Istwa Nou

Two hundred thousand tourists came through the Port-au-Prince airport in 1973, and jumbo jets arrived from Europe. Early in 1974 Habitation Leclerc opened, colonial ruins rebuilt as a hotel with villas and private pools, promoted on the claim that the land had belonged to Napoleon's sister Pauline, who is not recorded as having travelled further south than Dondon. George Hamilton and Barbara Walters came. Nicole Duvalier said Haiti finally had something no other country had. The site had been well outside the city in the eighteenth century and was now surrounded by one of its worst slums, so guests reached it by battered taxi over broken roads and entered through high walls set with glass shards. A night cost a hundred and fifty dollars, roughly what the average Haitian earned in a year. A visitor returning after ten years found the telephones working, the airport calm, and people willing to say things they would once have kept from a priest.