I felt compelled to repost this LinkedIn post by Korrine Sky, who’s a culture-first brand strategist & entrepreneur in England. I added links for more information. Scroll to the bottom for two versions of a spoken word piece based on the text.

Peace, MAA

They say Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
They don’t say who made it poor.

Haiti did what no other enslaved people had ever done.
It burned an empire to the ground.

1791 – the plantations lit first.
Then Spain. Then Britain.
Then Napoleon.

By 1804, the most profitable colony in the world became the first Black republic.
But freedom came with a price.
Not from God. From Paris.

1825 – Fourteen French warships appeared on the horizon.
Cannon mouths pointed at a free Black nation.
“Pay your former slave owners,” they said. “Or we’ll burn everything.”

150 million francs.
The ransom for daring to win.

That sum would be worth billions today.
France bled Haiti for over a century, interest stacked on extortion.
By 1947, Haitians had paid the equivalent of $20–30 billion to their oppressors.

The cost of freedom wasn’t just blood.
It was a bill.

For a century, Haiti’s future was wired to French banks.
While Europe built palaces, Haiti paid for its own chains.
Hospitals weren’t built.
Schools stayed empty.
The debt ate everything.

Then came America.
1915. U.S. Marines marched in.
They stole the gold.
Rewrote the constitution.
Called it “stabilisation.”
It was occupation.

Then came the Duvaliers.
A dictatorship wrapped in fear.
Foreign powers looked away as the Tonton Macoutes bled the country dry.

Then came neoliberalism.
1990s. Rice tariffs crushed. Haitian farmers wiped out.
Cheap American grain flooded in like a quiet invasion.
Dependency, by design.

Then came the UN.
2010. Cholera. Ten thousand dead.
Multiple investigations traced the source to a UN base.
The organisation initially denied responsibility.
Legal immunity shielded it from accountability.
Years later, they apologised.
But the damage was already done.

This was not misfortune.
This was punishment.
For being the first.
For being Black.
For proving empire could bleed.

Haiti isn’t poor.
It was robbed.
At gunpoint. On paper. In boardrooms.

It isn’t unstable.
It was stabilised for extraction.

They’ll teach you about the French Revolution.
The American Revolution.
But not the one that terrified the world.

This is Day 15 of Black History, Not White Lies.
Share it. Say it. Refuse silence.

Because the first thing they stole wasn’t the sugar.
It was the story.

Version 1

Version 2