Istwa Nou

Mexico sold oil to Haiti at concessionary prices to help the country. Some of it was sold on to South Africa, which was short of petroleum and paying well, and the seven million dollars of profit failed to reach Ernest Bennett only because Interpol guessed what was going on. Bennett was the president's father in law, once jailed by Francois Duvalier for shady dealing, and by 1981 he had a hand in everything: an airline consisting of one leased jet that ran freight to Miami exempt from the export taxes which carried the state, and what remained of the coffee crop after Hurricane Allen, bought cheap from ruined cultivators and held until world prices rose, since he alone had the credit to wait. His daughter routinely overspent an allowance of 100,000 dollars a month. She also wanted the title. The deputies duly resolved that the president's wife would be First Lady and that Francois Duvalier's widow would be First Lady of the Revolution. Simone Ovide Duvalier's mother, who had refused to bless the marriage, died a month after that.

Jimmy Carter lost the American election of November 1980 and the Duvaliers held a party. Within weeks the government expelled some forty journalists to Miami, among them Marc Garcia of Radio Metropole, on the understanding that visas home would be issued once they had reflected. The reporters who stayed wrote more carefully. Then the figures got out. Foreign exchange reserves had fallen by about 40 million dollars in a year, and 20 million of that was said to have gone on the new first lady's shopping trips abroad. The gourde, fixed at five to the dollar for as long as anyone could remember, began to trade at six and at seven. None of this cost the regime anything. Meeting the donor governments, the planning minister Edouard Berrouet picked up a hand bell and rang it through the speech of a departing Carter appointee who had started on human rights, telling him the subject was not acceptable and to move to the technical part. The donors then raised Haiti's aid by twenty percent, to 170 million dollars for 1981.