Haïti

Called Saint Domingue by the French who took it from the Spanish, the western part of the island of Hispaniola became, under the name of Haiti in 1804, the first independent republic of the Antilles. An independence that cost it its sugar industry, one of the most developed at the end of the 17th century as it produced half of the sugar of the West Indies alone. Currently, only one distillery of size remains, "Barbancourt", but the country has hundreds of micro-distilleries producing "Clairins", artisanal rums that perpetuate an ancestral tradition.