A wretched place on earth: the agony of Haiti, unending and worsening.

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, that could have been constructed only by forced labor on a vast scale. The slaves had won their freedom only to deliver themselves up to another slave master: this time, one of their own number.

After Haiti's reunification, the president, General Boyer, was so desirous of French recognition of Haiti's independence that he agreed to pay an indemnity to France for loss of property, which indebted the country deeply for the next 70 years. The United States, which might have been the country's natural ally and trading partner, refused to recognize it for more than half a century, for fear that its existence might give its own black population unwelcome ideas.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Haiti became a byword for political absurdity and exotic brutality, with civil war after civil war and coup after coup, in the course of one of which a colonel uttered the immortal words to his soldiers: "Mes enfants, pillage in good order." One president, Soulouque, had himself elected Emperor, created 59 dukes, and--in an eerie anticipation of the coronation of the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic--spent a huge amount on his own crown and imperial paraphernalia. At the time, it was regarded as proof--if any were needed--that the black man could not reliably govern himself, and needed white tutelage. In 1884, the former British ambassador to Haiti, Sir Spenser St John, published a book full of agreeably lurid stories of "vaudoux and cannibalism," entitled Hayti or The Black Republic, which starts:

   Whilst in Port-au-Prince, a Spanish colleague
   once remarked to me, "Mon ami,
   if we could return to Hayti fifty years
   hence, we should find the negresses
   cooking their bananas on the site of
   these warehouses." ... The negresses
   are in fact already cooking their bananas
   amid the ruins of the best houses of the
   capital ... The country has ... been
   steadily falling to the rear in the race of
   civilisation ... Foreigners, nearly ruined
   by their losses during the constant civil
   disturbances, are withdrawing from the
   republic, and capital is following them;
   and with their withdrawal, the country
   must sink still lower. A country in ruins,
   civil disturbances, flight of capital: it all
   sounds very familiar.

The American occupation from 1915 to 1934 brought improvements to Haiti's infrastructure, but the country's political history since then has not been encouraging: New roads and hospitals do not add up to a new political culture. The old fault lines of Haitian society, which emerged once the revolutionary effort had been successful, remain as deep as ever: between the mulattos who control commerce, a rich black class opposed to them, and the great majority of impoverished peasants (many now town-dwellers). The black elite woos them from time to time in its struggle with the mulattos, as Papa Doc wooed the same elite; otherwise, the peasants are disregarded.

The human condition of Haiti grows ever more frantically desperate. It is not so much that the country is actually poorer in absolute terms than it was--for it was always very poor--or that (for example) the life expectancy of Haitians is much lower than before. The historically new quality of Haiti's desperation is the population's awareness of wealth and abundance elsewhere, thanks to the media of mass communication to which even the poorest people in the world now have access. If you read Haitian literature of the 20th century, it grows ever more angry and despairing as the century progresses, as the awareness that things could be different increases, although it is unlikely that poverty in the absolute actually worsened as the century progressed. If you look at the pictures of Haitians in our newspapers, they are better or more expensively dressed than they would have been years ago, but the human quality of their lives has declined catastrophically. Modernization without prosperity has transformed poverty into absolute misery.

Mr. Daniels is the author of many books, particularly about the Third World.