A masons' union forms in 1946 and is gone by the mid 1960s

Skilled construction work in Haiti had been an organised trade since at least 1946, when a union formed with the aim of supplying consistent training and enforcing standards. Most building in Port-au-Prince was supervised by independent small scale masons known locally as bosses. They acted as foremen, mixed concrete and mortar on site, oversaw the labourers and trained the apprentices who learned the trade under them. By the middle of the 1960s the unions had been either absorbed by the dictatorship or destroyed by it, along with most other civil institutions, and those that survived worked as political organisations rather than professional bodies. That left no certification, no meaningful regulation and no way to enforce a standard. Two decades of building followed in which the quality of a house depended entirely on which boss a family hired and on what that boss had been taught.

In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the right of all peoples to choose their own government and to be protected from aggression. Educated Africans read it and asked the obvious question. Churchill was obliged to reply that Britain already looked after its imperial subjects perfectly well. The reply did not hold.African newsletters multiplied through the 1940s and their contents travelled further by word of mouth than by print, and the comparison being drawn everywhere was between fascism in Europe and colonial rule in Africa. Organisers took the charter as evidence that the system was weak and the philosophy behind it bankrupt. Roosevelt, anti-imperial by instinct, pressed his ally for a postwar timetable. By the end of the war a generation of young Africans educated in Europe and the United States had gathered around pan-Africanism, and at the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945 they stopped submitting petitions. The demand was the dismantling of the colonial empires and total independence.

On 1 January 1946 the student paper La Ruche, edited by Rene Depestre and Theodore Baker, greeted the new year as the year democracy would beat fascism, and printed four lines of verse: down with the Francos, long live democracy on the march, long live justice, long live the workers of the world. Within two days the editors were in the police station on the Champ de Mars and the paper was banned. Medical students walked out first, then the rest of the university, then the lycees, then children as young as ten, crossing the Champ de Mars shouting for liberty and democracy and against dictatorship. The Garde answered with clubs. On 7 January, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Depestre and Baker announced a new party demanding the release of political prisoners, immediate elections and a free press. On the 8th and 9th the government clerks struck, then the teachers, then the shopkeepers. Elie Lescot went on the radio promising drastic measures. On the afternoon of 11 January, Alexis and Georges Rigaud went to his residence and told him to go. He asked for time to arrange his affairs. Two hours later Fort National fired three times.

On 29 June 1950 the United States played England at Belo Horizonte in the World Cup. England had some of the best players in the world and the American side were part timers. The only goal of the match was a diving header by Joe Gaetjens, born in Port-au-Prince, who had moved to New York in 1947 and who turned out for the Americans under a rule admitting men who had declared an intention to become citizens. It is still the most famous upset the tournament has produced. Gaetjens went home to Haiti afterwards and ran a dry cleaning business. In July 1964 the Tonton Macoutes took him away and he was never seen again. His brothers had joined an exile movement against Francois Duvalier. No charge was laid and no body was recovered. The man who scored the goal Americans still talk about was killed by the secret police of the country he was born in.