August to December 1980 · Haitianspan
Hurricane Allen takes the south and nobody sends sympathy
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Hurricane Allen crossed the southern peninsula on 6 August 1980 with winds of 175 miles an hour. The population had four hours of warning. Les Cayes and Jacmel lay in the path, two hundred people died, more than 150,000 lost their houses, and the coffee bushes that had taken twenty years to recover from earlier storms were destroyed again. No wave of sympathy followed. Donors had already put a great deal into Haiti and did not care for what they saw. The International Monetary Fund had tied further money to demonstrable progress, and by the middle of 1980 the government had drawn almost none of it and was borrowing from commercial banks at commercial rates. The planning minister Edouard Berrouet explained the position to the Wall Street Journal by saying that Haitians were not angels, that corruption existed, and that one had to learn to live with it. That summer the state had closed Sylvio Claude's newspaper after a single issue. Haitians who could raise 800 dollars paid it to boat captains and took their chances on the Florida Straits.
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