I know about Haiti and DR. My point was that they are some fucked up places with extreme poverty and lack of resources with a corrupt government and that if they were still under supervision of foreign government they might be in better shape. The same way other conquered places in the past were better off then they are now. To say Columbus and explorers did all this bad stuff is to diminish the great things that came out of the Americas. For instance Philadelphia takes it's trash on barges to Haiti waters and dumps it. Do you think the French would allow that today. Probably not.
That bit about the trash is interesting. Is that an ongoing practice? I googled it and all I could find was one instance of this happening. An unauthorized dumping in the 1980's, and miraculously it seems like a lot of it actually made it back to Pennsylvania.
