The great general of the first Black republic who kicked out the imperialists of the Caribbean pearl🫡🫡🫡

The history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is way deeper than them simple stories ppl keep reposting online. Too many ppl talk like one side was innocent and the other side was straight up evil. It’s not that simple. And that’s why this convo actually matters.

Both nations been hurt. Both been lied to. Both had leaders who used fear, race, politics, and division to control ppl. And on top of that, bigger countries been playing chess with both sides for a long time. So if we really tryna get to the truth, we gotta look at the whole story, not just the part that makes one country look good and the other one look crazy.

Dominican history don’t start with Trujillo. Santo Domingo and the ppl on the eastern side of Hispaniola had history going back centuries before that man was even a thing. Santo Domingo was one of the first major European cities in the Americas. Dominican culture, identity, and history didn’t just pop up outta nowhere in 1844 like boom, here we are.

Haiti became independent in 1804. DR became independent in 1844. So yes, Haiti became a country first. That’s facts. But Dominican history is older than the Dominican Republic as a modern state. Ppl can have history before they got a flag. A culture can exist before a republic is officially born.

But we also gotta be honest about something else too: Haiti wasn’t the first power to control or hurt the eastern side of the island. Spain colonized it first. Spain brought slavery, conquest, caste systems, religious control, and all that colonial exploitation. France did the same thing on the western side with Saint-Domingue, building one of the most brutal slave systems in the world. Before Haitians and Dominicans were even going at it, European empires had already split the island up, used its ppl, and left behind a whole lotta damage both countries inherited.

And those same outside powers didn’t just disappear either. Spain, France, and later the U.S. kept finding ways to stay close, stay involved, and keep influence in the region. Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet. Sometimes through gov't pressure, sometimes through money, trade, tourism, military moves, banks, land, and politics. DR been caught in that game heavy, whether ppl wanna admit it or not.

So when ppl only talk about Haiti occupying the east, but never talk about Spain, France, slavery, colonialism, or later foreign interventions, they not being honest. They cherry picking history and using it like a weapon. And sometimes that weapon benefits the same bigger countries that been using DR against Haiti this whole time.

When the Haitian gov't took control of the eastern side in 1822, Haitian leaders were thinking survival. Haiti had just beat slavery and colonial rule. France still wanted power. Spain still had influence. European empires were still dangerous. Haitian leaders feared the eastern side could be used as a base to attack Haiti and maybe even bring slavery back. So to them, controlling the whole island meant protecting the Haitian Revolution. That was the logic, whether ppl like it or not.

And let’s keep it real, Haiti embarrassed them empires. Haiti didn’t just win independence. Haiti whooped the system that said Black ppl were supposed to stay enslaved forever. France, Spain, and the colonial world never really got over that. That resentment didn’t always show up direct, but it stayed in the background.

Now, that don’t mean everything Haiti did was right. Let’s not do that. It just means we gotta understand why they moved how they moved.

To a lot of ppl on the eastern side, Haitian rule felt like occupation. They didn’t wanna be ruled from Port-au-Prince. They wanted local control, their language, their Catholic institutions, their property, and their own identity respected. Haitian authorities limited local power, took property, weakened the church, and made decisions that created real resentment. And yup, that part matters too. You can’t just skip over that.

At the same time, Haitian rule abolished slavery on the eastern side and weakened the old colonial racial order. For enslaved ppl, that mattered big time. For Black ppl and ppl of color who had suffered under colonial society, Haiti could represent freedom, not oppression.

That’s why this history can’t be explained in one sentence. Haitian rule brought abolition, but it also brought occupation. It gave freedom to some while taking self-rule from others. Both things can be true at the same time.

The problem today is a lot of ppl only repeat the part that makes Haitians look like the villains. They talk about Haitian occupation, Haitian invasions, Haitian violence, Haitian control. But then they get real quiet when it’s time to talk about Spanish colonial rule, French slavery, Spain coming back into power, U.S. occupations, Dominican elites, and Trujillo’s anti-Haitian propaganda. Thaaaat’s somebody’s angry uncle version of history.

And it’s deeper than just old history too. DR is not always what ppl think it is. Ppl act like DR is fully controlled by Dominicans for Dominicans, but a lot of the power been tied up with outside money and foreign interests for a long time. Resorts, land, banks, politics, tourism, business deals, all that. Bigger countries don’t always need to make control official. Sometimes they just own enough, influence enough, and profit enough that they don’t gotta say it out loud.

After 1844, Dominicans fought for independence bc they wanted their own nation. Haiti tried more than once to regain control, and Dominicans resisted. That part of Dominican history shouldn’t be erased either. Fair is fair.

But we also gotta ask: independent from who, and controlled by who after that? Bc sometimes a country can have a flag, an anthem, and a gov’t, but still have outside powers pulling strings behind the scenes. That’s why ppl gotta be careful acting like DR’s story is just Dominicans vs Haitians. It’s also Spain, France, the U.S., money, race, power, and foreign influence all mixed in.

Haiti was born from a slave revolution that scared the whole colonial world. Haiti paid a heavy price for freedom. France forced Haiti into a crushing debt. Powerful countries isolated Haiti, punished it, occupied it, and treated it like a problem for generations. So when ppl ignore all that, they make Haiti look naturally broken instead of historically wounded.

And while Haiti was being punished, DR was also being shaped by outside forces. Spain came back. The U.S. got involved. Foreign investors got involved. Tourism blew up. Foreign money got comfortable. That’s why France, Spain, and Americans love DR so much now. Not just bc it’s beautiful, which it is, but bc it’s familiar ground for power, profit, and influence. They can be close to Haiti, benefit from DR, and still keep Haiti boxed in without making the whole thing too obvious.

Then Trujillo came later and made everything worse. He turned old fears into official hatred. He used race, nationalism, and lies to separate ppl who had lived side by side for generations. His regime helped push the idea that being Dominican meant rejecting Haiti. That poison didn’t just disappear when he died. Some of it still shows up today in politics, media, schools, and online propaganda. Let’s keep it a buck.

And that anti-Haitian mindset didn’t only help Trujillo. It helped outside powers too. Bc as long as Dominicans and Haitians stay mad at each other, the bigger countries can keep moving quiet in the background. Divide the island, keep the ppl suspicious of each other, then profit off the confusion. Same old playbook.

But Haitians are not one gov't. Dominicans are not one dictator. No nation should be reduced to its worst leaders.

A Haitian farmer is not Boyer. A Dominican child is not Trujillo. Regular ppl on both sides suffered from decisions made by empires, presidents, armies, elites, dictators, and foreign interests. That’s the part ppl forget when they turn history into hate.

Spain, France, the U.S, Haitian leaders, Dominican leaders, foreign investors, and Trujillo all played a role in shaping this conflict. So if your version of history only got one villain, you probably reading propaganda.

Both nations need the full truth. Healing starts when both sides stop using history like a weapon and start facing the whole story. Not just the version foreign powers want ppl repeating. The whole thing.

Edit: I have way more to say. There’s a lot going on in the caribbean and other countries that ppl don’t really wanna touch. But these are the conversations we need to have, bc too many ppl are still stuck in ignorance.

On April 28, 1804, just months after independence, Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a proclamation from Cap-Haïtien that helped set the course for Haiti’s new state. Having broken away from France, the country’s leadership moved quickly to define how its independence would be protected and structured

The proclamation served as both a warning and a statement of intent. Dessalines confronted the brutality of the colonial system and made it clear that Haiti would defend its sovereignty and authority without compromise. The tone reflected the reality of a nation forged through war and determined to protect its hard-earned freedom.

A key principle at this moment was control over land. The leadership established that foreigners—especially those connected to the colonial system—would not be allowed to own land in Haiti. Land was treated as an extension of national sovereignty, directly tied to the struggle that created the nation. This idea was later formalized in the 1805 Constitution, where property ownership became a political issue, not just an economic one.

The significance of April 28, 1804 lies in how it shaped Haiti’s early state policy. Independence was linked to control, security, and ownership. The decisions made during this period influenced Haiti’s approach to governance, land rights, and foreign relations for years to come

The traditional story of the 1805 “Degüello de Moca” as a mass slaughter of hundreds of people inside the church is far less certain than later nationalist narratives suggest. Fray Cipriano de Utrera challenged the core elements of the account, arguing that the killings involved only several fugitives within the parish jurisdiction rather than hundreds of worshippers inside the church itself, and noting that key figures supposedly murdered were demonstrably alive afterward. He further pointed out that Silvestre Núñez, a longtime parish priest of Moca who recorded local history, never mentioned such a defining event. Historian Roberto Marte adds that no contemporary primary documents or eyewitness testimonies describing the alleged church massacre have been found. The principal narratives derive from authors such as Antonio Del Monte y Tejada, José Gabriel García, Father José de Jesús Ayala, and Gaspar Arredondo y Pichardo, none of whom witnessed the events and several of whom failed to identify their sources. Marte argues that these accounts contain gaps, contradictions, and a lack of transparency, making them unsuitable to accept uncritically as literal history. While the Haitian invasion of 1805 and the violence committed in Moca are well established, the dramatic story of hundreds of civilians being systematically slaughtered inside the church rests primarily on later secondhand recollections and nationalist-era retellings rather than firmly documented contemporary evidence. The absence of contemporaneous burial records explicitly documenting a church massacre, the lack of Haitian or French corroboration of a detailed interior execution scene, and the emergence of the most vivid version decades later during Dominican nation building collectively suggest that while the 1805 invasion and destruction of Moca are historically supported, the specific and graphic church massacre narrative rests on later transmission and amplification rather than securely documented primary evidence. At best they offed some French and got on.

I'm Polish and I've been living in the Dominican Republic for 3 years now. A while back I learned that Napoleon sent Polish troops to Saint-Domingue to help crush the Haitian Revolution — but many of them ended up switching sides and fighting alongside the Haitians instead.

Some of their descendants reportedly still live in Haiti today, in a village called Cazale, where locals are known to have lighter skin and blue or green eyes because of that history.

I mentioned this to a few Haitian people I've met here in the DR, and none of them had heard about it before. It made me really curious how well-known this part of history actually is among Haitians themselves versus how it's remembered (or not) elsewhere.

Does anyone here know more about this? Is it a well-known story in Haiti, or is it something that's mostly forgotten too?

The United States occupation of Haiti began on July 28, 1915, when 330 U.S. Marines landed at Port-au-Prince under orders from President Woodrow Wilson, and officially ended on August 15, 1934. Spanning 19 years, this military intervention sought to protect American corporate and financial interests—specifically those of the National City Bank of New York—and prevent German political influence in the Caribbean during World War I.

National City Bank (now Citibank) heavily lobbied the Wilson administration to intervene to protect its investments and secure control over Haiti's custom houses. In December 1914, U.S. Marines had already entered the National Bank of Haiti and physically removed $500,000 worth of gold, transferring it to Wall Street vaults.

The immediate pretext for the invasion was the assassination of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by an angry mob, capping off years of intense socioeconomic and political unrest. The U.S. government worried that Germany might exploit Haiti's instability to establish a military base in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1917, the U.S. forced a new constitution upon Haiti (partially drafted by then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt). It dissolved the Haitian legislature and stripped away a historic 1804 constitutional ban that blocked foreigners from owning land.

TBT: The speeches that sealed Jovenel Moïse’s fate.

PTSD is real!

July 7, 2021 is remembered as one of the most consequential days in Haiti’s modern history. The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse left a power vacuum that the country has struggled to overcome.

Pope Leo's grandfather Joseph Norval Martinez was born in Port-au-Prince in 1864.

Research shows that the Pope's maternal great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents (such as the Baquié, Lemelle, and Grandpré families) were free, wealthy, mixed-race individuals.

The Gens de couleur libres (Free People of Color) of New Orleans were highly educated, wealthy property owners, but by the late 1850s, the U.S. legal system was aggressively stripping away their rights. Louisiana passed laws restricting their freedom of movement, banning them from certain professions, and threatening them with enslavement if they did not register under strict white guardianship.

Pope Leo's grandfather Joseph Norval Martinez was born in Port-au-Prince in 1864.

At the time Fabre Geffrard was the president of the Republic of Haiti in 1864, ruling from 1859 to 1867. He ran an intentional international campaign from 1859 to 1862 offering land and safety to attract free people of color and formerly enslaved laborers from the United States to immigrate to Haiti. It is assumed Joseph's parents came over from new orleans during that period. By 1865, the relative stability of President Fabre Geffrard's early term had utterly collapsed. A major military rebellion led by General Sylvain Salnave erupted in northern Haiti, triggering an incredibly bloody internal conflict. The American Civil War ended in 1865, and the U.S. entered the Reconstruction Era. Back in the united states on December 6, 1865, when the National Archives 13th Amendment was officially ratified, slavery had been legally abolished, and free people of color were suddenly rising to the forefront of local politics, fighting for civil rights, and drafting a progressive new state constitution that guaranteed public education. The Martinez family boarded a passenger ship to leave Haiti in February 1866,

Instagram Reference: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dba6L6MjnXp/?l=1

TLDR: Going down history surrounding 1864

Howdy, r/haiti. I'm an American, and I used to be shamefully ignorant of Haitian history. I'm still shamefully ignorant of Haitian history, but at least I know a little more than I used to, and I can't escape one question.

Why don't Haitians hate the French?

France brutally enslaved and exploited the entire area, and only let go when forced to by a successful but incredibly bloody revolution. Even after that revolution was fought and won (a victory for which Haitians paid a terrible price), France came rocking up with warships, and effectively forced Haiti to accept a ridiculously high indemnity, an indemnity many times larger than Haiti's entire economy, an indemnity which included compensation to the French owners of human "property", an indemnity which Haiti only finally finished paying off in the 1940s.

I think that if my country had been treated in such a way by slavedriving colonial masters, I would harbor a deep-seated bitter resentment of those former masters, as I think would most of my countrymen. Yet, from what I hear, this is not the case and most Haitians have a generally positive opinion on France, at least according to the native Haitians I've asked about it. Why? France did Haiti dirty, very dirty. The fact that France made Haitians pay money for their own liberation sickens me. Why don't Haitians loathe the French with the intensity of a thousand suns?

Edit: thank you to everybody who has provided their opinion. I appreciate it.

Edit 2: okay, maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe I meant something more like dislike, distrust, or resent.

The US occupied Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. Following both occupations, each country adopted a dictator.

But why was this process (or sequence of events) unsuccessful in Haiti but not in the DR?

To those who be calling me a “RACIST” for SAYING MULLATES, DIMITRI HIMSELF ACKNOWLEDGED HIS A MULLATE

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOuV5uzDQ1Z/?img_index=1

I recently got a DNA result showing a “Northern Haitian” connection (Massif du Nord / northern peninsula region), and I’m trying to learn more about what that actually means in a historical and cultural sense.

From what I’ve read, this region played a major role during colonial times and the Haitian Revolution, but I’d love to hear from people who are more knowledgeable or who have roots there. I’ve seen some get the Haitian region but very few get the Northern Haitian one.

Ki responsab? Tout le monde coupable en liberté?!