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Istwa Nou

We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.

We keep marching.

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The 1900s

1 entry · 1 year recorded Anba Chèf

1955

1 entry
27 January 1955 · Haitian

Magloire addresses Congress and the Artibonite bill keeps rising

Peligre was projected at eighteen million dollars and finished at forty with no generators.

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The Artibonite scheme ran away from its budget. The Export Import Bank raised its fourteen million dollars to twenty one and then to twenty seven, and when the Peligre dam was completed in September 1956 without generating equipment the total stood at forty million against a 1951 estimate of eighteen. Haiti's debt to that one bank came to more than all its other debts combined. The presidency still had momentum. Magloire toured Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama and Puerto Rico in 1954, then went to Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress on 27 January 1955, telling the members that whatever clouds had passed between the two countries, Haiti believed its future was tied to theirs. Eisenhower asked him where he had collected his decorations and Magloire replied truthfully that he had earned them on the Champ de Mars. New York gave him a ticker tape parade in freezing snow. He never heard cheering like it again.

Paul MagloireDwight D. Eisenhower WashingtonNew YorkPeligreArtiboniteHaiti
Where this comes from Heinl, R. D., & Heinl, N. G. (2005). Written in blood: The story of the Haitian people. University Press of America.HT-WIB-000529HT-WIB-000531

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

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