Istwa Nou

Three men agreed to run in the election the military council staged in January 1988: Hubert de Ronceray, once a Duvalier minister, Gregoire Eugene, and Leslie Manigat. Manigat was fifty seven and had written extensively on his country's history through more than two decades of exile. He had told television viewers that refusing to deal with the army was hothouse politics, since the army was there whether anyone liked it or not. On polling day the stations were almost deserted. Independent observers put turnout at five percent, the government said thirty five, and the appointed council retired to count in private and produced 50.27 percent for Manigat. He was sworn in on 7 February 1988, two years to the day after Jean-Claude Duvalier flew out, and looked small among the uniforms. It took him two weeks to assemble a cabinet, whose first instruction was to accept a ten percent pay cut. Foreign donors kept their money. Japan sent sixteen million dollars in vehicles.

Leslie Manigat took office over a state whose working parts belonged to other people. State companies were stuffed with patronage appointments. Officers ran smuggling across the Dominican border, where the crossings had become transshipment depots, and the traffic ran from rice to cocaine. In March a grand jury in Miami indicted Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, commander of the main barracks in Port-au-Prince, for drug dealing. Nothing followed. Haiti was never going to extradite him, and the United States had already cut most of its aid, which left Washington nothing to threaten with. Roger Lafontant, the most dangerous of the exiled Duvalierists, was two hundred miles away in Santo Domingo working on a coup. Manigat's own patrons made him close the Catholic literacy programmes teaching peasants to read Kreyol, which were working too well for the people who preferred them not to. Factory owners kept leaving and assembly employment in the capital fell another twenty percent. When fires broke out in the business district in late May, the army fire brigade arrived ninety minutes late.