Colonial Beginnings

Spain claimed the island of Hispaniola – of which modern-day Haiti is the western part and the Dominican Republic is the eastern – when Christopher Columbus first landed there in 1492.

The Spaniards used the island as a springboard to colonize deeper into the Western Hemisphere and exploited the island’s gold mines.  They imported the first black slaves to Hispaniola when their first pool of forced laborers, the island’s native Taino Indians, was nearly eliminated by disease and harsh living conditions.

French pirates or buccaneers used what is now Northwest Haiti – Tortuga Island (Île de la Tortue) in particular – to attack English and Spanish ships.  Eventually, their numbers grew and the French settled further south onto the mainland.  Spain ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France in 1697.

Over the next hundred years, black African slaves were shipped in by the thousands to work on sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations.  By the time of the American Revolution, Haiti (then called Saint Domingue) had become one of the richest colonies in the French empire, the “pearl of the Antilles.”

Independence

Conditions for many slaves were horrific.  Writings from the time describe masters  torturing and killing their slaves.  In 1790, there were slightly more than 50,000 white landowners and freemen extracting labor from half a million slaves – nearly one freeman for every 10 slaves.

It was a bloated ratio waiting to explode.  In 1791, it did.

A long and violent slave uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe finally led to independence in 1804.  The nation was renamed Haiti, after the Taino word for the island meaning “mountainous land.”

Haiti became the world’s first black republic and the second free nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States.  But the existence of a country of former slaves so close to home was abhorrent to many Americans, particularly in the slaveholding South.  For years, no nation would recognize Haiti as a country.  The United States did accept Haiti’s independence until Abraham Lincoln’s administration, nearly 60 years later.

France eventually acknowledged Haiti’s sovereignty in 1838, but only after exacting 150 million gold francs from Haiti in restitution – ten times the nation’s total revenue.  It was the first of many abusive international actions that set Haiti on its present course of indebtedness and would help fuel political instability there for two centuries.

Haiti was never able to revive its profitable plantation economy, which had depended entirely on slavery, an idea detestable to Haitians.  Most of them squatted on small plots of land around the country, resulting in the motley collection of small subsistence farms that still exists today.

Modern Era and Political Instability

In the 19th century, Haiti floundered under a series of ineffectual and tyrannical leaders and endured a series of occupations by U.S. Marines.  Since the nation’s birth, it has suffered under a long line of dictators and more than 30 military coups.

Perhaps the most notorious of those dictators were the regimes of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc.”  The Duvalier family came to power in the 1950s.  During their nearly 30 years in power, they were criticized for their rampant corruption, mismanagement and oppression.  An estimated 30,000 Haitians were killed during that period for opposing the regime, in addition to the unknown numbers who died from widespread famine and disease.

Baby Doc fled the country in 1986 before a series of coups and political oppression that racked the country for four more years.

In 1991, Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti’s president after a landslide victory that was declared largely free and fair.  But a few months later, Aristide was temporarily overthrown in a coup funded by wealthy Haitian business leaders and political opponents who disliked his platform favoring the poorest Haitians.

The coup eventually led to intervention by the United Nations, which continues today in limited fashion.  Aristide was restored to power in 1994 and disbanded Haiti’s military.  He was succeded by his first prime minister, Rene Preval.

Aristide won national elections again in 2000, though they were largely criticized as less-than-credible.  Political tensions and violence grew over the next few years, pushing Aristide to flee the country again in 2004 in the face of another coup.

Supported by international peacekeepers, an interim government held office until Preval was elected again in 2006 in elections that were declared legitimate.

In the spring of 2009, Preval’s prime minister, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, stepped down after widespread protests over skyrocketing food prices that made staples like rice and beans too expensive for many Haitians to afford.