1806–1816: (Haiti as the Arsenal of Liberation: Miranda, Bolívar, and the Debt Unpaid): Organizing his first and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to liberate …

1806–1816: (Haiti as the Arsenal of Liberation: Miranda, Bolívar, and the Debt Unpaid): Organizing his first and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to liberate Venezuela, Francisco de Miranda visited Jacmel in 1806, where Magloire Ambroise made him welcome and sent him on to Dessalines at Marchand — after Miranda had explained his plans at eloquent length, the Emperor snapped: “Kouté! To make a revolution and make it succeed, there are only two things you have to do — Koupé tèt! Boulé kay!” A decade later, in his darkest hours, Simón Bolívar sought and found shelter from Pétion’s republic: expelled from Venezuela in 1815 and made unwelcome in Jamaica, Bolívar and his followers reached Les Cayes on Christmas Eve, 1815, where they were warmly received and, on Pétion’s order, re-equipped with 4,000 muskets, 15,000 pounds of powder, flints, lead, and — most telling weapon of revolution — a printing press. Before Bolívar sailed again for Venezuela on April 10, 1816, he tried to thank Pétion, who replied simply that the best thanks he could receive would be the liberation of every slave in the Spanish colonies — and on July 6, struck off on his little press from Les Cayes, Bolívar proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Spanish America. (19) Scarcely had Bolívar proclaimed freedom when he was again beaten, and in mid-September he was back at Les Cayes, where Pétion helped him refit before he sailed from Haiti for the last time on December 28, 1816 — yet what Haitians omit when they tell this glowing chapter is that Bolívar never recognized Haiti’s independence, refused to invite Haiti to the Congress of American States held in Panama in 1826, and that Colombia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs bluntly asserted “great repugnance against maintaining with Haiti those relations generally observed among civilized nations,” while Venezuela did not even send a diplomatic representative to Haiti until 1874.