Invisible country.

• Author: Galeano, Eduardo
• Position: The Upside-Down World

Look it up in any encyclopedia: What was the first free country in the Americas? The answer is always the same: the United States. But the United States declared its independence when it was a nation with 650,000 slaves who remained slaves for another century, and its Constitution originally held that a black slave counted as only three-fifths of a citizen.

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And if you consult any encyclopedia to find out what was the first country to abolish slavery, the response will always be the same: England. Not true. The first country to abolish slavery was not England but Haiti, which is still paying penance for that sin.

The black slaves of Haiti defeated the glorious army of Napoleon Bonaparte, and Europe never forgave it for this humiliation. Haiti was forced to pay France a gigantic indemnity over a century and a half for the crime of its liberation, but not even this was enough. That black insolence continues to rile the white masters of the world.

We knOw little or nothing of all this.

Haiti is an invisible country.

The first time in years the world media paid attention to it was when the earthquake of 2010 killed more than 200,000 Haitians. Tragedy catapulted the country briefly into the media limelight.

And so today Haiti is known not for its historic achievements in the war against slavery and colonial oppression or for the unique talent of its artists--magicians of scrap who can transform refuse into things of beauty.

It is worth repeating again so that even the deaf will hear: Haiti was the first independent country of the Americas and the first in the world to defeat slavery.

It deserves far more than the notoriety that blooms on disaster.

The border crossing between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is called Malpaso, the bad step.

Perhaps the name is a sort of warning that you are entering the black world of black magic and witchcraft.

Voodoo, the religion that the slaves took with them from Africa and nationalized in Haiti, does not deserve to be called a religion. From the point of view of the owners of Civilization, voodoo is just a black thing, the product of ignorance, backwardness, and pure superstition. The Catholic Church, which has no shortage of believers ready to sell the fingernails of saints and feathers of archangel Gabriel, worked to get this superstition officially prohibited in 1845, 1860, 1896, 1915, and 1942, but the people just didn't get the message.

But for a number of years now, Christian...