Two foreign companies get the right to look for Haitian copper

Soon after Jean-Claude Duvalier took office the government signed contracts with two large foreign companies covering the survey and possible working of Haiti's copper deposits. Copper had been dug in the north on a small scale and never at volume. The agreements mattered less for the ore than for what they announced. Francois Duvalier had kept foreign capital at a distance, partly from doctrine and partly because few investors would enter a country where the palace could seize anything it noticed. His son's government advertised the opposite policy: outside money and outside technical staff were welcome, and the state would write terms that made them comfortable. That posture governed the next fifteen years. Aid, assembly plants and concessions arrived together, and the share of the proceeds that stopped inside the family and its circle became one of the standing complaints against the regime.

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.

Duvalier lay in state in a refrigerated glass case fitted with fluorescent light, his spectacles in place, his collected writings arranged beside him, twenty-two soldiers and twenty-two militiamen standing guard. The burial fell on Saturday 24 April, the day of Bawon Samdi, who keeps the cemetery. The morning was still and unusually hot; peasants said hell had opened its doors. Archbishop Ligonde and his bishops, all Haitian by then, sang the requiem inside the palace. Fort National fired a hundred and one guns, one every two minutes. Guy Durosier was flown from Paris to sing a hymn of thanks to Francois set to the choral movement of Beethoven's ninth. A judge of the high court called him the Messiah. Machine gun crews lay in the shrubbery at each corner of the palace in case the crowd turned. At the cemetery gate a column of dust rose howling out of the ground and blotted the sun, and the mourners ran.

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.