was Sept. 12, 1504, the speaker was Christopher Columbus, and the occasion was his fourth and final departure from the island he discovered in 1492. Columbus named it La Isla Española because it reminded him of Spain. For the Spaniards and French who followed him, for the Indians they slaughtered, for the Negro slaves they imported, and for anyone within a bullet's range last week, Hispaniola was more like hell on earth than the warm, jasmine-scented paradise it might be. Last week marked the third time in 50 years that U.S. troops have been forced to intervene in the affairs of the forlorn, hate-filled little Caribbean island.
Hispaniola became Spain's first permanent colony in the New World, its key harbor and free port to all the Indies. From the Santo Domingo capital, Ponce de León sailed forth to Florida, Balboa discovered the Pacific, Pizarro invaded Peru, and Cortés conquered Mexico. It was the site of Latin America's first cathedral in 1514, its first university in 1538. Even then it was a land of violence, where men carried the law in their knives, and the captains from Castile thought nothing of shearing an ear from a disobedient Indian or letting their dogs disembowel him.
Through war, wile and treaty, France managed to get possession of the 30,000-sq.-mi. island toward the end of the 18th century. Concentrating on the western third of the mountainous land, the French brought in thousands of colonists, and with them came vast numbers of Negro slaves from Africa. The French called their Caribbean possession Saint Domingue, termed it the "Queen of the Antilles." So it was. In the 1780s, its foreign trade approached $140 million a year, with vast profits from sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton and indigo flowing back home. Before long, 40,000 whites were lording it over 450,000 blacks. Then one night in August 1791, the island's painfully oppressed slaves rose in bloody revolt. Armed with pitchforks, torches and machetes and chanting voodoo dirges, they massacred 2,000 French planters and their families on the western third of the island.
Haiti
The fighting lasted more than a decade. France sent 20,000 troops to end the rebellion?only to see half of them wiped out by yellow fever and the rest thrown into disarray. In 1804, a former slave named Jean Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti a free and independent nation and became its Governor General. "To draw up the charter of our independence," he felt, "would require the skin of a white man as parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood as ink, and a bayonet as a pen." Dessalines died by an assassin's bullet within three years. His successor, Henri Christophe, cared little for charters?black or white. He proclaimed himself King, set up a ludicrous aristocracy (including such titles as the Duke of Marmelade and Count of Limonade), and ruled as a merciless despot until 1820, when his officers revolted, and he committed suicide by firing a silver bullet into his brain.