Istwa Nou

Haiti received state visits in these years. Hector Trujillo, brother of the Dominican dictator, came for four days in April 1952. Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua followed. In November 1954 William Tubman of Liberia became the first African head of state to visit Haiti. Sir Hugh Foot arrived from Jamaica in February 1954, the first governor of that island to set foot in Haiti since Henry Morgan was shipwrecked and jailed there 279 years before, and he bent his waltz to the meringue. Foreign writers had begun coming under Estime and now the fashionable crowd followed, with the Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread house the marines had used as a hospital, becoming the place they stayed. Noel Coward, Truman Capote and Graham Greene all passed through it. The world economy paid for the party. By the end of 1954 tourism had tripled since 1950, coffee exports were rising twenty percent a year, the Korean War lifted sisal, and a cement works, a flour mill and a shoe factory opened.

Haiti spent the first four days of 1954 marking a hundred and fifty years of independence. Guns opened the celebration at dawn on 1 January at Gonaives, where the largest Te Deum since 1934 was sung in the new cathedral. Magloire unveiled an obelisk and General Levelt read out the original declaration of independence, with its instruction that the skin of a Frenchman serve for parchment, his blood for ink and his skull for an inkwell. The presidential party went on by way of Breda, where Toussaint was born, to Cap-Haitien. On the third day the battle of Vertieres was staged on the ground where it happened, with cadets and soldiers in costume firing blanks. When the French side pushed the Haitians back, the watching peasants rose with a shout and ran into the Haitian ranks to settle it. That night Marian Anderson sang for seven hundred guests on the lit esplanade of Sans Souci. The ball on 4 January held three thousand.