Comments by "Kim Jong-un" (@SupremeLeaderKimJong-un) on "The Decolonisation of the Americas Explained" video.

  1. Haiti didn't exactly...get independence on good terms. In 1825, the French demanded they paid 150 million francs as compensation, this was reduced to 90 million in 1838 but it put quite the dent on their development. Not to mention this forced them to take huge loans as well as the US receiving interest payments when it acquired Haiti's treasury in 1911. Haiti finally paid off the debt in 1947. The DR-Haiti border just shows the differences in their development. When you just look at the two sides, you can see that the Dominican side is much greener than the Haitian side. And this is because of many factors. There was a lot of deforestation in 1954 after Hurricane Hazel drowned many trees, and concessionaires stepped up their logging operations in response to intensified demand for charcoal on top of rapid population growth. The geographic makeup of the Island of Hispaniola is such that the mountainous regions tend to cut off the rainfall needed to grow crops and sustain livestock. The northeast trade winds that blow across the island often favor the DR. Compared to the DR, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture in Haiti is much smaller, as a higher percentage of Haiti's area is mountainous. There is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery. Haiti's semiarid climate makes cultivation more challenging. On top of this, the French destroyed the soil by aggressively harvesting the same crops over and over again. France wanted the colony to be extremely profitable. Not just sugar, but coffee too. Over the course of fifty years, a quarter of the colony was all coffee with the original forests cleared. They were also forced to export timber to the French as part of paying off the millions of francs.
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