A fair for the capital's bicentennial launches Caribbean tourism

Destin identifies the international fair as Estime's most memorable commission, an exposition marking the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the capital, and credits it with launching tourism in Haiti and across the wider Caribbean. He places it inside a larger claim about what the presidency represented. Estime was the first black president after two decades of mulatto governments during and after the American occupation, and his election put an emerging black nationalist ideology into practice. His social reforms opened the civil service to a black middle class rising out of the peasantry for the first time in Haitian history, which Destin names as the lasting legacy. He notes that the movement of black intellectuals formed in this period included the man who would later rule as dictator. Destin adds that under this administration educators promoted Afrocentric views through the school system, much as elites had used the same system during the occupation.

From the 1950s the classical account of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution came under attack from several directions at once. One of them was the Atlantic thesis of Jacques Godechot and Robert Palmer, which held that the French Revolution was a part of a single great revolutionary movement running through the whole western world. That movement included the American Revolution, the Latin American revolutions, revolts in almost every European country of the late eighteenth century, and the revolution in Haiti. France was the most intense case and not a different species. Wallerstein notes that the Atlanticists kept most of the assumptions they were attacking, describing the movement as liberal, bourgeois and democratic. Albert Soboul rejected the thesis furiously, because grouping France with the west of the eighteenth century pulled it away from Russia in the twentieth. Haiti enters that argument as evidence, and the argument was never really about Haiti.

Britain, France and Belgium handed over power in their African colonies between the late 1940s and the 1960s, and even the transfers that went smoothly left the new states badly equipped. Schooling under colonial rule was open to a minority until the final years, so most citizens could not read, could not follow what their government was doing, and had no practical way to hold anyone to account. The men who took office had been pushed through training programmes assembled at speed once independence was agreed. Civil society, the associations and newspapers and courts that make a government answerable, had never been allowed to grow. Reid warns against reading the instability that followed as nothing more than colonial failure. The conflicts over who controlled land, revenue and office ran back into the nineteenth century, before any European flag went up, and they resumed once it came down. Colonial neglect made those older quarrels worse. I keep these decades on a Haitian timeline because Haiti reached the same position in 1804 and met the same problem: a sovereign state, a population kept illiterate on purpose, and a ruling class assembled overnight.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.