1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan
Baseballs are sewn in Port-au-Prince while the land gives out
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By 1978 about 250 assembly plants in Port-au-Prince employed some 60,000 people making baseballs, clothing, wicker furniture and electronic parts for North American buyers, and one economist reckoned a third of the capital lived off that work in one way or another. New roads ran from Jacmel to the Cap and west toward Les Cayes. Club Med opened on a beach fifty miles north of the city, where guests ate imported food behind a chain link fence. The country underneath was failing. Plots divided among heirs and then divided again had become too small to feed a family, so people walked to the towns. Coffee exports in 1977 came to 450,000 bags, half what Haiti had shipped in 1910, and after the hurricane of 1979 cultivators began cutting down coffee bushes and mango trees for charcoal. The island that had once supplied Europe with sugar was buying sugar. In 1978 African swine fever crossed into the Dominican Republic, and the pig in the yard was the savings account of a countryside that had no banks.
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