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ANALYSIS:Slavery, international extortion, embargoes and dictatorships have eroded Haiti’s ability to deal with its awful death toll and destruction

IN THE 1960s, Haitian tourist officials revived a term that had been commonly used among French colonists centuries earlier to describe the lush Caribbean island where they had taken control. Saint-Domingue, as the French named the western part of Hispaniola island in the 17th century, was “the pearl of the Antilles”, a paradisiacal, forested landscape that would become the richest French colony in the New World thanks to its thriving coffee, sugar and indigo industries.