1862-00-00: (Barbancourt Begins Producing Rum in Haiti, Establishing the Brand That Would Become the Most Internationally Recognized Haitian Commercial Produ…

1862-00-00: (Barbancourt Begins Producing Rum in Haiti, Establishing the Brand That Would Become the Most Internationally Recognized Haitian Commercial Product, a Symbol of Quality From a Nation the World Associated Only With Poverty): In 1862, Dupré Barbancourt began producing rum in Haiti, establishing what would become the most internationally recognized Haitian commercial product. The Barbancourt distillery transformed Haitian sugarcane into a spirit that competed with the finest rums of the Caribbean, a demonstration that Haitian craftsmanship and agricultural heritage could produce excellence when given the opportunity. The brand endured through two centuries of political upheaval, military occupation, dictatorship, and natural disaster, becoming for many outsiders the single positive association they carried with the name Haiti. The irony was that Barbancourt rum was made from the same sugarcane whose cultivation had once required the forced labor of half a million enslaved Africans, the plant that had built the colony and destroyed the people who worked it, now distilled into a luxury product for export.