Haiti

Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a country in the Caribbean occupying the western part of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic, east of Cuba and Jamaica and south of the Bahamas, with an estimated population of 11.4 million making it the most populous Caribbean country and Port-au-Prince as its capital and largest city. Originally inhabited by the Indigenous Taino, the island became a French colony, Saint-Domingue, worked by enslaved Africans on sugarcane plantations, until the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 made Haiti the first sovereign state in the Caribbean, the second republic in the Americas, and the only country in history established by a slave revolt. The independent state passed through an empire, a split into two nations, reunification in 1820 and a second empire before the republic returned in 1859, and the twentieth century brought a United States occupation from 1915 to 1934 and the dictatorial rule of the Duvalier family from 1957 to 1986. A catastrophic 2010 earthquake and a large-scale cholera outbreak devastated the country in the 2010s, and the presidency has been vacant since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, with the National Assembly and judiciary inoperative and gang activity displacing over 1.3 million people. One of the world's least developed countries with no elected officials remaining, Haiti has been described as a failed state, though it remains a founding member of the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.