Duvalier builds a model town while the people who build cities leave

Under Francois Duvalier the Haitian state built a small number of large projects: an airport, a dam, and a model town called Duvalierville laid out in modernist architecture as a Haitian answer to Brasilia. The showpiece was meant to demonstrate that the regime could produce a modern country. It could not compensate for what was leaving. Capital and people went out of Haiti through the 1960s in numbers no state investment matched, and the private building that normally shapes a city had almost stopped, because middle income and elite Haitians would not put money into property in a country where the state might take it, or take them. A capital whose physical form is made by thousands of small private decisions stood still for a decade. What Port-au-Prince looked like in 2010 was therefore decided in the years after 1971 rather than before.

Statistics kept by the Haitian Ministry of Education for 1964 traced how many children entering public primary school were still present at each later stage. The figure at the end of the sequence was 0.65 percent, which is fewer than seven pupils in a thousand of the school population completing the secondary cycle. The rate of enrolment was falling rather than rising. Between 1960 and 1967 the school age population of Haiti grew from about one million to about 1.8 million, while the number of children actually enrolled went from 249,000 to 300,113. What the school did in Haiti was mark a threshold. Passing through it meant crossing from the condition of a cultural laggard to the status of a civilised person, and the crossing was made in French, a language almost nobody in the country spoke at home.

In 1968 Michel-Rolph Trouillot left Haiti for Brooklyn to get away from the Duvalier regime. He was one of a great many student activists who went that decade, into a New York that was becoming the second city of Haitian intellectual life. He came from a family of historians and had grown up inside the argument about what his country was. In exile he trained as an anthropologist, and the books he wrote afterwards changed the terms in which Haiti could be described. Haiti: State Against Nation set out the Duvalier state as a system rather than a personality. Silencing the Past asked why Western historians had treated the Haitian revolution as an event that could not have happened, and it is now read in universities that teach nothing else about Haiti at all. He held a chair at Chicago and died in 2012. The dictatorship that drove him out produced, at one remove, the historian who explained it.

Hazel came up from the south on 11 October 1954 with winds of eighty knots. It struck the coast at Port-a-Piment, tore past Les Cayes, wrecked most of Jeremie, flattened villages, killed at least a thousand people, stripped forty percent of the country's coffee bushes, destroyed the new banana plantations Magloire had sponsored and uprooted half the cacao trees. Nan Mapou, a well off village near Port-a-Piment, was left as a lagoon a mile long. Help arrived fast. The Saipan was off the coast within a day, and money came from the Red Cross, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Guadeloupe and the United States, whose grants eventually reached nearly five million dollars. Some of it reached the people it was sent for. Visitors to the back country found relief stores stacked in army depots, prefectures and private shops for years afterwards. The word entered Creole with a second meaning. Mink wraps on the wives of officials were known as les Hazels.