Haiti History Part I
Republic of Haiti. Country of the Caribbean, located in the western part of the island the Spanish limits, with Dominican Republic. It is also made up of the Isla de la Gonâve, Isla de la Tortuga, the archipelago of the Cayemites Islands and the Isla de Vaches, as well as other islets located in territorial waters. It has an area of 27,750 km² and a population of 10,033,000 residents (2009). The capital and main city is Port-au-Prince, badly damaged by an earthquake on January 12, 2010.
According to The World Factbook, 80% of the population lives below the poverty line and two thirds of it is dependent on a sector of agriculture and fishing, traditionally organized in small subsistence farms, weakened by the lack and impoverishment of available land, and foreign aid. This state of misery and impoverishment is the result of more than three hundred years of agricultural overexploitation, colonial and neocolonial plunder, North American military interventions and corrupt governments in the service of the United States, of more than a century of employment of human resources in the most important jobs. hard.
A former French colony, it was the first country in Latin America to declare independence and the first in the world to make an antislavery revolution triumph, which it paid at the price of aggression, blockade and compensation.
On January 12, 2010, it suffered a devastating earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, which has aggravated the situation in which the residents live. It is one of the last on the list of countries with unfavorable human development indices, life expectancy does not exceed 52 years and only 1 in 150 Haitians receives a salary, while deforestation of their forests exceeds 95%.
According to MATHGENERAL, Haiti’s economy is the poorest in the entire American continent, the population depends almost 50 percent on family remittances received from abroad. It was the first country in which 400,000 Africans enslaved and trafficked by Europeans rose up against 30,000 white owners of sugarcane and coffee plantations, carrying out the first great social revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Napoleon’s most eminent general was defeated there.
History
The 5 of December of 1492 Christopher Columbus top Spanish, part of which will be called Greater Antilles and the island becomes part of the Spanish empire. Before the arrival of the Spanish, it was inhabited by the Arawak, Carib and Taino ethnic groups; its estimated population at the time was about 300,000 residents.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, due to the boom that the informal trade of the island’s Creole settlers had acquired and that went against the monopoly that the metropolis intended, the Spanish governor Antonio de Osorio ordered, between 1605 and 1606, the depopulation of the northern and western bands of the island in order to stop this practice. Over time, buccaneers settled in the depopulated areas of the western part, men who lived by hunting cattle and bighorn pigs, the fur trade and tobacco cultivation, as well as filibusters, both of French origin. They first occupied Tortuga Island and later these settlements determined that the western part of the island was claimed by France.
In 1697, Spain ceded that part of the island to France by the Treaty of Ryswick, constituting the French Saint Domingue and in less than a century it became the richest colony in the world, producing enormous profits for France with the production of sugar and coffee from the slave plantation.
In the middle of the 18th century, colonial Haiti, occupied by France under an iron and cruel slave system, had a population of 300,000 slaves and only 12,000 free people, mainly white and mulatto.
The revolution
The 14 of August of 1769 would have occurred in Bois-Cayman ceremony voodoo priest Boukman, which is considered the starting point of the Haitian Revolution. The long emancipatory process has as its protagonist François Dominique Toussaint – Louverture, who between 1793 and 1802 led the Haitian revolution with sagacity, confronting the Spanish, English and French, until his capture, exile and death in France.
The triumph of the French Revolution, on July 14, 1789, had repercussions in Haiti. In 1791, due to the internal situation in Saint Domingue and the renewing winds that came from France, great slave insurrections took place in the north of the island, and this is considered the beginning of what would be the Haitian Revolution. The city Cap Français was burned by slaves.
In 1792, the French monarchy, Louis XVI, fell, and the French Republic was proclaimed. The Jacobins, the left wing of the French Revolution, decree equal political rights for all free blacks and mulattoes; Which, of course, has enormous repercussions in Saint-Domingue, where the majority of the population was black.
