Haiti’s poverty has a number of causes, but to a great extent the country is a victim of its own success. Just over 200 years ago, Haitians carried out the greatest slave revolt in human history, despite terrible losses (150,000 died in their uprising against France, contrasted with 5000 Americans in our revolution).
Some historians contend that Napoleon had to agree to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, partly due to France’s defeat in Haiti. So if not for Haiti, Americans from Louisiana up to Montana might be French-speaking today.
The freed Haitian slaves refused to rejoin the world economy by returning to the big sugar plantations. Instead, they started to grow food on their own plots of land, recreating the small farms they and their ancestors had known in Africa. Haitians lived through the 19th and 20th centuries as free and independent producers, while third world people elsewhere continued to suffer and die on plantations, as slaves or exploited indentured workers.
Haiti’s population therefore grew steadily, from under one-half million at independence to 9 million today. The small farmers divided the land among their children, until the plots were too small to support a family. Pressure on the rural environment increased.
A democratic political system might have carried out the reorganization of agriculture that could have increased productivity, but instead Haiti slipped into the long years of the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986), misruled by terrible regimes that enjoyed the full support of the United States.
But Haitians were not done struggling for freedom.
