Istwa Nou

By 1977 the northwest was in its third year of drought. The reservoir behind the Peligre dam stood lower than at any time in twenty years, and the electricity company could give Port-au-Prince five hours of current a day. Soil stripped from the deforested hills washed out to sea and left a brown ring in the water around the coast. The public money went the same way. About half of the ninety five million dollars the government collected in 1975 went into accounts whose purpose the World Bank could not establish, and the tobacco monopoly took in some twelve million a year for the president's personal use. Le Monde ran a series about it titled Blank Check for Haiti. On 22 April, the anniversary of his father's death, Jean-Claude Duvalier put aside the prepared speech and addressed the country in Creole, announcing an ideology of his own, Jean-Claudism, which was to add economic progress to what his father had achieved politically. That summer the Coast Guard towed a sailboat carrying sixty one Haitians into Miami and the New York Times printed the photograph.