As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles<\/strong> to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.<\/p>\n By <\/span>Catherine Porter,\u00a0<\/span>Constant M\u00e9heut,\u00a0<\/span>Matt Apuzzo<\/span> and Selam Gebrekidan<\/span><\/p>\n DONDON, Haiti \u2014 Adrienne Present steps into the thin forest beside her house and plucks the season\u2019s first coffee cherries, shining like red marbles in her hands.<\/p>\n The harvest has begun.<\/p>\n Each morning, she lights a coal fire on the floor of her home in the dark. Electricity has never come to her patch of northern Haiti.<\/p>\n She sets out a pot of water, fetched from the nearest source \u2014 a mountain spring sputtering into a farmer\u2019s field. Then she adds the coffee she has dried, winnowed, roasted and pounded into powder with a large mortar called a pilon<\/em>, the way she was taught as a child.<\/p>\n Coffee has been the fulcrum of life here for almost three centuries, since enslaved people cut the first French coffee plantations into the mountainsides. Back then, this was not Haiti, but Saint-Domingue \u2014 the biggest supplier of coffee and sugar consumed in Parisian kitchens and Hamburg coffee houses. The colony made many French families fabulously rich. It was also, many historians say, the world\u2019s most brutal.<\/p>\n Ms. Present\u2019s ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the modern world\u2019s first successful slave revolution in 1791 and establishing an independent nation in 1804 \u2014 decades before Britain outlawed slavery or the Civil War broke out in America.<\/p>\n But for generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany\u2019s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the \u201cbutcher of the Commune\u201d for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.<\/p>\n The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present\u2019s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Cr\u00e9dit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti\u2019s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe\u2019s largest financial conglomerates.<\/p>\n Haiti\u2019s riches lured Wall Street, too, delivering big margins for the institution that ultimately became Citigroup. It elbowed out the French and helped spur the American invasion of Haiti \u2014 one of the longest military occupations in United States history.<\/p>\n Yet most coffee farmers in Ms. Present\u2019s patch of Haiti have never had running water or septic tanks. They have crude outhouses and cook their diri ak pwa<\/em> \u2014 rice and beans \u2014 over campfires. <\/span>They deliver their coffee harvests on the backs of thin horses with palm-leaf saddles and rope reins, or hoist the loads on their heads to carry them, by foot, for miles on dirt roads.<\/p>\n Many, like Ms. Present\u2019s husband, Jean Pierrelus Valcin, can\u2019t read, having never \u201csat on a school bench,\u201d as the Haitian Creole saying goes. All six of the couple\u2019s children started school, but none finished, given the steep fees charged in Haiti, where the vast majority of education is private because the country never built more than a tiny public school system.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is nothing here,\u201d said Mr. Valcin, who is losing his eyesight but can\u2019t afford to visit a specialist. \u201cOur children have to leave the country to find jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n He used a term you hear often in Haiti \u2014 miz\u00e8<\/em>. More than poverty, it means misery.<\/p>\n Violence. Tragedy. Hunger. Underdevelopment. These bywords have clung to Haiti for more than a century. Kidnappings. Outbreaks. Earthquakes. The president assassinated \u2014 this time in his bedroom.<\/p>\n How is it possible, many ask, that Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, with its underground subway system,health care coverage, public schools, teeming resorts and impressive stretches of economic growth?<\/p>\n Corruption is the usual explanation, and not without reason: Haiti\u2019s leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain, legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world.<\/p>\n But another story is rarely taught or acknowledged: The first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their freedom yet again \u2014 in cash.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/10\/01\/reader-center\/author-catherine-porter\/author-catherine-porter-thumbLarge.png\")
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