The Duvaliers take 265 million gourdes out of cement alone

Between 1968 and 1978 the Duvalier family took 265 million gourdes out of the sale of cement alone. The figure comes from combining Haiti's national cement production statistics with the distribution commission levied on every bag. Adjusted for inflation it is about 39 million United States dollars in 2019 terms. Those were the years of the building boom, so the money came from Haitians who were putting up houses. The mechanism ran the whole length of the chain. Ciment d'Haiti held the monopoly on making and importing cement, the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes held the monopoly on distributing it, and each stage added a margin that ended in private hands. The effect on the buildings was direct. Builders who could not afford the cement used less of it than the mix required, and the houses that went up during the boom were weaker for it.

In 1976 Port-au-Prince held about 638 thousand people, fourteen per cent of all Haitians and fifty eight per cent of everyone living in a Haitian town. Around the same period New York held about 300 thousand Haitians, while Cap-Haitien, the second city of the country, held 54,691. The same was true of the neighbours. Miami held more Cubans than Santiago de Cuba and New York more Dominicans than Santiago de los Caballeros. Across the Caribbean the capital swallowed the country: in the early 1970s a fifth of Cubans lived in Havana, a third of Puerto Ricans in San Juan, a sixth of Dominicans in Santo Domingo and a quarter of Jamaicans in Kingston. Two consequences followed for Haiti. Remittances from abroad became a support of the capital's economy, and the strongest opposition to Jean Claude Duvalier organised itself in New York and Miami rather than at home.

The American press reported that an American owner of a company in Haiti was buying blood plasma from destitute Haitians and exporting between eleven hundred and thirteen hundred gallons a month to the United States. The firm, Hemo Caribbean, had been operating for about eight months and was making four to five dollars a litre. It belonged to Joseph B. Gorinstein, a broker with interests in New York and Miami, who had signed a contract negotiated directly with President Francois Duvalier, dead by then since April of the previous year. The main intermediary between the government and the company was said to be Luckner Cambronne, minister of the interior and national defence. Haitians in rags and without shoes filed through the Hemo Caribbean centre six days a week. Donors received three dollars a litre. Anyone vaccinated against tetanus was worth more, because that plasma could be used to make vaccine, and received five.

Julius Nyerere spent the late 1950s doing two things at once. He built the confidence of the British administration in Tanganyika while turning TANU into a territory wide party with grassroots organisation as strong as any on the continent. London opened the handover with a multiracial constitution that gave the small European and Asian communities a voice out of all proportion to their numbers, an arrangement borrowed from neighbouring Kenya. Nyerere talked the settlers' representatives into supporting TANU instead of fighting it, and the party took a majority in the 1958 assembly elections. Independence came in 1961. Britain held Zanzibar until 1963, and within weeks of the island's independence African rebels overthrew the Arab government in a revolution whose violence drew on racial resentments a century old. In early 1964 Nyerere brought Tanganyika and Zanzibar together as Tanzania. The island stayed politically restless for decades, and every quarrel came back to its terms with the mainland.