A Cuban novel about Haiti gives world fiction the marvellous real

Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo in 1949. The novel follows Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte through the revolution and its aftermath, and it holds Vodou, revolutionary violence and European reason in one frame. In the prologue Carpentier set out what he called lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, arguing that the ordinary substance of Caribbean life already contains what the European surrealists had to manufacture in a studio. He had visited Haiti in 1943 and seen Sans Souci and the Citadelle, and the trip gave him both the setting and the argument. That prologue became the founding statement of magical realism, the mode that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a generation after him carried to the rest of the world. The line runs from a ruined palace in the Haitian north to a Colombian village to the international bestseller list. Haiti sent out a revolution in 1804. In 1949 it sent out a way of seeing.

Paul Magloire signed a Point Four agreement with the United States in July 1950 covering soil conservation, cattle, irrigation, drainage and sanitation. He took over the Artibonite scheme that Estime had begun and borrowed fourteen million dollars from the Export Import Bank, adding six million of Haiti's own, to build a dam at Peligre two hundred and twenty five feet high. Finished, it would irrigate eighty thousand acres and eventually deliver forty thousand kilowatts. He planned three hundred miles of road, including blacktop from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, and seven million dollars of new wharves at the Cap. All of it went into a five year plan costed at forty million dollars. Foreign capital was courted and some of it came, with Reynolds Metals opening bauxite mines at Miragoane in 1953. Magloire also broke the unions. He shut the Parti Socialiste Populaire in 1951 for striking against American firms, closed Fignole's MOP with it, and silenced both their papers.

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

Diederich explains how he came to be in the middle of this story. Sailing for the South Pacific, he put into Port-au-Prince, left the sea to hunt for a stolen camera, fell for the country, worked briefly at an American owned casino and in 1950 founded an English language weekly, the Haiti Sun. Stringing work for American and British media followed. He describes the period from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s as a time when the country had more than charm, and later contrasts it flatly with what came after, calling the seven years from 1957 a nightmare in which friends and colleagues were killed or vanished while he filed reports abroad, often anonymously, and censored himself at home to avoid joining the disappeared. The paper is also the source for many of the dates in this book, since he covered the arrivals and departures himself.