1957 to 1970 · Diasporaspan
More Haitian doctors practise in Montreal than in Haiti
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By 1965 Duvalier had won, and the country looked much as before. Time reported in 1966 that the telephones did not work, the lights flickered, the roads were holed or buried in mud, and business was stopping. A visiting African diplomat said that if his own country were in that condition in fifty years he would wish it had never taken independence. The ways out were the ones open to the enslaved in Saint-Domingue, death or flight. The new marronage was exile. By 1970 nearly 35,000 Haitians were in the Bahamas, and by 1976 there were 150,000 in New York City, with large communities in Montreal, Chicago and Washington. Rotberg found that by the middle of the 1960s four fifths of Haiti's qualified professionals were abroad. More than a thousand were working in the Congo. Over three hundred specialists went through the United Nations to jobs across Africa. By 1970 Montreal and New York each held more Haitian physicians than Haiti did, and Montreal had ten times the number of Haitian psychiatrists that Port-au-Prince had.
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