Haiti

Haiti occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic: 27,750 km², about a third of Czechia, with roughly 11.8 million people. It is mountainous — two-thirds of the country is over 400 m — densely populated, and the poorest country in the Americas by a wide margin.

It is also one of the most historically consequential small countries on Earth. In 1804 Haiti became the second independent state in the Americas after the United States, the first free Black republic, and the only nation in history founded by a successful revolt of enslaved people. The army it defeated was Napoleon's. The colony it replaced, Saint-Domingue, had been the single most profitable European possession in the world.

What happened next matters just as much. In 1825 France sailed a fleet into Port-au-Prince harbour and demanded 150 million francs — compensation to the former slaveholders for their lost property, meaning the Haitians themselves — as the price of recognition. Haiti paid, borrowing from French banks to do it, and did not finish paying until 1947. Any account of why Haiti is poor that begins later than 1825 is not a serious account.

And it is a country of extraordinary cultural output: a painting tradition that museums collect worldwide, a religion of its own in Vodou, a language of its own in Kreyòl, a dance music (kompa) that the whole francophone Caribbean moves to, a soup that UNESCO inscribed as heritage in 2021, and a literature that has produced members of the Académie française. None of that is on hold because of the crisis.

Ayiti is a Taíno word, generally translated as "land of high mountains", and it was the indigenous name for the whole island before Columbus renamed it Hispaniola. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on 1 January 1804 he deliberately discarded the colonial name Saint-Domingue and took the Taíno one back — a gesture of solidarity with a people who had already been destroyed, and one of the earliest acts of decolonial naming anywhere.

Haiti is shaped like a crab's claw, with two long peninsulas — the Northern and the much longer Southern — enclosing the Gulf of Gonâve and the large island of La Gonâve in its mouth. The name was accurate: the country is dominated by four mountain chains, and less than a fifth of it is flat.

You will read everywhere that Haiti has "2% forest cover" and that this is the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The figure has been repeated for forty years and is not reliable. It appears to derive from an old estimate of primary or closed-canopy forest, and it has been applied to "tree cover" as though the two were the same thing. Satellite studies since 2018 put Haiti's actual tree cover in the region of 30%, though the great majority of that is agroforestry, coffee and fruit shade and secondary growth rather than intact forest.

That correction does not make the problem go away. Haiti's primary forest is very nearly gone — a study in 2018 found that of 137 mountain blocks surveyed, forty-two had lost all their primary forest since 1988, and projected complete loss of the country's primary forest well within a generation. Charcoal remains the main cooking fuel for most households, hillside farming without terracing has stripped soil off slopes into the sea, and the flash floods that kill people in every storm are a direct consequence.

Tropical, warm all year, with temperatures on the coast between about 23 and 33 °C and no real winter. Altitude does the work instead: Kenscoff at 1,500 m needs a sweater at night, and Furcy above it is genuinely cold by Caribbean standards. Rain comes in two seasons — April to June and August to November — with a drier stretch in between and a properly dry season from December to March.

The overriding weather fact is hurricanes. The Atlantic season runs 1 June to 30 November, peaking in August and September, and Haiti's exposure is worse than its neighbours' because the deforested slopes turn ordinary rainfall into landslides and flash floods. Hurricane Jeanne in 2004 killed around 3,000 people at Gonaïves without even making landfall in Haiti; Hurricane Matthew in 2016 devastated the southern peninsula and killed over 500. A storm that would be a nuisance in Florida is a catastrophe here.

Haiti lies between about 18° and 20° north, on the western third of Hispaniola, some 90 km from Cuba across the Windward Passage and 200 km from Jamaica. Port-au-Prince is at the head of the Gulf of Gonâve; Cap-Haïtien is 170 km north across the mountains; Jacmel is 40 km south of the capital as the crow flies and about three hours by road over the Massif de la Selle.

The distances are short and the times are long. Haiti's road network is limited, mountainous and in poor repair, and — at present — large sections of the national highways around Port-au-Prince are controlled or taxed by armed groups, which makes internal travel a security question before it is a logistical one.

Columbus made landfall on Hispaniola in December 1492 and his flagship, the Santa María, ran aground on Christmas Day near what is now Cap-Haïtien. Its timbers were used to build La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Americas; when Columbus returned a year later every man he had left there was dead. The Taíno population of the island — estimates run from several hundred thousand to over a million — was effectively destroyed within fifty years by disease, forced labour in the mines and war.

Spain then largely abandoned the western end of the island for richer conquests on the mainland, and by the 1620s French and English buccaneers had established themselves on Île de la Tortue (Tortuga) off the north coast — the classic pirate base of the Caribbean, and a real one. France took formal possession of the western third at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 and named it Saint-Domingue.

What France built there in the following century is difficult to overstate. By the 1780s Saint-Domingue produced roughly 40% of the world's sugar and 60% of its coffee, plus indigo, cotton and cacao. It was worth more to France than all thirteen British colonies in North America were to Britain, and it generated something approaching a third of French foreign trade. It was, by a distance, the most profitable colony in the world.

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is the only slave revolt in recorded history that founded a state, and one of the most consequential events of the modern era. It began on the night of 22–23 August 1791 in the northern plain, traditionally after a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman led by the houngan Dutty Boukman and the manbo Cécile Fatiman. Within weeks a thousand plantations were burning.

Toussaint Louverture, born enslaved on the Bréda plantation and freed before the revolt, emerged as the movement's political and military genius. He outmanoeuvred the Spanish, the British — who lost tens of thousands of men trying to take the colony — and successive French governments, secured the abolition of slavery, and by 1801 governed the whole island under a constitution that made him governor for life. Napoleon sent an expedition under his brother-in-law Leclerc; Toussaint was seized under a flag of truce in 1802, deported to France, and died of cold and neglect in the Fort de Joux in the Jura in April 1803.

His arrest destroyed the last restraint. When word spread that France intended to restore slavery — as it had already done in Guadeloupe — the war became total. Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe destroyed Leclerc's army at Vertières on 18 November 1803. French losses over the campaign are usually put at around 50,000 dead, most from yellow fever, and it was the worst defeat any European army suffered in the Americas.

This is the fact that explains more about Haiti's condition than any other, and it is not widely known outside the country.

For twenty-one years after 1804 no major power recognised Haiti. The United States, with a slaveholding South of its own, refused until 1862. Then in 1825 Charles X sent a squadron of fourteen warships to Port-au-Prince with an ordinance: France would recognise Haitian independence in exchange for 150 million gold francs, payable in five annual instalments, as indemnity to the former colonists for the property they had lost — that property being the Haitians themselves. President Boyer, facing a blockade and a possible invasion, signed.

Haiti could not pay 150 million francs. It borrowed from French banks to make the first instalment, and thereby acquired a second debt on top of the first — what historians call the "double debt". The sum was reduced to 90 million in 1838, and the borrowing was refinanced repeatedly, latterly through the National Bank of Haiti, which was itself French-owned and took a cut of every transaction. The last payment was made in 1947.

A New York Times investigation published in 2022 attempted to quantify it. Its estimate: Haiti transferred the equivalent of roughly US$560 million in then-value to France and French banks, and the compounding cost to the Haitian economy over two centuries — money that never became roads, schools, ports or irrigation — lies somewhere between US$21 billion and US$115 billion. For most of the 19th century, debt service consumed a very large share of the Haitian government's entire revenue.

In July 1915, after the lynching of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by a Port-au-Prince crowd, US Marines landed and stayed for nineteen years. The stated reason was stability; the operative reasons were debt, German commercial influence, and the approaches to the newly opened Panama Canal.

The occupation rewrote the Haitian constitution — a draft prepared in Washington, reportedly with the involvement of the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt — to permit foreign ownership of land, which the 1805 constitution had forbidden. It took control of the customs revenue, moved the gold reserve of the Banque Nationale to New York, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint when it refused to ratify, and revived the corvée, a colonial-era forced-labour system, to build roads.

The corvée provoked the Caco rebellion under Charlemagne Péralte, who was betrayed and shot by a Marine officer in 1919. The Marines photographed his body tied to a door and circulated the picture to demonstrate that he was dead; the image reads unmistakably as a crucifixion, and it became — and remains — one of the central icons of Haitian nationalism. Estimates of Haitian deaths during the occupation run into the thousands and possibly well beyond.

François Duvalier — "Papa Doc" — was a country doctor and an indigéniste ethnologist who had written seriously about Vodou, and who was elected president in 1957 as a champion of the black majority against the mulatto elite. He then built one of the most complete personal dictatorships of the twentieth century.

His instrument was the Tontons Macoutes — formally the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, in practice a militia in denim and dark glasses that answered only to him, was paid by extortion, and operated entirely outside the law. Duvalier deliberately cultivated the imagery of Vodou around himself, dressing in the black and purple of the death spirit Bawon Samdi. Estimates of those killed under the two Duvaliers range from 30,000 to 60,000. Tens of thousands more fled; the Haitian professional class in Montreal, New York and Paris largely dates from these years.

He declared himself president for life in 1964, and on his death in 1971 was succeeded by his 19-year-old son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who ruled for fifteen further years while the country's economy was hollowed out and the family's fortune moved abroad. Popular uprisings and the withdrawal of American support forced him out in February 1986; he flew to France on a US Air Force plane. He returned to Haiti unexpectedly in 2011, was charged, and died in 2014 with the case unresolved.

At 16:53 on 12 January 2010 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck 25 km from Port-au-Prince on the Enriquillo fault. The National Palace, the cathedral, the parliament, the tax office, the UN headquarters and a very large share of the capital's housing came down. Death toll estimates range from about 100,000 to the Haitian government's figure of 316,000; most independent researchers settle somewhere between 100,000 and 160,000, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Around 1.5 million people were displaced.

The international response was enormous — some US$13 billion pledged — and is widely regarded as a failure. A small fraction went through Haitian institutions; the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission was co-chaired by a foreigner; and audits of some of the largest recipients found remarkably little permanent housing built. Worse: in October 2010 cholera, absent from Haiti for a century, was introduced by UN peacekeepers from Nepal through a leaking sanitation system into the Artibonite river. It killed around 10,000 people and infected 800,000. The UN denied responsibility for six years before acknowledging a role in 2016; compensation has never been paid.

Since then: President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom on 7 July 2021 by a commando composed largely of Colombian former soldiers, in a plot still not fully explained. Six weeks later a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the southern peninsula killed more than 2,200 people. And from 2022 the armed groups that had long existed in Port-au-Prince consolidated, coordinated, and took the city.

Vodou is a religion. It has a theology, a priesthood, a liturgy, a moral code and a two-hundred-year documented history, and it is practised by a large share of Haitians alongside Catholicism without either party finding this contradictory. The old formulation — Haiti is 70% Catholic, 30% Protestant and 100% Vodou — is a joke that carries a good deal of truth.

The system: a single distant creator, Bondye (from bon dieu), who is not petitioned directly, and a large family of lwa — spirits with names, personalities, colours, foods, songs and days — who are. The lwa are served by a houngan (male priest) or manbo (female priest) in a temple called an ounfò, through drumming, song, dance, offerings and possession, in which a lwa "mounts" a devotee and speaks through them. The theology is African — Fon, Yoruba and Kongo in the main — with a Catholic overlay adopted under a régime that banned everything else.

Haiti's painting is one of the genuinely distinctive national traditions of the twentieth century, and it is collected by museums worldwide. It has its origin in the indigéniste reaction to the American occupation, and its institutional beginning in the Centre d'Art, founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944 by the American watercolourist DeWitt Peters, which set out to find and supply painters rather than to teach them a European manner.

What it found included Hector Hyppolite, a Vodou priest and house-painter working with chicken feathers and enamel, whose work André Breton bought and took to Paris; Philomé Obin in Cap-Haïtien, painting the north's history with the precision of a draughtsman; Préfète Duffaut, whose imaginary vertical cities climb impossible mountains; Rigaud Benoit, Castera Bazile, Wilson Bigaud. The label "naive" was attached by the market and most Haitian critics reject it.

Kompa (konpa dirèk) is Haiti's national music and one of the Caribbean's major genres. The saxophonist Nemours Jean-Baptiste created it in 1955 out of méringue with a slowed, insistent beat built for close dancing, and it went from Port-au-Prince to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Cape Verde and francophone Africa. Zouk, the Antillean genre that conquered the 1980s, is kompa's direct descendant, which the bands from Guadeloupe generally acknowledge and Haitians never let anyone forget.

Kanaval runs on the three days before Ash Wednesday and is the biggest event in the Haitian year: chan pwen — songs with a barbed political point — new tracks released by every major band, enormous slow-moving floats, and days of walking crowds. Historically the government funded it, chose the theme and used it, and every band used it back; a Kanaval song has brought down more than one political career.

For a country of twelve million with a literacy rate around 60%, Haiti's literary output is disproportionate to the point of absurdity. It writes in French, in Kreyòl and increasingly in English, and it is one of the central literatures of the Caribbean.

One more name that is not fiction: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the Haitian anthropologist whose Silencing the Past (1995) uses the Haitian Revolution to argue that some events are "unthinkable" to the societies that record them and are therefore erased from history as it is written. It is one of the most influential works of historical theory of the last fifty years and it is, at bottom, about why nobody taught you any of this.

Haitian Creole is spoken by every Haitian and is the mother tongue of essentially all of them. It grew in the 18th century from French vocabulary on a grammatical frame drawn largely from Gbe and other West African languages, and it is not a dialect, a patois or a simplified anything — it has its own consistent grammar, a standardised orthography adopted in 1979, a Bible, a growing literature and, since 2014, an Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen.

The politics of it are sharp. For most of Haiti's history the state operated in French, a language most citizens do not speak, which meant that courts, laws, schools and the civil service were structurally inaccessible to the majority. Kreyòl became co-official only in 1987, and instruction in Kreyòl in primary schools is still contested. It is, in a small way, the country's oldest inequality expressed in grammar.

Haitian cooking is French technique on African and Taíno ingredients with a Caribbean climate, and it is distinctly hotter, more aromatic and more heavily marinated than anything else in the region. Two things define it: epis, the green seasoning base of parsley, thyme, scallion, garlic, pepper and citrus that goes into everything and lives in a jar in every fridge, and pikliz, the ferociously hot pickled slaw that goes on top of it.

This is not just a soup. Under the colony, a rich pumpkin soup was a dish of the French planters, and the enslaved were forbidden to eat it. On 1 January 1804, the day Haiti declared independence, Haitians ate it — and have eaten it on 1 January every year since. It is served all morning, house to house, and refusing a bowl is not really an option.

In December 2021 UNESCO inscribed joumou soup on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — Haiti's first inscription of any kind. The squash it uses is a specific one, the giraumon, a turban-shaped Caribbean pumpkin; ordinary butternut is the standard substitute abroad and works well.

If soup joumou is the dish of the nation's birthday, griot is the dish of every other occasion, and it is never served without pikliz. Making the two together is the most useful thing a foreign cook can learn from Haiti.

Haiti makes rum in two entirely different ways and both are internationally significant, which is not something you can say of many countries.

Haiti's only UNESCO World Heritage Site — the National History Park: Citadelle, Sans-Souci, Ramiers, inscribed in 1982 — sits in the mountains behind Cap-Haïtien and is one of the most remarkable historical sites in the Americas.

The purpose was explicit. Haiti had beaten Napoleon and expected him back, and Christophe's strategy was to abandon the coast, burn the plains and hold the mountains. The Citadelle mounts around a hundred and sixty-five cannon, many of them captured French, British and Spanish pieces hauled up a mountain by hand, and stores of cannonballs are still stacked in pyramids in its courtyards. It was never attacked.

Cap-Haïtien — Okap — is Haiti's second city, about 270,000 people on a bay under a mountain, and it was the capital of Saint-Domingue and then of Christophe's kingdom. In the 18th century it was called the Paris of the Antilles and was, by some distance, the richest and most sophisticated city in the Caribbean.

Its street grid and a good deal of its 18th- and 19th-century fabric survive: two-storey merchant houses with arcaded ground floors, iron balconies, tiled roofs and internal courtyards, laid out on the French colonial plan and rebuilt after the fire of 1802 and the 1842 earthquake. It is genuinely handsome, badly under-maintained, and on Haiti's UNESCO tentative list. It has also been, since the closure of Port-au-Prince's airport to US carriers in November 2024, the country's principal functioning international gateway.

Port-au-Prince is a metropolitan area of some three million people built up the sides of a bowl above a bay, from the flat, hot, dense downtown at sea level through Delmas and Canapé-Vert to Pétion-Ville on the slope above, where the restaurants, galleries, hotels and money are. Founded in 1749, wrecked by earthquake in 1770 and again in 2010, and at present largely controlled by armed groups.

Jacmel, on the southern coast about three hours from Port-au-Prince over the Massif de la Selle, is Haiti's arts town and its most charming small city. It grew rich on coffee in the 19th century, and its merchant houses — brick and cast iron shipped from Europe as ballast, with wrought-iron balconies and internal courtyards — give it a townscape unlike anywhere else in the country. It has been on Haiti's UNESCO tentative list for years.

The town is the centre of Haiti's papier-mâché tradition. Workshops make masks, animals and full-body carnival figures, and Jacmel's Kanaval — held the Sunday before the national days — is the best in the country and one of the most distinctive in the Caribbean, with characters including the tar-blackened lansèt kòd who chase the crowd. Jacmel also has a serious film and music school, the Ciné Institute, founded after 2010.

The long southern peninsula — Les Cayes, Port-Salut, Jérémie, Pestel — is the greenest, wettest and least industrial part of Haiti, and it holds the beaches. It also took the full force of Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and the 2021 earthquake, and much of it has been rebuilding ever since.

Fifteen kilometres and 1,200 vertical metres above Port-au-Prince, the temperature drops fifteen degrees and the vegetation changes to pine. Kenscoff at about 1,500 m and Furcy above it have been the capital's hill station since the 19th century — cool nights, woodsmoke, strawberries and vegetables grown for the city below, and views the whole length of the Cul-de-Sac plain.

This is also the gateway to La Visite National Park in the Massif de la Selle, which protects the last significant block of Hispaniolan pine forest and cloud forest in the country. The classic hike is the two-day traverse from Furcy over the massif to Seguin and down to the sea at Marigot on the south coast — high karst, pine, cloud, and hamlets that see almost no outsiders. It is one of the best walks in the Caribbean and one of the least known.

This section exists because a travel page about Haiti that skirts around this would be dishonest. At the time of writing, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and every comparable Western ministry advise against all travel to Haiti, and have done so continuously since 2023. That is the highest level of advisory issued, the same one applied to active war zones, and it is not a formality.

The honest position: do not plan a trip to Haiti now. Watch the advisories, and understand that if and when they change it is likely to change first for the north — Cap-Haïtien, Milot and the Citadelle — which has been substantially less affected than the capital. The rest of this page is written for that day, and for readers who want to understand the country regardless.

There have never been direct flights from Prague and there is currently no straightforward routing at all. Haiti's two international airports are Toussaint Louverture (PAP) at Port-au-Prince and Hugo Chávez International (CAP) at Cap-Haïtien; PAP has been closed to US commercial carriers since November 2024, which removed the great majority of the country's air links at a stroke.

Assume 25,000–45,000 CZK for a return from Prague when routings exist, and assume they may not. Any Haiti plan needs to be made with a local host, a confirmed pickup, and the flexibility to abandon it.

Haiti has always been an odd market: very cheap at street level and unexpectedly expensive at the level a foreign visitor typically operates at, because the small supply of secure hotels, drivers and guides is priced for the NGO and diplomatic economy. The crisis and the collapse of the gourde have widened that gap.

Budget 2,500–5,000 CZK a day for a visitor operating with a driver, staying in secure accommodation and eating well — which is what any responsible arrangement looks like in Haiti. Backpacking Haiti on the cheap was possible in the 2000s. It is not a thing anyone should be attempting now.

It is not honest to write a cheerful travel page about Haiti in 2026, and it would be worse to write the country off. Both temptations are wrong in the same way: they treat Haiti as a headline rather than as a place with twelve million people in it, a two-hundred-year history and a cultural output that most countries of any size would envy.

So: do not go now. The advisories are right and the reasons for them are real. But know what is there. The Citadelle is the largest fortress in the Americas and it was built by people who had just defeated Napoleon and expected him back. Sans-Souci was built to prove a point about what a free Black state could do, and it succeeded before an earthquake took it down. Jacmel makes carnival masks that belong in museums. La Visite has a two-day walk over the mountains to the sea that almost nobody in Europe has heard of. Barbancourt makes better rum than most of the Caribbean and sells it for a fraction of the price.

And the history is not optional, because it is the thing that has been most systematically kept out of European education. A slave revolt beat the greatest army in the world and founded a republic — and the country was then charged for it, in gold, for a hundred and twenty-two years, by the state it had defeated. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's argument that the Haitian Revolution was "unthinkable" to the societies that recorded it, and was therefore not recorded, explains why you probably did not learn any of this at school.

Practical closing advice: read the current MZV advisory before anything else, and take it seriously. If you want to do something for Haiti now, buy Haitian art from a Haitian seller, read Danticat or Laferrière, and buy a bottle of Barbancourt — every one of those puts money in the country and none of them requires a flight. And keep the country on the list, because the day the advisories change, the north will be first, and the Citadelle will still be up there.