Istwa Nou

Leslie Delatour, the finance minister, tried to restart an economy that had been drained for three decades. He closed the state cooking oil monopoly, was picketed by its sacked workers, cut the price of oil by thirty percent and got no credit for it. Nobody knew where the Duvalier accounts were. In the four months after the family left, roughly twelve thousand assembly jobs disappeared from Port-au-Prince, a fifth of the total, as foreign owners went looking for quieter workforces. Unions asking to raise the daily minimum from three dollars twelve to six dollars twenty four were met by men who looked very much like the old militia. In the countryside the section chiefs still ruled. Provincial ports stood open and smugglers poured in American rice, cheap enough to ruin Artibonite growers, who put up roadblocks. Namphy took to his bed with what he called extreme fatigue. Floods in June carried away bridges near Cayes that were less than five years old.