Cement output falls forty three percent in the decade of development

Duvalier called his first ten years the decade of development. The United Nations found that Haiti was the only country in the world with almost no growth through most of the 1950s and 1960s. A rising birth rate pulled national product per head down by 2.3 percent a year between 1961 and 1967. The cost of living index went from 112 in 1957 to 135.2 ten years later. Agricultural output fell thirteen percent, electricity generation four percent, and cement production, which is the best available proxy for housebuilding, dropped forty three percent. Internal debt rose from 4 million dollars in 1946 to 52.1 million. Henry Giniger of the New York Times came to Port-au-Prince in August 1967 and reported that Haiti alone in the hemisphere showed no growth at all, that it was widely agreed the place had been better off two centuries earlier under French planters, and that plans to raise farm output began with putting roads and irrigation ditches back to their colonial condition. The regime advertised that year as Year Ten of the Duvalierist Revolution.

The Suez Canal had offended Egyptian nationalists since it opened in 1869, and Gamal Abdel Nasser meant to remove every remaining Western hold on Egyptian sovereignty. Britain agreed in 1954 to pull its troops out. Two years later Britain, the United States and the World Bank withdrew the money promised for the Aswan Dam, and Nasser answered by nationalising the canal company. Britain and France invaded with Israeli help and the operation failed completely. Condemnation was worldwide and the loudest of it came from Washington. London and Paris backed down. Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister soon afterwards. Nasser had won a victory for pan-Arabism, and Africans read it as something wider, the postcolonial state proving stronger than the empires that had ruled them. No European power had been humiliated on African soil on that scale since Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Within a few years Britain and France were retreating from the continent altogether. The remaining question was when Africa would be free.

Greene told Diederich in a letter of 20 December 1965 that a novel about Haiti was coming out at the end of January, and a copy reached the Diederich house in the middle of the Dominican civil war. In the prefatory letter Greene wrote that poor Haiti and the character of Duvalier's rule were not invented, and that the latter had not even been blackened for dramatic effect, since it was impossible to deepen that night. Diederich read it in one night and concluded that Greene had protected everyone concerned and had breached no confidence, and that the book gave the poor of Haiti something the dictatorship had taken from them, a voice. He identifies the models as he knew them, Jolicoeur as Petit Pierre, Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe behind the young Philipot, Bajeux as the refugee priest, and Doctor Camille Lherisson, a revelation Greene made only in 1980, as Doctor Magiot.

Between 1956 and 1957 a household survey covered the bourg of Kenscoff, the settlements nearest to it, and the higher region of Furcy. Every plot of land occupied by peasants was canvassed systematically, and only a few families who happened to be away were missed. The count was made in the months when no holidaymaker from the capital was present, so errors could be corrected on the spot. It produced 917 households: 468 in the bourg, 198 in the neighbouring communities and 251 around Furcy. Household size rose with distance from the town. The bourg averaged 4.5 people, the nearby settlements 5.8, and Furcy 6.7. So did the shape of the household. Father, mother and children living alone made up 47 per cent of households in the bourg and 74 per cent at Furcy, while widows, widowers, separated people and young men starting out on their own were 26 per cent in the bourg and 8 per cent at Furcy.