Tourists used to flock here. After the war, Port-au-Prince’s jazz clubs and casinos rivaled only those of pre-revolutionary Havana. But in 1957, the dark ages of the Duvalier dictatorship overshadowed Haiti, and Haiti has yet to fully emerge.
Haiti’s return to democracy in the 1990s was marked by coups and UN peacekeepers, the 2010 earthquake that leveled the capital and killed 300,000 people, and last year’s unsolved assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. It was interrupted and awkward.
It’s ironic for the Haitian people, whose enslaved ancestors defeated the French and British empires in the Haitian Revolution and ushered in the world’s first nation to emerge from a successful slave rebellion.
The current instability caused by gang violence in Port-au-Prince means that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises people to avoid traveling here, although it ranks last in the Caribbean rankings. far beyond the current political impasse. I will be the first to return when they do.