The Colonist Who Finally Saw

In 1514, a Spanish colonist named Bartolomé de las Casas stood in his church in Cuba preparing a Pentecost sermon when a passage from Sirach arrested him mid-sentence: "The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood." He looked beyond the chapel walls to the enslaved Taíno people laboring in his own fields and saw, for the first time, what he had willfully ignored for twelve years.…