Istwa Nou

Port-au-Prince dated its founding to 1749 for the purposes of the party, and the government spent six million dollars on an international exposition to mark two hundred years. A gambling ship was brought down from Miami to help fill the seats. The planning was poor and the money went astray. Edmund Wilson walked the grounds on opening day and found the Palace of Tourism shut, with visitors peering at murals through the glass, an aquarium with no tanks and no fish, and buildings that had barely been started. The takings never came near the outlay. What the fair did produce was Katherine Dunham and her Haitian dancers, and the first showing to a foreign public of the painting that would soon carry Haitian art into museums abroad. Vodou reached tourists through folkloric performance. Three years earlier Estime's education minister had staged Vodou chants at a university function and scandalised the Church, whose paper was then suppressed and its editor jailed.

By October 1949 the Haitian budget had reached thirteen million dollars, lifted by a good harvest and by the first income tax in the country's history, which Dumarsais Estime had imposed on an elite that did not thank him for it. Nearly five percent of that budget went on one project. Belladere was a small post on the road in from Santo Domingo, and the state rebuilt it as a model town with a bank, a theatre, a town hall, a restaurant, a hotel and a new church. There was no economic case for any of it. The point was to outshine Elias Pina, the Dominican town on the other side of the line. Rafael Trujillo watched the buildings go up and said nothing. A few weeks after the opening he shut the highway and sent all traffic through Jimani and Malpasse instead, and Belladere emptied out. Haiti had spent one twentieth of its revenue on a shop window that a neighbour closed with a single administrative order.