The Devil probably could have cut Haiti a better deal than the French did … After being defeated militarily by revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, the French colonial powers who held Haiti demanded reparations in the form of 150 million gold francs in order to recognize the new, free nation. That number was later, generously of course, reduced to 90 million gold francs, or over $20 billion current U.S. dollars … [Haiti] did not finish paying off the “independence debt” to France until 1947… We use language, like the selective telling of history, to confuse things sometimes. So Haiti becomes “cursed” instead of shackled by a post-Colonial debt that no Western nation ever had to bear.