It wasn't always like this, and a visitor is tempted to wish Haiti could return to the way it was. The traveller from Europe was enchanted at his first glimpse of this paradise, in which the ordered beauty of agriculture and the prodigality of Nature competed equally for his surprise and admiration. A revolution begins Today, three quarters of Haiti's eight million people are peasant farmers, eking out a life on tiny plots of depleted soil in the countryside. After the 1791 revolution, the new leaders expropriated the large colonial plantations and shared them among the former slaves. Coffee and sugarcane have historically been important export crops, but now, most Haitians have to work hard just to grow enough maize, rice, beans, and fruit to feed their families.
Malnutrition is rife, as are serious diseases such as malaria and aids.
In the early 1980s, when aids first became known, many Americans believed it started in Haiti. It was in these slums that Aristide first gained popularity in the second half of the 1980s by telling the residents that it was wrong for them to be desperately poor while a tiny, mostly lighter-skinned elite lived in luxury. You are a pig. In the wake of the popular overthrow of Baby Doc in 1986 and the string of interim dictators who followed, Aristide rode a wave of hope to a landslide victory in Haiti's first genuinely free election. The wave of hope, however, soon turned into a tidal wave of disappointment when Aristide was deposed.