People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.

America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, "Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934."