Haiti has a close history with the USA..............there are many Haitians in South Fl.......esp...........and it was them that the GOP targeted..........in the stolen election of 2000............their voter registration card said to vote at such and such a location............but when they got there.........the voter rep......told them it had been changed......................George. W. Bush's brother........Jeb.........was gov. of Florida then...........in 1999...................in Nov..............



After the Spanish came to Hispaniola, next came the French, who arranged for hundreds of thousands of African slaves to be brought there to work in the fields planting and harvesting sugar cane, which made the French colony wealthy. By the end of the 17th century, the western third of Hispaniola became a French possession called Saint Dominique. In 1791, a French Black man by the name of Toussaint L'ouverture led a successful slave revolt. Four years later Spain ceded the Spanish part of Hispaniola to France, and L'ouverture and his followers claimed the entire island. A compatriot of L'ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared independence for Haiti, reclaiming the indigenous Taíno name, meaning "Land of Mountains," for the new nation.

When Napoleon sent an army to defeat the black rule over a French settlement, L'ouverture’s forces defeated them and established the Republic of Haiti on the western third of the island. The French retained control of the eastern side of Hispaniola, which was returned to Spanish rule in 1809. In 1822, the President of Haiti took control of the eastern part of the island and Hispaniola was ruled by Haiti for 22 years. A Spanish underground resistance group succeeded in driving out the Haitians from the eastern two-thirds of the island. In 1844, the independent Dominican Republic was founded.

For the next 70 years, the control of Hispaniola changed hands several times. During the first World War, US Marines were brought in to “protect” the island from the Europeans, mainly a few hundred Germans who controlled much of the commerce in Haiti. The US military raised and trained a local military in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti to create and maintain order, stability, and security. This resulted in a shift of power away from civilians to the military. Rafael Trujillo came to power in the Dominican Republic and maintained power with the help of the United States for 30 years before he was assassinated.