A Port-au-Prince bank becomes the first Haitian multinational

Unibank was founded in Haiti in 1993 with its headquarters in Port-au-Prince, and in 1999 it became the first Haitian multinational corporation. Its offices abroad sit along the east coast of the United States, placed where Haitian populations are dense, because its customers on both sides of the water are people of Haitian descent. The pattern is a homeland bank with branches in the diaspora, which is the reverse of an immigrant bank founded abroad by immigrants. Money transfer firms built in the diaspora moved the other way. HATREXCO, which operated from Boston, New York and Miami, merged into Unibank. The Caisses Populaires Haitiennes, the Haitian credit union federation grouped as Le Levier, later partnered with a bank headquartered in New York. A country that exports people ends up with financial institutions shaped around the routes those people take.

At the falls of Sodo, far from the capital, Phyllis Galembo counted a crowd she puts at a quarter of a million Haitian pilgrims come to bathe in water held to be magical. Her photographs of the gathering are dated 15 July 1997. The pilgrims were shedding their ritual clothes in honour of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, who in this country is also Ezili Danto, the mother and warrior spirit. Under the falling water, priests and priestesses worked through the crowd with brooms, cleansing the faithful in rites that carried people into states of ecstasy. The scale is the thing to hold onto. A quarter of a million people at one site on one day, in a country of some seven million at the time, is not a survival or a remnant. It is the ordinary religious life of a nation, conducted at a waterfall because the spirits live in the water.

Average daily calorie intake in Haiti stood at 1869 in 1997, about eighty percent of the standard recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and below the figures estimated for the 1960s, which were 2140 in 1962 and 2000 in 1966. Life expectancy at birth was a little under fifty four years in 1998, an improvement on the figure below forty eight in 1970, and the gain came from sharp reductions in infant and under five mortality. The share of fifteen year olds who would die before reaching sixty rose for both sexes in the late 1990s and was the highest in the Western Hemisphere, at 340 per thousand for women and 432 for men. There were 0.2 physicians per thousand people in 1995, up from 0.1 in 1990, a figure that had been flat since the early 1970s and was barely above the level reported in 1952.

At a CARICOM summit in Montego Bay attended by president René Préval, the Jamaican prime minister P. J. Patterson announced that Haiti would be granted full membership. The application had been lodged on 10 May of the same year. Patterson called the decision historic and argued it would help build democratic structure inside Haiti through contact with sister nations. Others were sceptical. Jerry Tardieu described it as a dramatic break from twenty years of subregional integration built almost entirely on historical and political homogeneity and judged it more politically motivated than economically justified. Smith notes that Haitian membership raised the combined population from roughly six million to fourteen million, which made the single market proposal more attractive, and that Haitian intellectuals complained that the Préval administration had done almost nothing to explain CARICOM to Haitians. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that describing Haiti as a French-speaking country, as CARICOM's accession debate did, misstates the case, since fewer than fifteen percent of the population speak or comprehend French and proper integration would require formal recognition of Kreyòl as a CARICOM language.