Istwa Nou

Francois Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince on 14 April 1907, the son of a justice of the peace, and went to school at the tin roofed Lycee Petion in Bel Air. He was a small man, five feet six and about a hundred and fifty pounds, a physician and ethnologist who spoke so quietly that people leaned in to hear him. On reaching the National Palace in 1957 he took a single sentence as his motto: I am the Haitian flag, one and indivisible. Louis XIV had claimed to be the state, and Stenio Vincent had claimed the same thing in Haiti. Duvalier was claiming something else. The flag is the object Dessalines made in 1803 by tearing the white strip out of the French tricolour, the thing carried at Vertieres and raised every first of January since. To attack the president was now to attack the flag, and to attack the flag was to step outside the nation. Within a few years the regime had a word for people in that condition. Apatrides, stateless.

The American occupation ended in 1934, and the obvious comparison then was with 1804. Twenty three years later the better comparison was with 1827. That year had been summed up as general ruin. Dead fields. The bridges and roads left by the French gone, seaports decayed, the army rotting, politics deadlocked, noir and mulatre at each other's throats. By 1957 exports had fallen a fifth in a decade and were still falling. The roads and bridges the Americans built had ceased to exist. In 1934 a car went from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel in under two hours, and in 1957 a jeep took nine in good weather. The telephones were dead, the harbours silted and blocked by wrecks, the docks crumbling. Patients lay on the floors of stinking hospitals. The president-elect himself said the country was rotting in poverty, hunger, nudity, sickness and illiteracy. Heinl's verdict is that the Americans modernised everything except Haiti and the Haitians. Infrastructure had been laid over a society whose internal arrangements nobody touched, and it decayed at the speed those arrangements dictated.