Congressional Digest

Excerpt

Situated in the northern Caribbean Sea, about 600 miles from Florida, Haiti is the smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. When it gained independence from the French in a slave rebellion in the early nineteenth century, Haiti made history as the world’s first black-led republic and the first Caribbean state.
     Today, however, it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, with four out of five of its people living in poverty and more than half in abject poverty. There is a huge income gap between the Creole-speaking black majority and …