Haiti--Paradise Lost

What happens when the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean kills off its educated and financially competent leadership (the white planters), gains its independence and is dominated by previously uneducated former slaves—who have never been given the chance to learn or to govern?
“Hell in a handbasket” is a phrase that comes to mind. L’Ouverture was betrayed (and killed) by the French. Jasques Dessaline was assassinated three years later. That left things to a former stable hand, waiter and mason—Henri Christophe.
He had been a winning general against Napoleon’s troops; his menial jobs had given him real skill in dealing with the wealthy whites who still controlled much of Haiti’s economy. He was also nuts. He proclaimed himself “King Henri”.
He created a noble class, aping the “ancient regime” of France. He built himself six chateaus, eight palaces, and the gigantic Citadelle Laferriere that was once considered such a wonder of the world people traveled just to see it.
To prove how loyal his troops were to him, he would occasionally have a unit of infantry march off the top of the citadel and fall to their deaths. Like the ancient Pharaohs he put much of the populace of Haiti to work building his monuments.
It was still a fabulously rich country. Some say that during his fourteen year reign people from New York would sail down to Port au Prince to see the “big town”. Revolt finally came in 1820. Rather than lose power, Christophe put a silver bullet in his head.
His body was hidden in a block of wet cement. People carrying loads to build more monuments to him dropped their loads on the spot where they heard the news. Visitors a century later claimed to be able to still see these piles of construction materials along the trails.
The rule of a man like Christophe would be enough to poison the future of any nation, but the tragedy of Haiti was by no means done. Sugar slowly declined in value as more and more nations began to produce it (notably colonial Cuba)—no one had thought to use the sugar money to create a more varied economy, or any economy at all.
It was a slow, tortuous downhill slide for a nation rich enough in 1815 to take in South American revolutionary hero, Simon Boliver, resupply him with men, money and weapons and send him back to defeat Spain. There are those who say Venezuela and several other nations owe their independence to Haitian help.
By the 1830s, Haitian economy had declined so much that the Haitian government (under a dictator almost as cruel as Christophe) passed a law denying any “free” peasant who worked on a sugar plantation the right to leave that land—for any reason.
During the 1820s, thousands of free blacks from the United States migrated to Haiti, a black nation. Most returned home—Haitian poverty had already become so bitter. A fleet of French warships showed up in 1825 and made Haiti promise to repay them 150,000,000 Francs as indemnity for the value of the lost slaves and slave trade that once centered in colonial Haiti. (It would be like making penniless freed slaves in the south pay for the Civil War and their own market value.)
Even though that amount was eventually reduced to ninety million, the rest of the century saw many incursions from European forces claiming Haiti owed them money—and helping themselves to it. Expatriates and other foreigners bankrolled dissident groups who fought each other within Haiti.
Coups, assassinations and violence became commonplace in a nation where the bulk of the populace was uneducated and desperately poor. It is estimated that between 1820 and today, Haiti has had at least 32 coups.
Finally, in 1915, appalled at the chaos so near our shores, we sent in the marines. More later.