CAMBRIDGE: Seven hundred miles off Florida’s coast lies one of the most impoverished places on earth. Hispaniola was Christopher Columbus’s first stop in the New World. Just a hour-and-a-half flight south of Miami, we might expect that island to be a tropical paradise and a favored spot for offshore US business. But reality is more cruel.

Hispaniola is home to two nations. Haiti, on the western side, is the poorest country in the Americas. The Dominican Republic, to the east, is more successful, with six times Haiti’s average income. It too, however, experienced political and economic horrors until a breakthrough in the past decade. With President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returning to office in February, Haiti’s long cycle of poverty and violence could end, but only if Haiti and the US understand the lessons of Hispaniola’s tortured history.

Hispaniola’s impoverishment has colonial era roots. Europeans colonized the Caribbean islands as sugar plantations, ruthlessly bringing African slaves by the millions to work, and die young, on those plantations. Tropical forests were cut down to expand the plantations. Hispaniola suffered the worst fate of deforestation, soil erosion, and collapse of agricultural productivity, especially on the Haitian side.

After slavery ended, the once beautiful island could barely sustain the former slave populations because the soils were exhausted by overuse and erosion. Racism in America made conditions worse. America refused to recognize Haiti as an independent country until the 1860s, nearly six decades after Haiti’s slave rebellion successfully ended French colonial rule.

Countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic found themselves adrift, with uneducated populations barely surviving on subsistence agriculture. Their long-term needs required massive investment in health and education, as well as a shift to new kinds of economic activity. In the 20th century, profitable activities in the Caribbean included tourism, offshore banking, and labor-intensive manufacturing, especially of textiles and apparel and electronics. But the Haitian and Dominican dictatorships that ruled through most of these decades were incapable of attracting these businesses.

The Dominican Republic, despite violence, dictatorship, and periodic invasions from the US, broke through recently to embark on a two-pronged development path: expanded health and education and a shift to profitable manufacturing and services activities. As a result, the Dominican Republic became one of the world’s fastest growing economies in the 1990s, with booming investments in tourism and in labor-intensive manufactures.

In Haiti, however, misery deepened. America supported a series of brutal dictators uninterested in economic development. When the Duvalier dictatorship fell, America started promoting democratization in the mid-1980s, but violence ensued and the US imposed various economic sanctions. These chased away even the tiny levels of foreign investment that had come to Haiti.

Jean Bertrand Aristide, a leader of Haiti’s poor, won election as President in 1990, only to be overturned by a military coup in 1991. Three years later, Aristide was returned to power through the support of the US military, but America allowed him to serve less than two years, on the grounds that his election in 1991 was for a term originally scheduled to end in 1996. After a five-year hiatus, he has won re-election as President.

Haiti’s situation is fraught with peril. The few rich Haitians distrust Aristide. Aristide distrusts the rich because of their support for the coup that ousted him, and because of their traditional intransigence against reform. America’s political leadership is also divided. Despite Aristide’s undoubted popularity, he is viewed by many US conservatives with suspicion.

Centuries of violence and poverty could finally yield to social and economic progress if all of the key actors rise above their bitter fights. President Aristide understands that his real fight is not with Haiti’s tiny rich community but against mass poverty. This fight requires large investments to create jobs and well as financial aid from America and the UN to fight disease, illiteracy, and environmental ills. Aristide should, and will, endorse this two-pronged strategy of business investment and human investments in health and education.

Haiti’s elite should not view Aristide as the enemy. For Aristide’s mass popularity is not a threat to their wealth but an opportunity for reforms that can produce long-term economic development. The US should understand that Haiti cannot overcome its intense poverty on its own. Haiti requires urgent financial support to put children in schools, and to reduce diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS which now cripple and kill many. As Haiti’s first popular leader in decades, perhaps in history, President Aristide is the best chance for addressing these ills in a peaceful, effective, and democratic manner.

Haiti is an extreme example of how a cycle of poverty, disease, and violence reproduces itself for generations. The path of economic development is not hard to see, but to get on that path, impoverished countries often require the good will and support of powerful neighbors, and usually luck as well. Haiti’s luck today is to have a popular and freely elected leader. When countries with tortured histories get this modicum of good fortune, the rich and powerful should seize the chance to help them develop.