1949, October: (Belladère and the Ice Cream That Melted: Estimé’s $600,000 Frontier Town, Trujillo’s Highway Closure, and the Ghost Town on the Border): Hait…

1949, October: (Belladère and the Ice Cream That Melted: Estimé’s $600,000 Frontier Town, Trujillo’s Highway Closure, and the Ghost Town on the Border): Haiti’s budget — fattened by a good harvest and Estimé’s unwelcome gift to the elite, the country’s first income tax — hit $13 million in October 1949. Six hundred thousand of those dollars, nearly five percent, went for the transformation of Belladère, a humble frontier post on the highway from Santo Domingo, into a modern new town complete like a toy village with bank, theater, hôtel de ville, restaurant, new church, and hotel. The reason, with no economic justification whatever, was to upstage the thriving Dominican town of Elias Piña just across the border. Trujillo, no more friendly toward Estimé than toward Lescot, silently watched the new buildings go up. A few weeks after Belladère’s grand opening, El Benefactor simply closed the highway and rerouted traffic into Haiti via Jimani and Malpasse on the Cul-de-Sac, leaving Belladère to crumble into a ghost town — or, in the metaphor of a critic, to melt away like ice cream in the sun. The Belladère episode — a sovereign state spending five percent of its national budget to construct a showcase town on its border with a neighbor whose dictator could render the investment worthless with a single administrative order — distilled the asymmetry of power between Haiti and the Dominican Republic into its purest form: the same structural vulnerability that had made possible the 1937 massacre now made possible the economic strangulation of a frontier town, the message in both cases identical — that Haiti’s sovereignty existed only at the sufferance of the stronger neighbor.