The history of Haiti as the oldest Black republic in the western hemisphere is fascinating and checkered. If it had been up to some of the country’s land-owning mulattos during the 1700s, slavery would have remained on Hispaniola. Toussaint L’ouverture is considered the father of the Haitian revolution but he wasn’t hardbody enough to make Haiti independent from France. It was another Haitian general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, that ultimately engineered Haiti’s liberation from France.
Dessalines did not play that shit. Once he learned of the double-cross that the French made with L’ouverture and how they planned to re-implement slavery on the island he rounded up all the slaves on the island and organized their rebellion. Shit got wild bloody on Haiti for a while. The French would kill 500, the Haitians would do the same. The indiscriminate brutality of the French had the end result of uniting the various Haitian populations against their occupation.
The Haitians kicked all the Europeans off their island. Except the Poles who actually fought to help them gain their independence. What is the deal with the Polish people helping western countries get their shit right? Word to Kosciusko. Anyhoo, there were several more uprisings after Dessalines forces liberated the island. With coffee being a huge cash crop in Europe and Haiti supplying more than a third of Europe’s consumption the value of the land was still too important to escape unrest from outside intervention.
Dessalines administration had formed a simple constitution for the Haitian people. It consisted of three main points…
It was during the early 1900’s that America basically started installing a steady stream of puppet dictators on the island when they assigned Haiti to be a US protectorate. None of these dictators was more corrupt or more infamous than Dr. François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. For the fifteen years his regime administered Haiti he created a brain drain with the forced exile of the political and economical elite. Google Tonton Macoutes to learn about Duvalier’s private army of terror that he unleashed against political rivals. The Tonton Macoutes also helped Duvalier’s son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier retain control of the country until he was deposed in 1986.
Haiti continues to exist in a eco-socio-political purgatory to this day. Regimes continue to fail and the country spirals into an incredible level of fourth world poverty. Televangelist Pat Robertson says that Haiti suffers from a curse because of a pact that was made with the Devil during a voodoo ritual practised before the otherthrow of the French. Robertson is right on one account, there was definitely a deal made with the Devil back in the day that keeps Haiti all fucked the fuck up.
Supremacy keeps the illest records on the planet and Haiti stays in the red because it had the nerve to bet on the Black.
