The tragic island magnificence ready to reclaim its Caribbean vacation crown

Vacationers have flocked right here previously. Within the post-war interval the jazz golf equipment and casinos of Port-au-Prince have been rivalled solely by these of pre-revolutionary Havana. However in 1957 the lengthy darkish years of the Duvalier dictatorship fell over Haiti, casting a shadow it’s but to completely emerge from.

Haiti’s return to democracy within the Nineteen Nineties was a fitful one, punctuated by coups and UN peacekeepers, the 2010 earthquake that levelled the capital and killed as many as 300,000 individuals and final yr’s unsolved assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

It’s a bitter irony for the Haitian individuals, whose enslaved ancestors beat the French, British empires within the Haitian Revolution and ushered forth the primary nation on the earth to be born from a profitable slave revolt.

Whereas the present instability brought on by Port-au-Prince’s gang violence implies that the Overseas and Commonwealth Workplace advise towards journey right here – a undeniable fact that explains its place at the foot of our Caribbean rankings – Haitian civil society teams are doing their greatest to discover a well past the present political impasses. Once they do, I’ll be among the many first to return.