Haiti is the second free nation of the Western Hemisphere and the world’s first black republic

Yet in 2001 – almost two centuries’ freedom notwithstanding – Haiti remains more underdeveloped than much of Africa from which it emerged. Haiti is not merely the poorest country in the hemisphere but one of the poorest anywhere. In 1994 her annual per capita income amounted to $270. Haiti was also one of the few countries in the latter twentieth century whose gross national product has stagnated or declined more years than it has advanced. After 200 years of freedom, Haiti is the most prostrated nation in the Western hemisphere, and one of the most prostrated nations in the entire world. Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the Caribbean. It was the cutting edge of European agriculture. Now Haiti is less developed than Ghana or Angola. In the first half of 1995 Haiti exported $65 million, a figure that, 207 years later, falls far short, when adjusted for inflation, of the $41 million in exports of Saint-Domingue (French colonial Haiti) in 1788. During the same period, its imports amounted to $265 million, or four times its exports. Haiti has to import all petroleum products, machinery, processed goods and the bulk of even the simplest consumer goods. In only four years of the last fifty has Haiti enjoyed a favorable balance of trade. After 200 years of freedom, modern Haiti’s exports are substantially less than Saint-Domingue’s in 1791, while its imports are four times as large as its exports. The Haitians are unable to manufacture even the simplest consumer goods for their own consumption. Haiti is hungry. Few countries of Africa have less to eat. Haiti is dependent on the outside world for more of its food than any other country in the world but one. The country whose sugar exports financed the building of châteaux in the Loire and town houses in France’s great cities and which, in 1789, produced three-quarters of the world’s sugar, must now import it. Under free society, the Haitians lack the capacity to feed themselves, and mass starvation would ensue without foreign charity. In what used to be the sugar capital of the world, the richest colony in the entire world, Haitians now have to import sugar from the United States. Few countries have regressed so far or been so misused by man. In 1789 a flourishing Haiti, France’s richest colony, ran its mills and ground its grains by waterpower. In 1995 – an anthropological regression measurable in centuries – the waterwheel and flume were largely forgotten and the Biblical ox and beam prevailed.