Today the name 
Haiti
signifies poverty. But in the late 18th century, as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, it was the world’s most profitable colonial holding — a world-record holder in coffee and sugar production. 
In 1791 the colony’s slaves rebelled against their masters — whose cruelty was extraordinary, even by 18th-century standards. Punishments included amputation of limbs and even genitals; some slaves were executed by burning them alive or filling them with gunpowder, then blowing them up. 
After more than 10 years of fighting and infighting among the colony’s blacks, mulattoes, whites, French, English and Spanish forces, Napoleon felt France’s prize slipping away and sent an army to keep Saint-Domingue French. But the ex-slaves triumphed. “Damn sugar! Damn coffee! Damn colonies!” Napoleon fumed. 
Haiti declared its independence in 1804. The founders named it in the language of its original inhabitants, who called the island “mountainous.” 
Two decades later, in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence, France demanded 150 million gold francs. (It lowered the demand in 1838 to 90 million francs, which the Haitians paid.) More than 175 years later, Aristide would campaign for France to return the money — $21,685,135,571.48, to be exact, in today’s dollars, according to Aristide’s consultants. 
Haiti’s foremost founding father was an ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture, a brilliant military and political strategist who tried to lessen the racial hatreds between blacks, mulattoes and whites created by slavery and colonialism. But he didn’t live to see the fruits of his labor. The French tricked him aboard a ship bound for France, where he died imprisoned in a mountain fortress in 1803. 
Aristide’s claim that he was “kidnapped” when the Americans whisked him away from Haiti in 2004 was seen by his partisans as an echo of the Louverture tragedy — a comparison Aristide “did not discourage,” wrote Paul Farmer, an American physician who runs a rural health clinic in Haiti and an Aristide supporter. 
Louverture’s tragic end foreshadowed the outcome of national independence. He was replaced by one of his generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a hater of whites best known for his war cry: “Cut off their heads! Burn down their houses!” The rest of the 19th century was marked by violent political instability, continuing conflict between black and mulatto Haitians and the flight of most Haitians to parts of the countryside beyond the government’s reach. 
Other nations helped weaken Haiti’s nationhood. The United States refused to grant recognition until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War. 
Until then, politicians from slaveholding states had blocked diplomatic relations. 
“From the day Haiti was born, it was viewed as a threat to the U.S., particularly in the Southern U.S.,” says Maguire of Trinity College, echoing a widely held view among historians.
Those who know Haiti argue that the viciousness of the French slave system and the violent, treacherous story of Haiti’s birth help explain its present condition. Haitian history amounts to 200 years of “economic and social tsunami,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in January. 
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a leading scholar of the country, wrote that slavery, and a policy of maintaining big plantations, made Haitian peasants in the interior so distrustful of government that they kept as far away as possible from all authority, including coastal merchants, preventing the peasants from realizing how much more they could have made from their coffee and sugar. As for the rich, it was never in their interest to build a modern government structure, which would have lessened the advantages they enjoyed. 
The ingredients of the Haitian tragedy have been simmering so long that improvement in one area makes no difference if other problems aren’t solved at the same time, says Michael Tarr, a former U.N. officer who lived in Haiti for 15 years. Opening up hundreds of schools, for instance, wouldn’t help if violent political instability kept children at home, he says. “You have to make progress on all fronts at the same time.”
As the 20th century began, two developments in particular alarmed the United States: the growing power of German business interests and political instability in Haiti so extreme that the latest of eight presidents to hold office in 13 years was torn to pieces by a mob in downtown Port-au-Prince in 1915 after ordering the massacre of 167 unarmed political prisoners. That prompted the commander of a U.S. warship in Port-au-Prince harbor to order his five companies of Marines and sailors to immediately occupy Haiti.
Some historians say the United States had been looking for a reason to intervene. “Hayti is a public nuisance at our doors,” a State Department official had written 28 years earlier. 
The U.S. occupation lasted until 1934. According to historians, it didn’t produce a democratic political culture but did build the foundation for a modern infrastructure, defeat nationalist rebels, boost the political clout of the mulattoes — whom the U.S. occupiers favored over black Haitians — and help create a repressive Haitian military. 
Over the next two decades, Haiti veered from dictatorship to a nascent democratic populism. A new era opened in 1957 when a physician and anthropologist with a deep knowledge of Haiti’s African religion, vodou (popularly known as voodoo), was elected — probably not legitimately. François (Papa Doc) Duvalier quickly earned a reputation as one of the most savage dictators the Americas had ever seen. In 1963, for example, Duvalier demanded that his men deliver to him the head of an ex-Army captain who died while leading a failed coup. Duvalier spent hours trying to communicate with the head, according to rumors. 
The coup attempt was one of many. Duvalier proved as brutally skillful in repression as he was tough in dealing with the United States. Despite heavy U.S. pressure to leave office after his second term expired in 1962 — he had become an embarrassment to Washington at a time when the Kennedy administration was extolling the virtues of democracy in the Americas — Duvalier refused to budge. He even forced Washington to withdraw its ambassador, and declared himself president for life.
“[T]he State Department . . . concluded by 1964 that a showdown with Duvalier . . . was not really necessary and ought at least to be deferred. Policy therefore veered toward the ‘cool and correct,’ ” a historian noted. 
When Duvalier died in bed in 1971, he had already named his son, Jean-Claude as his successor. But “Baby Doc” lacked his father’s strategic sense and iron will. By the 1980s, as the country grew poorer, military men — with Washington’s blessing — convinced the head of the feared Tontons Macoutes, a savage paramilitary group, to help bring down the dictatorship. 
On Feb. 3, 1986, with the poor rioting in several cities, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz announced Haiti should have a democratic government. Four days later, Duvalier fled with his wife and a small entourage to France, where he still lives.
