Istwa Nou

The day Paul Magloire flew out, construction stopped on the new slaughterhouse in Port-au-Prince. No order was given. The site simply went quiet, and the rusting frame stood there for years while government after government refused to touch a predecessor's project or even move the building materials stacked at the curb since 1956. Six years of spending, roads, hotels and public display evaporated at the same speed. What followed was nine months of provisional regimes that decided nothing. Within half a year Haiti went through five governments. Leslie Manigat listed the forms the country managed to exhaust: collegial government, provisional military government, provisional constitutional presidency, provisional revolutionary presidency, and a constituent assembly, the whole nineteenth century replayed at speed. The short-lived governments of 1911 to 1915 had at least been fighting over control of the country. These were surface weather. Underneath, four serious candidates competed for the succession, Louis Dejoie, Clement Jumelle, Daniel Fignole and Francois Duvalier, and the army that would normally have settled the matter was split into factions of its own.

Louis Dejoie was a rich mulatre planter and dealer in essential oils with land around Les Cayes and Jacmel, the choice of the elite, of the South, and of one faction in the army. Clement Jumelle was a self-made noir from the Artibonite educated at Fisk and Chicago, finance minister under Magloire, a believer in planning who had once been Francois Duvalier's superior and had hidden him when he was on the run in 1954. Daniel Fignole was a Port-au-Prince labour organiser whose urban following could paralyse the capital at will and had never converted that into national power, a speaker in Creole so sharp that people later heard Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the echo of it. Duvalier was a physician and ethnologist, spokesman of the griots and the folklorists, and he presented himself as the heir of Dumarsais Estime. Two of the four called their candidacies revolutionary. Dejoie found the word repellent and Jumelle found it beside the point. Three colonels stood behind them, Cantave, Armand and Kebreau.