The boy in the palace did not want to be president

Jean-Claude Duvalier was barely five years old when his father entered the National Palace, and like most Haitians of his generation he had lived under no other president. Unlike them he had watched at close range how the thing was run. He grew up alone. His companions were a few approved children of Duvalierists, and he learned early that they vanished when their fathers fell out of favour. On hot afternoons he was driven to Clement Barbot's house in Pacot to swim by himself, and it was Barbot who later organised the 1963 ambush on the car taking him to school. He was an indifferent student whose teachers passed him every year because they were frightened. Around town he was called basket head. Schoolmates who once shouted the wrong words when he tripped over were warned never to do it again. He played the cello, argued with his father about the volume of his stereo, drove sports cars around the palace courtyards at ten, and took to motorcycles and hunting. He did not want the job.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

The Gold Coast was the colony British officials pointed to when they wanted to show that colonial rule worked. Between 1946 and 1950 it stopped cooperating. Cocoa farmers resented the West African Produce Marketing Board, which set the price they were paid for their crop. When the authorities ordered about two and a half million cocoa trees destroyed in 1946 and 1947 to halt an outbreak of swollen shoot disease, farmers read it as a government willing to ruin them without asking. In the towns the post-war slump brought shortages, high prices and restrictions that favoured Europeans, wages fell behind prices, and unemployment threw together two groups with the same grievance: young men leaving school with no work, and soldiers home from the war who found no reward for their service. A boycott of European trading companies in 1948 forced those firms to lower prices. Ex-servicemen marched on government buildings, rioting followed, and European commercial offices were attacked. The disturbances were small beside those in other territories. They were enough to make London start talking to nationalist politicians.

In 1954 a French construction conglomerate opened Ciment d'Haiti, the country's first domestic cement plant, and the government granted it a formal monopoly over both the manufacture and the import of cement. Total market control with protection from competition was a standard inducement Haitian administrations used to attract foreign industry, and it reliably meant higher prices for anyone buying a bag. The price of such a concession was often a large sum paid to the president personally. In this case the beneficiary was Paul Magloire, the Haitian president who preceded Francois Duvalier. During the 1970s journalists and some officials opened investigations into how the company used its position, and found among other things that it sold low quality cement at high prices inside Haiti while selling better cement abroad more cheaply. Every bag used in the capital for the next three decades came through that arrangement.