Salomon becomes a martyr and noirisme acquires an ancestor

Max A. Antoine wrote about Lysius Salomon as a martyr, a president brought down for defending the interests of his class. Salomon was driven from office in 1888 and died in Paris the year after. The account belongs to what David Nicholls calls the black legend, a body of Haitian writing that assembled a line of black leaders running from Dessalines through Soulouque to Salomon and offered it as the authentic national tradition, betrayed at every stage by a mulatto elite. The purpose of a line like that sits in the present. Noiriste politics in the middle of the twentieth century, which produced the government of Dumarsais Estime and then the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier, needed an ancestry, and writers such as Antoine supplied one. History composed to authorise a current claim is still evidence, though it is evidence about the moment of composition. A martyred Salomon tells you more about Haiti in the 1940s than about Haiti in 1888.

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.

In April 1950 the Ligue feminine d'action sociale held the first national congress of Haitian women, at the invitation of the commission organising the bicentennial exposition of Port-au-Prince, with Lucienne Heurtelou-Estime, the president's wife, in the chair. It brought together delegates from forty four Haitian women's associations and thirty two delegates from seventeen foreign and international organisations, which had never happened in the country before. Alice Garoute, already dying, came in person on 10 April to present the register of women's grievances. In October delegates put the demands to several thousand people at the Massillon Coicou open air theatre, and on 4 November they filed petitions carrying thousands of signatures from both sexes with the constituent assembly, then went to Gonaives and stood watch for the whole length of its proceedings. The right to vote and to stand for election was won. Haitian women did not exercise it until the municipal elections of 1955.

A man named Toussaint was on the beach at Piquolet outside Cap-Haitien one day in 1950 when Saint Philomena appeared to him, standing on the sea and holding an anchor. She instructed him to carry her, as a statue, up the coast to Bord-de-Mer, a fishing village near the town of Limonade, roughly forty miles away. He did it. Her cult had been unknown in the country before this. Within a few years it was among the largest. Poor villagers pooled what they had and began a chapel for the statue, and President Paul Magloire, a practising Catholic and a native of Limonade, put official support behind it. The building was finished in the summer of 1953 and consecrated on 5 September, which Haitians keep as her feast, although the Catholic calendar had long placed her on 11 August. Devotion joined her to Lasyrenn, the mermaid of the sea.