A newspaper offers cheap blocks as the answer to Haiti's housing shortage

An article published in 1973 in the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste presented the hand cranked block press as an instrument of community empowerment. Its author described watching children and elderly people together digging up earth, passing the soil through a sieve, mixing it with a small amount of cement and water, and pouring it into the press. In under three minutes, the article said, peasants produced in front of the reporter the bricks that would shortly build their homes. The arithmetic in that scene is the problem. A concrete block takes its strength from the proportion of cement in the mix, and a very small amount of cement makes a block that will not hold a roof up when the ground moves. The proposal removed skilled labour from construction and removed most of the cement with it, lowering the quality of what poor families would live inside.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

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.

The play version of James's history was first performed at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Hogsbjerg contrasts its ending sharply with the 1934 script. Where the earlier play closed with the birth of a national flag, the later one ends with Dessalines toasting his position as emperor after personally betraying Toussaint to the French, and has the condemned Moise dismiss Toussaint as an old man with a dream of an impossible fraternity. Two other shifts are noted. The crowds are given even greater weight, with stage directions specifying that they say little but are powerfully felt at every critical moment, and the experience of women during the revolution is treated more directly. The editor accepts a contemporary judgement that the later play, for all its scale, lacks the earlier one's spark.