Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

ONLY ONE YEAR AFTER Christopher Columbus landed on
Hispaniola in 1492, the Spanish established themselves as the
dominant European colonial presence on the Caribbean
island. With the decline of Spain as a colonial power in the late
seventeenth century, however, the French moved in and started
their colonization of the western part of Hispaniola, sustaining
themselves by curing the meat and tanning the hides of wild
game. What is now known as Haiti was used by French buccaneers
to harass British and Spanish ships until Spain ceded the
western third of the mountainous island to France and agreed
to the borders delineated by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697.
As piracy was gradually suppressed, more and more Frenchmen
became planters and made Saint-Domingue—as the
French portion of the island was called then—one of the richest
colonies of the eighteenth-century French empire. Another
factor contributing to this success was the large number of African
slaves being imported to work the sugarcane and coffee
plantations. But it was this same slave population, led by Toussaint
Louverture (also seen as L'Ouverture), Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
and Henry Christophe, that revolted in 1791 and
gained control of the northern part of Saint-Domingue.
After a bloody, twelve-year rebellion by descendants of African
slaves, Haiti became the world's first independent black
republic on January 1, 1804. It is also the second oldest republic
in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. It occupies
an area about the size of Maryland—27,750 square
kilometers—with a population variously estimated at between 7
and 8 million. The World Bank (see Glossary) estimated in
mid-1997 that approximately 80 percent of the rural population
lives below the poverty level. The majority of these people
do not have ready access to safe drinking water, adequate medical
care, or sufficient food. With a gross domestic product
(GDP—see Glossary) per capita of US$225, in the late 1990s
Haiti had the dubious distinction of being the poorest country
in the Western Hemisphere and the fourteenth poorest nation
in the world.
Stages of Development
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1803) devastated agricultural
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