Coffee, sugar and sisal fall from 88 percent of exports to 46.7

In 1955 agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar and sisal made up 88 percent of the total volume of Haitian exports. By 1977 they made up 46.7 percent. Assembly plants in the towns grew over the same years, and yet three million four hundred thousand people still lived from farming, on holdings divided and divided again. The mechanism behind the fall was the marketing chain. Two separate networks carried goods from the most distant mountain garden to Port-au-Prince and abroad, one for export commodities and one for food eaten inside the country. On export crops the intermediaries, the importers, the speculators and the state took up to 50 percent of the value, which is why peasants lost interest in growing coffee, the principal crop. On food crops a very large number of intermediaries took 25 percent between them, and nobody attended to the food side at all.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

In June 1964 twenty five men trained across the border came ashore east of Saltrou under Captain Fred Baptiste. They fought in the pine forest and on Morne la Selle for weeks, ambushing the units sent after them, then withdrew to the Dominican Republic because the peasants around them were too hungry to feed anyone and their weapons never arrived. On 5 August thirteen young men of Jeune Haiti landed at Cap Dame-Marie. Most came from Jeremie and from families the regime called mulatto. Their leader, Gusle Villedrouin, was twenty four and the son of an officer Duvalier had killed the year before. They marched more than two hundred miles along the spine of the southern peninsula, fought at least ten engagements, brought down an aircraft and walked through a hurricane. On 26 October the last three died at Ravine Roche near l'Asile, throwing stones once the ammunition was gone. Their heads were carried to the palace and photographed for the newspapers. Duvalier then turned the militia loose on Jeremie. The Villedrouin, Drouin, Guilbaud, Laforest and Sansaricq families were marched through their own town and shot. At least a hundred people died. The government called it nationalisation.

The depression of the 1970s cut agricultural production and investment in Haiti. World demand for commodities was falling, and the Duvalier government had no agricultural policy that might have absorbed the shock. In 1977 the opposition newspaper Le Patriote Haitien, published by exiles, reported that seventy five people in the Northwest Department of Haiti had died of starvation and disease inside two days, and that a number of students at Cap-Haitien, the country's second city, had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The Northwest is the driest part of Haiti. When the same depression came back in the late 1980s it produced famine there again, and thousands left by boat for the United States and for other islands of the Caribbean. Pierre-Louis lists the economic crisis as the second of three things that turned Haitian migration into a mass movement, after the election of Francois Duvalier and before the drive against the peasantry under his son.