Haiti has been thwarted by outside interests from its very beginning. The Caribbean nation became the world’s first Black-led republic when it declared its independence from France on New Year’s Day 1804. That day, Saint-Domingue, once France’s richest colony, known as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” became Haiti. Its declaration of independence meant that, for the first time, a brutally enslaved people had wrenched their freedom from colonial masters. In 1825, more than two decades after independence, the king of France, Charles X, sent warships to the capital, Port-au-Prince, and forced Haiti to compensate former French colonists for their lost property.

Source: New York Times July 07, 2021 21:56 UTC