But if there were ever a model of how not to construct a human society, this Caribbean republic, with generous assistance from the old colonial powers of Europe and United States, takes line honours here, too.
By the time Dr Francois Duvalier entered the fray in 1957, a couple of hundred years after the first wave of European intervention, Haiti had suffered just about every indignity ever contrived by mankind.
Born out of violent revolution in the late 18th century, and declaring its independence from France at the very beginning of the 19th, the island nation formerly known as Sainte-Domingue, went downhill from there.
The legacy of piracy, which had accompanied its earliest European colonisation, and the inhuman predations of the slave trade which would ultimately repopulate the island with African stock seemed to have become stitched into its DNA.
In addition to a procession of revolts and coups d'etat, greed, corruption, cruelty and violence eventually became the hallmark of just about every administration that occupied Port-au-Prince, as if a reversion to type were always just a political tremor away.
The world's first black republic won its freedom in 1804, but it spent the next century and a half paying for it - literally.
By some accounts, its reparations to former colonial master France began in 1825 and went on until 1947.
To accommodate the sums, it took out huge loans from the US and other Western country banks at rapacious interest rates, so that by the turn of the 20th century it was deeply in hock.
Its economy eventually crumbled under the weight of compounding debt burden, and the avarice of a succession of leaders who came to see power as a pathway to personal wealth and hoarded for themselves whatever reserves were left over when the interest bill had been paid.
But even by the dire standards of all that had gone before, Dr Duvalier, infamously known as "Papa Doc", raised the art of rule by fear, by corruption and graft, by torture, rape and murder, to new heights.
Some time in the summer of 1969 or 1970, I flew into Port-au-Prince, a very nervous young man in short trousers.
By a fortuitous combination of circumstances I found myself being schooled in New Zealand and spending the Christmas holidays at home in the Caribbean.
One year the route was via Haiti.
At the time I was immersed in The Comedians, a novel by Graham Greene, set in Haiti amid the regime of Papa Doc and his hand-picked private army of Tonton Macoutes - comprising among their number, according to local folklore, a number of "zombies" raised from the dead.
Greene's book oozed menace, and induced a wildly palpitating sense of paranoia in a skinny young white kid who reckoned himself too young to die, for belatedly, it had come to my attention that this work, whatever its literary merits, was not on the Haitian dictator's personal best list.
In fact it was at the top of his worst - and woe betide anyone found reading it.
Landing at Port-au-Prince I found myself nursing an excruciating dilemma: hide the book near my seat and risk being found out when the aircraft was cleaned; make a last minute dash to the lavatory and attempt to flush it into oblivion; or shove it deep into my carry-on bag and hope - no, pray - I wasn't searched during the transit stop.
The last course prevailed and there ensued a couple of the most uncomfortable hours ever spent anywhere in an airport lounge, policed as it was by gun-toting Tonton Macoutes who, to a man, wore berets and dark glasses and blank stares that made you feel as permeable as a ghost.
During his reign, and that of his son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), which together lasted 28 years, it's estimated up to 60,000 Haitians were murdered and countless others tortured and raped by the infamous Tonton Macoutes, while the Duvaliers, pere et fils, salted away billions of aid money.
And what was the United States and the West doing at the time?
Turning a blind eye to the regime as long as the loans were being repaid and Cuban-style communism didn't take hold?
While the country's more recent history could not be any worse, arguably it has not been a great deal better, either.
Last week's quake has visited unspeakable tragedy on Haiti.
Thankfully, aid is finally getting through.
As disaster and development experts warn, it is going to take a superhuman effort to alleviate the immediate suffering and a truly massive and sustained commitment to put the country back on its feet.
Confronted by its dark and brutal history, one school of thought might suggest that perhaps the world owes it that - at least.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
