From this Link:
The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.
For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.
60 million gold francs, or over $15 billion current U.S. dollars. Compounded with interest that would be over 22 Billion U.S. Dollars
And from this link:
The United States refused to recognize Haiti when independence was declared in 1804 and in 1806 we initiated a trade embargo. The outrageous French extortion described in the post took place two years after the Monroe Doctrine was promulgated guaranteeing the independence of the other Western Hemisphere republics. It did not apply, since we did not recognize Haiti’s independence until 1862.
In 1911 the National City Bank, with State Department support, took over Haiti’s only bank. In 1915 the United States invaded Haiti to enforce the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared our nation the Western Hemisphere collection agency for the rest of the world. We seized the custom houses and national treasury and diverted as much as 40% of the GDP to the payment of external debt. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who won his second Congressional Medal of Honor for action in Haiti, later wrote “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” One of the worst policies introduced by the American administrators was allowing American companies to use migrant Haitian workers in the sugar fields of eastern Cuba. The Marines were withdrawn in 1934, but the U.S. continued to control Haiti’s external finances until 1947.
