A wretched place on earth: the agony of Haiti, unending and worsening.(The Americas)

HAITIAN naive art often depicts landscapes replete with surreally lush vegetation, populated with friendly, smiling lions, leopards, and giraffes. When you know Haiti as it is, however, these paintings take on a different and much deeper meaning: They express a longing for a paradise lost, in Africa and in Haiti itself--a paradise that never existed, except in the imaginations of those who despair.

Such longing is understandable in a country for which today is always worse than yesterday, and for which tomorrow will almost certainly be worse than today. Idealization is an escape from a grim reality, and an even grimmer future: The painters' thriving, fruitful landscapes, for example, are a response to the almost total deforestation of the real Haiti. The land is bare and eroded; the trees have been cut down; the people have fled to the inferno-city. And when you fly from the Dominican Republic, which shares with Haiti the island of Hispaniola, you can see the border between the two countries from five miles up, green on one side, desert-brown on the other.

The hopes placed by the Haitian population in former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when he was first elected president, seem now to have been as extravagant and unrealistic as the canvases of the wishful painters. He promised the Haitian people that he would lift them from absolute misery to decent poverty, but even this was a dream too far. Haitians are now poorer and more desperate than ever. If they could, 95 percent of them would leave. Those who risk the trip to Florida in leaky boats are said to take le passeport requin, the shark passport: an eloquent testimony to their desperation.

Anyone who visits Haiti senses at once that this small and obscure country has a tragic history far more significant than its present unimportance in world affairs would suggest. Since its birth as a result of the first truly successful slave revolt in history, Haiti has symbolized far more than just itself: It has symbolized man's desperate search for justice in a world of injustice, and the African race's desire, long denied, to be taken as equal by the European race. In the preface to his eight-volume history of Haiti from 1791 to 1846, 19th-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou wrote that upon the conduct of the Haitian republic hung the world's opinion of the black man's ability to govern himself: that is to say, govern himself according to the standards of Europe and North America.

But of course there is an equal and opposite yearning: for the Haitians to be measured not by the standards of Paris or Washington, but to be accepted as the originators of a vibrant, syncretic, and valuable culture of their own. The populism of Aristide was foreshadowed by that of Francois Duvalier--Papa Doc--who, besides being a doctor, was an ethnographer who rejected the idea that Haitians should become more like whites. As Papa Doc's dictatorship demonstrated, cultural authenticity is a dangerous notion when welded to political power.

Haiti was born out of the most inauspicious of circumstances. Even by the standards of 18th-century slavery, conditions in Saint Domingue (as the French colony was known) were atrocious. The Pearl of the Antilles gave rise to one-third of France's external trade, but the wealth extracted from the plantations, principally in sugar, came at the cost of unparalleled cruelty. Slaves had to be imported every year to prevent a decline in their total numbers. When the example of the French Revolution finally led to revolt, a war to the death soon ensued: The first ruler of independent Haiti, Dessalines--who proclaimed himself Emperor and was then himself assassinated--decreed that every white (with the exception of some Poles who had joined the blacks) should be killed.

The country split in two; the north was ruled by King Christophe, and the south by Alexandre Petion. Christophe was so afraid of French attempts to recover its colony that he built the Citadel, truly one of the wonders of the world: a formidable and impregnable fortress in the Haitian hills, overlooking the sea, ...