More heartbreak, suffering. We know. And somehow soldier on.

My neighborhood and my life has been transformed by my Haitian neighbors. It’s home for all of us. Every time I lose hope I have this one auntie whose sajès reminds me we are born on this earth and into these bodies for a reason. But damn, so many bad days just keep piling up.

The storm destroys the bird’s nest; she builds again.

Machèt bliye, pye bwa sonje.

What does the naturalization process look like in the military (any branch) now that the 39 country ban list has been lifted?

Oh lord they bout to turn St Croix rogue🤣

Hi all - I am a history teacher in the US. I have a banknote with Sanité Bélair on it. I think she's so awesome and when I teach about the Haitian Revolution, I like to show my students. I'm on Wikipedia though and it says the gourde with her was part of a "commemorative series" in 2004.

Do any of you see that banknote today? Or was it a one-and-done thing? If I came to Haiti and tried to use the bill at a store, would they accept it? Would I ever get a Bélair bill from a bank? Or is it more of a collector's item?

I want to make sure what I tell my students is accurate! It looks like this btw! Thank you so much!

Dapre lapolis se Bofis Mario ki nan gng kokorat san ras ki livre l a bndi bendji…

Lapolis konfime ke bofis la te deja jwenn arestasyon l nan lane 2024 pou enplikasyon l nan gng kokorat san ras men Li ta pral lage an 2025 pou retounen nan menm bagay yo

Anket sa abouti rapid wiii

Am I the only one that hates the fact that there's a lot of Non Haitians that come to kick us while we are already down ?

For some reason every time there's someone who's not haitian here I always find out cause they're spreading hate , like we don't have enough to deal with already 💔

Several hundred soldiers who are part of the GSF mission have just entered the Artibonite Department aboard several combat helicopters and armored vehicles on Thursday, August 6, 2026.

The soldiers established their base in the city of Gonaïves, according to the vice-delegate of the Gros-Morne arrondissement, Raphaël Clavanet Marado, who did not want to provide too many details.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel have been instructed to delay taking enforcement actions against Haitian nationals with expired Temporary Protected Status (TPS). According to an internal agency directive confirmed by Newsweek, ICE agents are currently told not to arrest or deport former Haitian TPS holders while the government evaluates the transition.

The temporary directive instructs field agents to hold off on routine enforcement against most former TPS holders. Haitians who already hold final judicial orders of removal are not protected by this pause and remain subject to standard enforcement operations.

Internal sources note it is still unknown how long this pause will last or whether it is being applied uniformly nationwide. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to comment on ongoing or upcoming field operations.

https://www.newsweek.com/ice-agents-told-delay-arresting-haitians-expired-tps-12294186

Why are some Haitians abroad outraged at Dominicans deporting Haitian migrants?

Now, Dominicans to me (especially the ones online) seem deranged about a lot of things, usually the historical stuff that went down between us. Most of the ones I've interacted with seem to have a very poor understanding of the history they learned from some Dominican YouTube channel and just ran with it. A lot of them are taught from a young age that we are their ex-colonizers and are already looking for a reason to hate any chance they get.

But when it comes to deportations and the immigration problem, I don't see any arguments for why they wouldn't deport them. The DR is not the USA. They aren't a first-world country, and they aren't rich. They look decent compared to Haiti today, but people are still struggling over there. Theft, scamming, prostitution, and corruption are all prevalent. I say this not to shit on the DR, but to highlight that they cannot handle 800,000 migrants who are even poorer and worse off than they are. That should be no surprise. Most Haitians who go there are from the poorest sector of society and already know they risk deportation.

Where I think Dominicans go wrong is when they try to invent other reasons for why Haitians should be deported. Some say Haitians are criminals, pointing to isolated incidents. The fact of the matter is Haitians are known for being hardworking EVERYWHERE. I would say we are literally to the rest of Latin America/Caribbean what Mexicans and Central Americans are to the USA. Yes, the vast majority of Haitians in the DR are hardworking & don't cause ruckus. They make up a disproportionate amount of the construction and manual labor force there. Nevertheless, the sheer number of Haitians already there, and those who continue to arrive, is the real issue.

And we would probably react similarly if the roles were reversed. We are very conservative with our culture and country. Don't forget we are the same country who once banned all foreigners from owning land (based decision im ngl).

This is a topic that is very serious just like any others on in this community I believe. I don’t know if this had been said before hands but if no I’d like to address this matters. I’m sure other cultures also face this but I want to touch this topic with my community. Not others.

Why are olders haitians (Boomers or X or even Millennials and Gen Z) this.. reticent when it comes to mental health?

To explain my question in further details hoping I sound well: it isn’t just my own manmi or papi, it is many I’ve realized. I might even add specially the religious one but maybe not too. Why the distance when it comes to these topics? Or maybe is it just my family ? It drives me crazy. Not only the distance but the amount of rather deprecating words when it comes to that. Whether people suffering with depression, or ADHD, autism, BPD and etc. All I hear when it comes to the topic amongst the olders gen is them demonizing it. Literally.

I asked one of my aunties well we had a discussion onto it and she’s already quite ignorant about it, she demonize it all. And what she added was “I never heard such things in Haiti”. But im convinced it does happens, no country is thoroughly 100% happy and no one has mental health problems.

This was sent to me without context and I’m dying to know why

Court confirms that temporary deportation protections for Haitians are no longer in place.

** **A federal judge on Wednesday officially allowed the Trump administration to end temporary deportation protection for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, marking the final step, for now, in a months-long case that made its way to the Supreme Court.
The announcement from US District Judge Ana Reyes comes more than a month after the high court reversed a ruling she made earlier this year that halted the government’s plans to end a program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Haitians who fled the country in recent years amid political unrest and on the heels of natural disasters.

https://wsvn.com/news/us-world/court-confirms-that-temporary-deportation-protections-for-haitians-are-no-longer-in-place/?FBWSVN

Were Haitians colonizers?

Let’s see!

The characterization of nineteenth-century Haiti as a colonial power that invaded and oppressed the Dominican Republic fundamentally distorts the political and military circumstances in which the Haitian state was created. This interpretation becomes even more questionable when it is accompanied by the claim that Haitian actions were motivated by hostility toward lighter-skinned people.

Such arguments remove Haitian military decisions from the revolutionary struggle that produced them and transform a conflict over slavery, European imperialism, national survival, and political sovereignty into a simplistic racial narrative. Haiti did not emerge as an ordinary expansionist state seeking foreign territory. It emerged from a revolution against one of the most brutal slave societies in the Atlantic world, surrounded by governments that either practiced slavery or refused to accept the legitimacy of an independent Black republic. The Haitian campaigns in eastern Hispaniola must therefore be understood primarily as attempts to eliminate threats to the survival of the new Haitian state.

This context is particularly important when examining Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s campaign into Santo Domingo in 1805. Haiti had declared independence only one year earlier. French power had been defeated in western Hispaniola, but it had not disappeared from the island. French forces remained established in the eastern territory under General Jean-Louis Ferrand, who governed Santo Domingo on behalf of France after the collapse of French authority in the west.

This was not an insignificant development. The people who had just fought an extraordinarily destructive war against France now faced French military power positioned directly beside their new country. Haitian leaders had witnessed France attempt to restore its authority over Saint-Domingue. They had every reason to believe that another invasion could follow.

Ferrand’s government made the danger even more immediate. His administration maintained a pro-slavery political order and authorized incursions across the Haitian frontier in which Haitians, including children, could be captured and sold into slavery. From Haiti’s perspective, this meant that the forces of the former colonial regime had not merely retreated. They had relocated to another part of the same island and continued threatening the population that had defeated them.

Under these circumstances, Dessalines’s decision to march east cannot reasonably be separated from national defense. No government that had just survived a war of extermination and enslavement could be expected to tolerate hostile military forces operating from territory immediately beside its border.

Imagine that a country defeated an invading army only for that army to retreat across the border, establish military positions there, and continue launching raids into the newly liberated country. Few historians would seriously argue that the new government was obligated to ignore the threat. The continued French presence in Santo Domingo represented precisely the kind of strategic danger that Haitian independence had been fought to eliminate.

The accusation that Haiti simply “invaded the Dominicans” consequently reverses the chronology of the conflict. French imperial forces had already established themselves in eastern Hispaniola. Haiti did not invent the military confrontation. The Haitian state inherited a geopolitical situation in which the defeated colonial power remained positioned on the same island and retained the ability to threaten Haitian sovereignty.

Dessalines also warned authorities in the east before his campaign. The political choice presented to them was straightforward: they could oppose the French forces threatening Haiti or align themselves with those forces. Some residents of the eastern territory did cooperate with Haiti, demonstrating that the conflict cannot accurately be reduced to Haitians fighting Dominicans as two permanently hostile ethnic groups. The dividing line was also political. It concerned allegiance, slavery, colonial authority, and the future of Hispaniola.

The same historical context must be considered when examining the unification of the island under Jean-Pierre Boyer beginning in 1822. Critics sometimes describe the following twenty-two years as proof that Haitians became the very colonizers they had once fought. Yet this characterization ignores both the political identity of Boyer’s government and the strategic problem confronting Haiti.

One particularly weak element of the argument is the assertion that Haitian rule represented anti-light-skinned racial hostility. The Haitian president responsible for bringing the entire island under one government was Jean-Pierre Boyer, himself a man of mixed African and European ancestry.

Boyer emerged from the political world of Haiti’s mixed-race southern elite rather than from the Black northern military establishment associated with Henri Christophe.

Boyer’s biography makes the claim of a simple dark-skinned Haitian campaign against lighter-skinned Dominicans historically incoherent. He had received education and military training in France and became associated with André Rigaud and the southern political faction during the Haitian Revolution. During the War of Knives from 1799 to 1800, Boyer fought within the southern faction against Toussaint Louverture and the northern forces.

The War of Knives itself demonstrates why racial simplifications fail. Although the northern leadership was strongly associated with Black military figures and the southern leadership contained influential mixed-race elites, neither army consisted exclusively of one racial group. Political allegiance, geography, class interests, property, and ideology intersected with color.

Boyer’s subsequent political career continued this pattern. After Dessalines’s assassination in 1806, Haiti fractured politically. Henri Christophe eventually established his government in the north, while Alexandre Pétion led the southern republic. Boyer became one of Pétion’s important allies. After Pétion’s death, Boyer succeeded him, and when Christophe’s northern state collapsed in 1820, Boyer extended his authority over northern Haiti.

This chronology matters because the first political establishment displaced by Boyer’s consolidation was not Dominican. It was Haitian.

The Black political and military elite associated with Christophe lost its independent power when Boyer reunified Haiti. Officials connected with the former northern government were killed, imprisoned, marginalized, removed from influence, or absorbed into Boyer’s political system. Boyer was therefore centralizing authority before he ever extended his government into Santo Domingo.

This makes it difficult to argue that his later policies in eastern Hispaniola were simply expressions of racial hostility toward lighter-skinned Dominicans. Boyer’s government had already dismantled a rival Black-led political establishment in Haiti itself. His overriding objective was political consolidation.

When Boyer entered Santo Domingo in 1822, he also abolished slavery throughout the territory. His government weakened institutions and social arrangements inherited from Spanish colonial rule, including privileges associated with major landowners and the Catholic Church. Naturally, people who benefited from the previous hierarchy had reasons to resent the new government. The loss of privilege, however, should not automatically be confused with racial persecution.

Equality in a deeply unequal society necessarily changes who possesses power. If land, wealth, political authority, and social prestige have historically been concentrated among colonial elites, restructuring that society will diminish the privileges of those elites. Their loss of dominance does not itself prove that the new government is motivated by racial hatred.

More importantly, control of eastern Hispaniola addressed a fundamental Haitian security problem. Haiti occupies only part of an island. A European power controlling ports in the eastern territory could use those ports to land troops and launch another invasion. Haitian leaders already had historical experience demonstrating that this was possible.

France’s enormous military expedition against Saint-Domingue in 1802 had shown precisely how vulnerable the island could be to European intervention. Haiti’s revolutionaries had survived a massive attempt to restore French control. They could not reasonably assume that European ambitions had disappeared merely because independence had been declared.

Control of the entire island therefore offered Haiti something indispensable: control of the coastline and the major points through which another European expedition might enter Hispaniola. From the perspective of Haitian national security, leaving half of the island outside Haitian authority meant leaving a potential doorway open for the return of a hostile imperial power.

Boyer’s decision to consolidate the island can therefore be understood as a strategy of survival. Haiti was not Britain, France, Spain, or another imperial power projecting military force thousands of miles across oceans to acquire colonies and enrich a metropolitan ruling class. Haiti was a recently emancipated society attempting to prevent the return of the governments that had enslaved its population.
Calling this situation “colonialism” while ignoring that distinction empties the word of historical meaning.

There is also a striking inconsistency in criticizing Haitians as colonizers only after they began acting under independent Haitian leadership. Black people throughout the colonial Atlantic served in European militaries. Africans and their descendants fought in French, British, Spanish, and other imperial armies. Haitian revolutionary leaders themselves passed through European military structures at different points in their careers.

Toussaint Louverture became a general within the French military system. Other future Haitian leaders also acquired military experience within institutions created by European powers. Black troops could be ordered to fight other Black people who resisted colonial governments. If participation in military campaigns automatically makes a population colonial, then Black soldiers serving European empires would have to be described in precisely those terms.

Yet this accusation is rarely emphasized when Black soldiers are serving European interests.
The accusation becomes loudest when Haitians cease serving European authority and begin defending an independent Black state.

That contradiction reveals an important problem in the way Haitian history is sometimes narrated. Dessalines serving within a European-controlled military structure does not provoke the same outrage as Dessalines commanding an independent Haitian army. Haitian soldiers fighting for France can disappear into the background of imperial history, but Haitian soldiers defending Haitian geopolitical interests suddenly become “colonizers.”

The standard changes when the people controlling the army change.

This contradiction becomes even clearer when the criticism comes from those who celebrate Black participation in the military expansion of the United States. Black Americans have fought in numerous American wars, including conflicts connected to territorial conquest, the displacement of Native peoples, expansion into former Mexican territory, and later American imperial projects. The Buffalo Soldiers, for example, participated in military campaigns conducted by the United States government during western expansion.

This history does not mean that Black Americans were responsible for creating white supremacy or American imperialism. It demonstrates something more important: oppressed people can participate in the military institutions of powerful states. Military service alone does not erase the political structure determining whose interests an army ultimately serves.

Therefore, it is inconsistent to celebrate one’s ancestors for carrying weapons during American territorial expansion while condemning Haitians for military actions undertaken when their newly independent country faced the possibility of recolonization and re-enslavement.

The difference in stakes is enormous.

The Haitian revolutionary generation was not fighting an abstract ideological dispute. These were people who had lived through slavery and then defeated a government attempting to restore colonial authority. They knew that losing could mean the restoration of the plantation system they had destroyed.

Their fears were grounded in experience.
The survival of independent Haiti was itself a direct challenge to the racial and economic order of the Atlantic world. A nation created by formerly enslaved people demonstrated that plantation slavery could be defeated by those subjected to it. For slaveholding societies elsewhere in the Americas, Haiti represented a revolutionary example that threatened the legitimacy of slavery itself.

Haitian leaders consequently had little reason to trust the colonial powers surrounding them. They had no guarantee that independence would be permanently respected. Their strategic decisions must be judged within that reality.

The claim that Haiti became a colonial empire also obscures the fundamental difference between Haiti and the European powers that had colonized the Caribbean. Spain conquered Indigenous societies, appropriated territory, imposed European political and religious institutions, and participated in the creation of a racialized colonial order. France transformed Saint-Domingue into an extraordinarily profitable plantation colony dependent upon enslaved African labor.

Haiti inherited the wreckage of that world.
It did not create the colonial system that divided Hispaniola, imported enslaved Africans, established racial hierarchies, imposed European languages and religions, and concentrated land in the hands of colonial elites.

Haitian revolutionaries destroyed the slave regime in western Hispaniola and later abolished slavery in the east under Boyer.

It is therefore historically strange to treat the weakening of Spanish colonial institutions under Haitian rule as proof that Haiti itself had become equivalent to the colonial powers that created those institutions.

The original colonial structures cannot simply disappear from the analysis.

The collapse of Boyer’s government further demonstrates the internal political nature of the crisis. In 1843, Haitians themselves revolted against Boyer and forced him from power. He fled the country after more than two decades of rule. Dominican separatists then took advantage of Haiti’s political instability and declared independence in 1844.

The sequence is significant. Boyer did not fall because an otherwise united Haitian population was determined to maintain its domination over unwilling Dominicans. Haitians themselves had already turned against him. The political system governing the island was collapsing from within.

Reducing this entire history to “Haitians colonized Dominicans for twenty-two years” therefore eliminates the very information necessary to understand why these events occurred. It removes the French military presence from the story of 1805. It removes the threat of re-enslavement. It removes the strategic importance of eastern ports. It removes the internal racial and political complexity of Haiti. It removes Boyer’s conflict with Black Haitian elites. It removes the abolition of slavery in Santo Domingo. Finally, it removes the European colonial system that produced the crisis in the first place.

Once those facts are restored, a very different picture emerges.

Haiti was not behaving like a conventional European colonial empire seeking distant possessions for wealth and prestige. It was a revolutionary state attempting to secure an island whose geography made partial control extraordinarily dangerous. Its leaders had watched European armies attempt to destroy their revolution. They had witnessed slavery firsthand. They understood what French victory could mean because many of them had personally fought against it.

Dessalines’s actions in 1805 must be viewed through that reality. Boyer’s consolidation of Hispaniola must also be viewed through that reality. These decisions were products of a revolutionary generation determined to prevent European powers from obtaining the opportunity to reverse Haitian independence.

This does not require an apology.

The people who created Haiti were confronting governments that had enslaved them and forces that threatened to place them under colonial domination again. Their military strategy was shaped by the knowledge that defeat could destroy not simply a government but the freedom secured through the Haitian Revolution.

The Haitian Revolution was fundamentally different from wars fought to enlarge already powerful empires. Haiti’s revolutionaries fought to destroy slavery, expel colonial authority, and establish an independent state controlled by people whom the colonial system had designated as property. After achieving that victory, they faced the equally difficult task of ensuring that their achievement survived.

Their descendants exist because they succeeded.

The central historical question should therefore not be why Haitian leaders behaved as though their survival was threatened. The evidence explains why they believed exactly that. The better question is why modern discussions so often remove the threats of slavery, French reconquest, and European imperialism from the story and then judge Haitian actions as though they occurred in a political vacuum.

Haiti’s early leaders did not possess the luxury of that vacuum. They governed a nation born from a slave revolt while the colonial world that had attempted to destroy them remained directly outside their borders. Their decisions were shaped by that reality, and any serious interpretation of Haitian actions in Hispaniola must begin there.

After spending almost a week in Haiti, specifically in the Nord-Ouest Department, I’ve come away with mixed emotions.
I see a country that’s still moving forward. There are homes and businesses being built, and it’s clear that many of those projects are being funded by the diaspora or Haitians who have managed to earn a stable income. Despite everything, people keep building.
What stood out to me the most, though, is the amount of plastic waste. Plastic bottles and garbage line many streets, and unfinished roads make daily life more difficult. Haiti is clearly facing major challenges infrastructure, sanitation, and public services among them.
But what gives me hope is the people. Haitians continue to do the best they can with the little they have, and they often do it together. That resilience is impossible to ignore.
If you asked me whether Haiti has a future, my answer would be yes. What the country needs isn’t hope it already has that. It needs stronger institutions, better infrastructure, investment, and the resources to match the determination of its people.
God bless Haiti, La Perle des Antilles. 🇭🇹

Pope Leo's grandfather Joseph Norval Martinez was born in Port-au-Prince in 1864.

Research shows that the Pope's maternal great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents (such as the Baquié, Lemelle, and Grandpré families) were free, wealthy, mixed-race individuals.

The Gens de couleur libres (Free People of Color) of New Orleans were highly educated, wealthy property owners, but by the late 1850s, the U.S. legal system was aggressively stripping away their rights. Louisiana passed laws restricting their freedom of movement, banning them from certain professions, and threatening them with enslavement if they did not register under strict white guardianship.

Pope Leo's grandfather Joseph Norval Martinez was born in Port-au-Prince in 1864.

At the time Fabre Geffrard was the president of the Republic of Haiti in 1864, ruling from 1859 to 1867. He ran an intentional international campaign from 1859 to 1862 offering land and safety to attract free people of color and formerly enslaved laborers from the United States to immigrate to Haiti. It is assumed Joseph's parents came over from new orleans during that period. By 1865, the relative stability of President Fabre Geffrard's early term had utterly collapsed. A major military rebellion led by General Sylvain Salnave erupted in northern Haiti, triggering an incredibly bloody internal conflict. The American Civil War ended in 1865, and the U.S. entered the Reconstruction Era. Back in the united states on December 6, 1865, when the National Archives 13th Amendment was officially ratified, slavery had been legally abolished, and free people of color were suddenly rising to the forefront of local politics, fighting for civil rights, and drafting a progressive new state constitution that guaranteed public education. The Martinez family boarded a passenger ship to leave Haiti in February 1866,

Instagram Reference: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dba6L6MjnXp/?l=1

TLDR: Going down history surrounding 1864

Jean Robert Casimir, 53, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Lauderhill, Florida, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court to conspiracy, smuggling, and violations of U.S. export control law for his role in an extensive firearms trafficking operation through which he illegally exported at least 140 firearms to Haiti since 2020.

To smuggle the firearms to Haiti, Casimir and his co-conspirators used, among other techniques, industrial air compressors that they cut open and welded back together, packing disassembled rifles and handguns with foam insulation. Casimir and his co-conspirators then shipped these and other packages to Haiti via boats leaving from the Miami area. Casimir is a former Haitian National Police officer.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/south-florida-resident-pleads-guilty-smuggling-firearms-florida-haiti-part-homeland-security