Washington sends forty million dollars and gets a survey ignored

Duvalier arrived with an empty treasury and decided that the United States would fill it. He found sympathetic listeners in Washington who could still describe him as a Caribbean democrat. He hired the consultants Klein and Saks for a 338,000 dollar survey of Haitian finances with no intention whatever of acting on it. By the end of 1961 he had taken 24.4 million dollars in outright grants, 7.2 million in technical assistance and 4 million in food, a four year total of 40.4 million, equal to two fifths of everything the United States had given Haiti in the previous quarter century. In 1960 American aid covered thirty percent of the Haitian budget, the third highest level anywhere in the world. Dedicating a coffee wharf built with American money in June 1960, Duvalier warned that Haiti had to choose between the two poles of attraction in the world, while his information minister suggested 150 million might settle it. At Punta del Este in 1962 the foreign minister gave a pro-Castro speech, then told Dean Rusk in the lobby that a poor country votes where its needs lie. Haiti voted with the Americans.

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.

Kebreau finished the job the same night. The cabinet went to jail along with twenty Fignolist organisers. At half past ten the next morning, with the guns of Fort National firing, the general told the press that the army had taken charge, that soldiers were the fathers of the family and not politicians, and that they wanted order and elections. On the night of the sixteenth the hammering on lamp posts started after the eight o'clock curfew and then turned into a sound people compared to the sea. Word had gone round that Fignole had been secretly executed. It was false. The slums came out anyway, breaking the street lights as they went, and the darkness was followed by fire. The fire brigade had its engines wrecked and its hoses cut. Fort Dimanche answered the attack from La Saline with machine guns. Then the army came in behind half-tracks and light tanks, firing into the alleys and into whole blocks of plank houses. This was the last time the poor of Port-au-Prince acted on their own account for thirty years.

When the supreme court declined the presidency for a second time, the Haitian army handed it to Major General Paul Magloire, who had been running the country since 1950. He declared a state of siege and dissolved the legislature. He lasted a week. On the Monday, businesses across Port-au-Prince failed to open. Bank clerks and schoolteachers stayed at home. The Duvalierist drivers association pulled every taxi and camionnette off the road, and peasants who had heard that something dangerous was loose in the capital brought no food to market. Magloire walked the length of the waterfront with his staff and a submachine gun in his arms. Shops opened as he came near and shut again behind him. He had no intention of shooting Haitians and everyone watching understood that. On the Wednesday he passed executive power back to the chief justice, kept his commission as a general, and set up in the barracks. Junior officers arrived with pistols to tell him the time had come. A transport plane was waiting at Bowen Field, and he flew south to Kingston.