24 - Columbus

Before we can consider how best to deal with the poverty and injustices common in so many developing countries, we need to understand the structures responsible for creating these. And we need to understand how these structures came about. We will find the answers to those questions in the history of these nations.

The Dominican Republic has a very telling history.

Early in this series of postings, I described some of the preparations which the Dominican government had made in order to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, what they officially referred to as the 500th anniversary of the “Discovery and First Evangelization of the Americas.” In a more recent posting, I demonstrated that people inevitably view things from a culturally-conditioned point of view, or perspective, which is the product not only of where they live but also when they live. For example, today, many people look at events such as Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in a more critical fashion than previous generations had.

When I was a child, Columbus was presented as a hero. That was still pretty much the case when my children were in school; there was even a “Sesame Street” routine about him—counting to three, for the three boats in his first fleet. As my grandchildren go through school, I see that that adulation is beginning to be moderated.

Without a doubt, Columbus’s first voyage demonstrated tremendous courage, and no one can deny that his arrival in this hemisphere altered the course of the development of human history. But the story I was given in school was, frankly, bowdlerized. Our text books told the story exclusively from the perspective of Europeans. When these same events are looked at more objectively, or from the perspective of the native communities living in the New World before Columbus arrived, the consequences of that encounter take on a very different appearance.

For centuries, Columbus has been a cultural icon to many people in North America. So criticisms of the “Grand Admiral” can seem almost heretical. But the fact is that he was a man of a particular time and culture, and while some of the things he did after landing in the Americas were considered reasonable at the time, they were barbaric by contemporary standards.

In school, I was not informed, for example, that in order to pay for his voyage Columbus captured 1200 members of the Taino population on the island of Hispaniola–where the countries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are now located–and transported them back to Spain to be sold as slaves. Nor was I told how other Taino were forced to work in the mines and plantations which Columbus and his family established on the island, that natives who could not produce gold when it was demanded were punished by having their hands cut off.

By 1496, the Grand Admiral’s men had either killed or exported as slaves one third of the original population of Hispaniola. Within fifty years of the arrival of the Europeans, the Taino people were extinct.