Haiti's tragic history

In the New York Times there is a helpful, but disturbing, Op-Ed piece To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature. Here is one extract:

At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue: the brutal predatory extraction of the country’s wealth by a chosen powerful few.