1947–1949: (Haiti as Laboratory: Ernest Chauvet’s Pitch, Trygve Lie’s Delight, and the 327-Page Report That Russell Could Have Dictated Any Friday Afternoon)…

1947–1949: (Haiti as Laboratory: Ernest Chauvet’s Pitch, Trygve Lie’s Delight, and the 327-Page Report That Russell Could Have Dictated Any Friday Afternoon): Looming on the horizon like a giant mapou, what looked like a newfound money tree beckoned. While the United Nations was still in temporary quarters at Lake Success in 1947, Ernest Chauvet, Haiti’s delegate, convinced Secretary General Trygve Lie that the UN should adopt Haiti as its laboratory model, a demonstration of how it was prepared to tackle the problems of technical aid to underdeveloped countries. Lie was delighted — announcing that Chauvet’s request had given the UN its very first opportunity to make a test case, the secretary general mobilized experts in health, agriculture, education, public administration, and finance, who deployed south as the fine fall weather set in. The era of solving Haiti’s problems by foreign survey team had dawned. Manfully the experts wrought, surveying from Cap to Cayes, plumbing offshore waters, poking into schools, and discovering that university French enunciated with a Scandinavian accent conveyed little to peasant coffee-growers back of Grand-Goâve. The result, a year later, was 327 pages of what was wrong and what needed doing — malaria, yaws, tuberculosis, and parasites must be eliminated, twenty-six separate agricultural recommendations covered the top priorities, mining should be pressed despite Haiti’s dearth of minerals, hydroelectric power should be developed alongside windmills, swamps should be turned into fishponds, and the educational system should be reorganized. In these recommendations — save perhaps for the fishponds and windmills — the UN report was one General Russell could have dictated any Friday afternoon; attaining these results, as Russell could have explained, was another matter. When the question of money came up in late 1948, the Haitian government was dumbfounded to learn that the UN really had none — perhaps the United States would like to finance it all, or the Ex-Im Bank, or the IMF, or the Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but when smitten, none of these rocks gushed forth. The UN test case — a 327-page diagnosis of Haiti’s pathologies that prescribed solutions identical to those the American occupation had attempted two decades earlier, produced by experts who could not communicate with the population they studied, and offered without the funds to implement a single recommendation — captured the structural absurdity that would define the international community’s relationship with Haiti for the next seven decades: the endless production of knowledge about Haiti’s problems substituting for the political will to address them.