We can choose our friends and associates, but unfortunately, we are stuck with the family we are born into - good, bad or indifferent.As a region, Caribbean territories are coupled by our common history of colonialism, slavery and thwarted development.Included in that common thread is the French-speaking nation of Haiti. Sharing the island of Hispaniola with its Spanish-speaking neighbour the Dominican Republic, Haiti has become the unwanted cousin.For the past few years, it has been caught in an unceasing vortex of instability, crime, poverty and lawlessness.We are conscious of the history of exploitation and under-development that has plagued the country since its majority black slave population staged the most audacious rebellion in the history of Europe’s bloody slave record.The 1791 rebellion that ended in the 1804 independence, a topic of which students in the state of Florida in the United States will likely never read about in History lessons, emboldened the enslaved in America that they too could achieve freedom from the torture of enslavement.
