1949–1950: (The Exposition That Wasn’t Ready: Port-au-Prince’s Bicentennial, the $6 Million Fiasco, the Gambling Ship from Miami, and Edmund Wilson’s Empty P…

1949–1950: (The Exposition That Wasn’t Ready: Port-au-Prince’s Bicentennial, the $6 Million Fiasco, the Gambling Ship from Miami, and Edmund Wilson’s Empty Pavilions): Belladère was only a curtain raiser to a more costly failure: the 1949–1950 International Exposition held to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of Port-au-Prince, which for purposes of the fair was officially dated 1749. At a budgeted cost of $6 million and despite a gambling ship sailed down from Miami, the poorly planned, mismanaged, and under-patronized exhibition proved a tourist fiasco. As seen on opening day by Edmund Wilson, one found almost nothing there — the Palace of Tourism had nothing in it but murals at which people were staring through locked doors, the aquarium housed no fishes and was not yet equipped with tanks, and many buildings were hardly begun. Yet the exposition could boast artistic triumph — the inspired performances by Katherine Dunham and her troupe of Haitian dancers and the debut of what would soon be the sunburst of Haitian art on the world scene. Through the medium of folklorique dances, Vodou for the first time began to emerge into public — that is, tourist — view. Under a noir regime with Lorimer Denis as one of its begetters, Vodou had regained its central place: in 1946, Estimé’s Minister of Education had outraged Church and elite alike by presiding over a university function at the Ciné Rex featuring Vodou chants and dances, and when the Catholic Action Sociale called for a new anti-Vodou campaign, it was suppressed and its editor jailed, while Père Foisset, a French priest whose articles had charged Vodou involvement in politics, was expelled. The Exposition of 1949 — an event whose physical infrastructure was unfinished on opening day but whose cultural content announced to the world the existence of a Haitian artistic genius that no infrastructure could contain — embodied the paradox that has defined Haiti’s relationship with modernity: the state that could not build an aquarium on schedule could produce, from the same budget and the same historical moment, an artistic movement that would reshape the Western understanding of what art could be.