Dorsainvil tells the Haitian elite that it lives off the state

On 4 March 1909 J.B. Dorsainvil published a piece in Le Nouvelliste on the economic and social crisis and put a share of the blame on the educated class itself, which he said lacked initiative and leaned too heavily on government employment. The charge described a real machine. Haiti's revenue came almost entirely from taxes on coffee and other exports, collected at the customs houses. Whoever held Port-au-Prince held the customs houses, and therefore the salaries, the pensions and the sinecures. An educated Haitian who wanted a living had the law, the press, trade with the foreign import houses, or a place on the payroll, and the payroll paid best and asked least. Every change of government reshuffled it. That is one reason changes of government came so often and so many men had reason to want the next one. Dorsainvil was writing three months into the presidency of Antoine Simon, whose finance minister would shortly be complaining in private about the thieves around him.

South Africa needed African labour in the mines and needed Africans confined to the reserves when the mines had no use for them. The pass system did both jobs, and it also produced the earliest sustained organised protest on the continent outside Islamic North Africa. In 1912 a group of educated men founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923. Its reach was narrow at first, though it worked with Indian and Coloured organisations and laid ground for something larger. Mass action came from elsewhere. In 1919 huge demonstrations against the pass laws showed what popular participation could look like, and in 1920 some forty thousand mineworkers struck. That industrial strength made the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union possible, founded in 1919 and claiming a hundred thousand members by the middle of the decade. Internal splits broke it before the decade ended. The worker consciousness it exposed had been formed in the compound and down the shaft.

Between 1913 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Haitians crossed to Cuba to cut sugar cane. The wars fought in Cuba from 1895 onward had held the island's own supply of labour low, so when the sugar industry began expanding the planters imported workers, most of them from Haiti. Haiti had people and was running short of ground. Arable land per head was falling by the end of the nineteenth century, and Haitians moved readily when offered higher wages. Living conditions in the Cuban cane districts were hard, and the movement continued anyway. The depression stopped it. Prices for primary products fell, and Cuban population growth had by then rebuilt the domestic labour force to a level at which the Haitians were judged unnecessary. Repatriation began soon after. Those who stayed grew old in Cuba, and by the early 1980s the survivors were elderly men who had arrived as young cutters.

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.