Haiti was poor but not yet desperate. In those days, it was a green and verdant place, full of little family truck-farms, and the postwar West’s early aid and development specialists who were sent there spoke about the country as the future “breadbasket” of the Caribbean. They were pioneers; this was pre-Agency for International Development, pre-Peace Corps, and my father, then a young United States government foreign service hireling sent as an agricultural advisor to Haiti, was just starting out a career in what would become known, in American government circles, as “foreign aid.”

When my father lived in Haiti, Graham Greene had not yet written “The Comedians,” because François Duvalier, the future dictator “Papa Doc,” had not yet taken power and begun to misrule his country with his Tonton Macoute and his homburg and dark sunglasses and his voodoo terror, which led in turn to the misrule of his son, Baby Doc, and then to cruel military men who sometimes cut the faces off people they killed and left them in the mud of the streets of the slums to terrorize others, and it was before Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who the U.S. first backed and then arranged to oust and who lives today in Johannesburg in exile—just as Baby Doc lives in the South of France.

In my father’s day—and that of my eldest sister, who was born there and who was given a Haitian name, Michelle Dominique, to honor a much-loved place—Duvalier was not a dictator yet, but still a practicing doctor. According to my father, he was on the U.S. Embassy’s “preferred doctor” list for its employees, and so it was that Duvalier gave my sister her very first vaccinations.

Before he passed away, in 2000, my father often spoke fondly and with great sadness of the country where he had begun his career, and he acknowledged that the failure of Haiti was also, somehow, the failure of the United States and its “foreign aid,” or at least, of the way it had been conceived of and conducted until then. Because of its poverty and because of its neglect, Haiti had been a disaster waiting to happen long before this week’s earthquake. Haiti has languished in the top ranks of the world’s dependent states; the Haitians are the poorest people of the Western Hemisphere and nothing seems likely to change that anytime soon.

Just as Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward five years ago, this terrible earthquake in Haiti will rightly focus attention on a most-neglected place, where the conditions of human misery made a natural catastrophe much worse than it had to be.