Istwa Nou

In early 1961 Luckner Cambronne launched a national renovation movement, and its showpiece was Duvalierville, a model town to be built next to Cabaret. Haiti had done this before, since Dessalines had renamed Marchand after himself a hundred and fifty seven years earlier. The construction was the smaller half of the project. The collection was the point. Businessmen in Port-au-Prince were assessed at five thousand dollars each to begin with and provincial firms at a thousand, while government clerks, soldiers, deputies and schoolchildren were signed up for monthly contributions. Tonton macoutes put tollbooths on the road at Cabaret to tax passing traffic for the fund, which is what Soulouque's men had done a century earlier. One contributor got his cancelled cheque back from the bank and found the endorsement on it was Cambronne's mistress. After four years of work the site held a handful of one room concrete boxes on a dusty plain, a cement playground, and a cockpit big enough to look like a coliseum beside them.