Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a country in the Caribbean on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica and south of The Bahamas. It occupies the western side of the island, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Haiti is the third largest country in the Caribbean by area, and with an estimated population of 11.4 million, it is the most populous Caribbean country. The capital and largest city is Port-au-Prince. Haiti was originally inhabited by Indigenous peoples, known as the Taíno. In 1492, Christopher Columbus established the first European settlement in the Americas, La Navidad, on its northeastern coast. The island was part of the Spanish Empire until 1697, when the western portion was ceded to France and became Saint-Domingue, dominated by sugarcane plantations worked by enslaved Africans. The 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution made Haiti the first sovereign state in the Caribbean, the second republic in the Americas, the first country in the Americas to officially abolish slavery, and the only country in history established by a slave revolt. The independent state began as an empire, later splitting into two nations before reunifying in 1820; a second empire was established under Faustin Soulouque before the return of the republic in 1859. The 19th century also saw political instability, international isolation, a crippling debt to France, and failed invasions of the Dominican Republic, including a costly war. U.S. forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, followed by the dictatorial rule of the Duvalier family (1957–1986). Following a coup d'état in 1991, a U.S.-led multinational force intervened in 1994; a second coup in 2004 was followed by a United Nations intervention. In the 2010s, a catastrophic earthquake and a large-scale cholera outbreak devastated the country. Historically poor and politically unstable, Haiti has faced severe economic and political crises, gang activity displacing over 1.3 million, and the collapse of its government. The presidency has been vacant since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse, while the National Assembly and the judiciary have been rendered inoperative, leaving the country in virtual anarchy with almost nonexistent state control. One of the world's least developed countries and with no elected officials remaining, Haiti has been described as a failed state. Haiti is a founding member of the United Nations, Organization of American States, Association of Caribbean States, and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. In addition to CARICOM, it is a member of the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
Etymology Haiti (also earlier Hayti) comes from the Indigenous Taíno language and means "land of high mountains"; it was the Native name for the entire island of Hispaniola. The name was restored by Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines as the official name of independent Saint-Domingue, as a tribute to the Amerindian predecessors. Another theory on the name Haiti is its origin in African tradition; in Fon language, one of the most spoken by the bossales (Haitians born in Africa), Ayiti-Tomè means: "From nowadays this land is our land." In French, the ï in Haïti has a diacritical mark, a diaeresis (used to show that the second vowel is pronounced separately, as in the word naïve), while the H is silent. (In English, this rule for the pronunciation is often disregarded, thus the spelling Haiti is used.) There are different anglicizations for its pronunciation such as HIGH-ti, high-EE-ti and haa-EE-ti, which are still in use, but HAY-ti is the most widespread and best-established. In French, Haiti's nickname is La Perle des Antilles ("Pearl of the Antilles") because of both its natural beauty and the amount of wealth it accumulated for the Kingdom of France. In Haitian Creole, it is spelled and pronounced with a y but no H: Ayiti. In the Haitian community the country has multiple nicknames: Ayiti-Toma (as its origin in Ayiti Tomè), Ayiti-Cheri (Ayiti my Darling), Tè-Desalin (Dessalines' Land) or Lakay (Home).
History
Pre-Columbian era
The island of Hispaniola, of which Haiti occupies the western three-eighths, has been inhabited since about 6,000 years ago by Indigenous peoples who are thought to have arrived from Central or northern South America. These Archaic Age people are thought to have been largely hunter-gatherers. During the 1st millennium BC, the Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taino people began to migrate into the Caribbean. Unlike the Archaic peoples, they practiced the intensive production of pottery and agriculture. The earliest evidence of the ancestors of the Taino people on Hispaniola is the Ostionoid culture, which dates to around 600 AD. In Taíno society the largest unit of political organization was led by a cacique, or chief, as the Europeans understood them. At the time of European contact, Hispaniola was divided among five 'caciquedoms': the Magua in the northeast, the Marien in the northwest, the Jaragua in the southwest, the Maguana in the central regions of Cibao, and the Higüey in the southeast. Taíno cultural artifacts include cave paintings in several locations in the country. These have become national symbols of Haiti and tourist attractions. Modern-day Léogâne, started as a French colonial town in the southwest, is beside the former capital of the caciquedom of Xaraguá. According to the Puerto Rican historian Cayetano Coll y Toste, the German explorer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was the first person to describe the Indigenous peoples of Haiti as "Taini" (Taino). The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet has written that Martius described these peoples as "Taini...perhaps by mistaking the qualifier for an ethnonym".
Colonial era
Spanish rule (1492–1625)
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