It’s true that Haiti is only modern country to be established after a slave revolt, though of course a system akin to slavery, the Code Rural, was soon set up by the victors. I don’t agree that the treatment was uniquely brutal. The Arabs routinely castrated their slaves, and historians estimate that tens of millions of Africans died in transit (John Azumah, in The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue, puts the figure at 80 million).
I wonder why you believe that the sanctions and the indemnity (160 million francs, later reduced to 50 million) were unrivaled? Many countries have had to pay crushing reparations over long periods, and in fact being in debt bondage to Western nations was, and sadly often still is, the norm for third-world countries.
No country can be divorced from its history, and no one has suggested otherwise, but nor can one pretend that the events of the two centuries since the Haitian Revolution, the decades of political turmoil, the US occupation, the long line of dictators and coups, and the general misrule and bad governance, aren’t more important.
Haiti’s initial conditions were bad, but other countries, including Paraguay that I mentioned, found themselves in a worse state after wars. Soon after the war, the Haitians were still able to offer Simón Bolivar substantial material support. They even managed to occupy the rest of Hispaniola and hold it under their sway for 22 years; indeed, they extracted a decent portion of the indemnity payment from what became the Dominican Republic. Curiously enough, despite this, the Dominican Republic is doing much better than Haiti.