Assembly plants arrive to use the cheapest labour in the hemisphere

North American investment in Haiti rose sharply after Jean-Claude Duvalier took power, and most of it went into light manufacturing. Firms shipped in cut cloth, electronic components, leather and thread, had them put together in Port-au-Prince, and shipped the finished goods back for sale. Baseballs, brassieres and stuffed toys were among the products. What made the arrangement work was the wage, the lowest in the hemisphere, which the government undertook to hold down by preventing unions from forming. The workforce was mostly women drawn from the countryside into the capital, and the plants paid by the piece. Employment in the sector climbed into the tens of thousands over the decade. None of it altered the structure of the economy, because the inputs came from abroad and the profits left again, and the country still could not feed itself. When the regime fell in 1986 the factories left about as fast as they had come.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.

In the late 1960s, during one of the hardest stretches of the Duvalier period, Franketyen, Rene Philoctete and Jean-Claude Fignole founded Spiralism in Haiti. It took the spiral as its working figure: repetition, return, and a refusal to settle into any fixed shape. All three declined to emigrate, which set them apart from most Haitian intellectuals of their generation, and the movement rested on two commitments. The first was that the space and the culture of Haiti held enough material for any literature. The second was that a form invented there could be applied anywhere. Franketyen did not once set foot outside the country during thirty years of dictatorship. He described that confinement as the source of his writing, and said he made imaginary journeys through reading, writing and dreams instead. After Jean-Claude Duvalier was driven out, he began in 1987 to travel to the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Japan, Martinique and Guadeloupe.

From 1968 Haiti began taking in assembly industries. They worked semi-finished goods into articles re-exported to the United States, sporting equipment above all, along with shoes, gloves, clothing, toys, leather goods and electrical parts. Their profitability rested on cheap labour, tax exemption granted by the host country, proximity to the American market and a customs code that taxed only the value added by assembly. By 1973 the sector employed fifteen thousand people full time along with ten thousand trainees, many of them women working in the plants or at home. The nominal wage in 1971 was one dollar sixty for an eight hour day, against a minimum wage of one dollar, which still left firms saving thirty to forty per cent on their American production costs. Trade unions were repressed. The number of plants went from forty three in 1971 to two hundred in 1974. In those years Haiti became the largest producer of baseballs in the world.