History Tips - Haiti Observer Blog

While Haiti suffers, Dominican Republic is well off and occupies Caribbean Island of Hispaniola up to around 30,000 sq m. It is filled with resorts, is prosperous and healthy while Haiti continues to be poverty stricken. The Dominican Republic is ranked 90th on the human development index out of the 182 countries while Haiti comes 149th.

In Haiti the life expectancy is 61 years while in the Dominican Republic it is 74 years. In case a person lives on 2/3rds of eastern Hispaniola then he is more likely to write and read and live on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Read more →  

The city of Cap-Haïtien is located near the historic Haïtian town of Milot, which lies about 12 miles away. This little city in Haiti is known to be the first Capital of Haiti. Henri Christophe, who took power in 1807, renamed Cap-Francais as Cap-Henri and built his Sans-Souci palace in Milot.

About miles away from the Sans-Souci palace is a massive stone fortress bristling with cannons, atop a nearby mountain. The Citadelle Laferrière is a fort that was built with the labor of 20,000 men high atop a mountain to protect against a return of the French.

Read more →  

The term Affranchi was a French legal term classifying some slaves after obtaining their freedman or emancipation
This was a social class in the former Haiti, Saint-Domingue. The Affranchi at the time were in the social class between those who were free whites and enslaved Black people.

The Afranchi class was not only determined by your skin color at the time. Some of them werefreed people of mixed race and others were freed blacks. For instance, a mixed child born of a white father and a black mother was born free and would fall under the Afranchi class

Read more →