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I cannot help but wonder how different Haiti might be today had they stayed under French rule.

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Here's the rest of the history....

In the 1800s the US refused to recognize Haiti's government even though they came to power the same way we did, by throwing out the colonial power. The fear was that recognizing a former slave nation as now legitimate would create a similar rebellion here. For over a century the US, UK and most of Europe pretended that Haiti didn't exist...iow, no trade. Without trade there is no revenue for growth.

More recently...

After Cuba went communist and with the threat of communism real throughout Latin America and the Caribbean the US took the FP attitude of supporting any dictator in the region as long as he was not a red. This gave us Pinochet, Trujillo, Noriega and, in Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier.

Duvalier drove the educated creole class out of Haiti and created the Macoute, a kind of uneducated, merciless gestapo, to keep the rest in check through torture and murder. The US supported Duvalier. When Papa Doc passed on his son, Baby Doc, took over. It is a very telling fact that the only foreign diplomat who was present when Baby Doc was sworn in was the Ambassador from the US, a guy named Knox. We continued to support the new Duvalier as he continued his father's rule by terror.

In the nineties Baby Doc was chased out and the true communist Aristede was installed, essentially by us. He was thrown out but Clinton put him back in using the Marines. Aristede was as bad as Duvalier but an even bigger thief. He was again thrown out and now lives in Paris with a couple of hundred million US dollars.

For over a century the US, UK and most of Europe pretended that Haiti didn't exist...iow, no trade. Without trade there is no revenue for growth.

That's utter and complete bullsh*t, most likely spouted by a source that wants to blame Haiti's many economic and political problems on everything but Haiti itself.

The Treasury Department's register of commercial regulations indicates that the United States first requested and officially received from the "Republic of Hayti" a statement of its existing tariff rates and commercial laws on international trade with the United States way back in 1819.

The State Department's list of foreign diplomatic postings shows that we've maintained a U.S. consulate in Port au Prince since at least 1833.

And in terms of actual trade, the irrefutable reality is that the United States was engaged in regular commerce with Haiti since its founding. The first year that the Treasury Department recorded imports coming into the U.S. by country was in 1815 - barely a decade after Haiti's independence. Our trade in goods from Haiti that year was valued at just under $60,000. The largest categories were molasses, rum, and sugar.

The volume of Haiti's exports to the United States at the time also made it our third largest trading partner in the Caribbean and South America. Haiti exported more to us than Brazil, Florida (a Spanish colony at the time), and all of the Danish, Dutch, and French West Indies. Only the very sizable British and Spanish colonies surpassed it.

And all of those facts are even more amazing when you consider that the government of Haiti was a politically dysfunctional basket case in perpetual revolution, more or less from its inception till the 1870's - the first time a Haitian president left office voluntarily and peacefully at the end of his term.