Istwa Nou

Duvalier called his first ten years the decade of development. The United Nations found that Haiti was the only country in the world with almost no growth through most of the 1950s and 1960s. A rising birth rate pulled national product per head down by 2.3 percent a year between 1961 and 1967. The cost of living index went from 112 in 1957 to 135.2 ten years later. Agricultural output fell thirteen percent, electricity generation four percent, and cement production, which is the best available proxy for housebuilding, dropped forty three percent. Internal debt rose from 4 million dollars in 1946 to 52.1 million. Henry Giniger of the New York Times came to Port-au-Prince in August 1967 and reported that Haiti alone in the hemisphere showed no growth at all, that it was widely agreed the place had been better off two centuries earlier under French planters, and that plans to raise farm output began with putting roads and irrigation ditches back to their colonial condition. The regime advertised that year as Year Ten of the Duvalierist Revolution.

In August 1963 the International Commission of Jurists, based in Geneva, published its finding on Haiti. It said that terror had taken the place of law, that the country was now the poorest in Latin America because of the way it was governed, and that the regime of Francois Duvalier was strange among dictatorships for having no ideology at all. Its purpose was to keep the population paying tribute to the men in power. In September 1967 the commission returned to the subject and was harsher. Every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being broken as a matter of routine, and the president for life spent his energy on threats real and imagined while the country slid toward collapse. What made Haiti awkward for reformers abroad was that it satisfied their checklist. Civilian rule over the army, land reform, a national clergy, redress against an old elite: Duvalier could point to all of it while the people starved.