1950–1951: (Magloire’s Program and Haiti’s Malthusian Trap: Doublure Dismissed, Friendly Relations with Washington and Trujillo, and the Budget of an Archaic…

1950–1951: (Magloire’s Program and Haiti’s Malthusian Trap: Doublure Dismissed, Friendly Relations with Washington and Trujillo, and the Budget of an Archaic State): The president’s policies could be quickly summed up: harmony and reconciliation among the classes and colors — which Estiméists sourly dismissed as doublure with Magloire as cat’s-paw for the elite — internal development, and friendly relations with the two powers that counted, the United States and the Dominican Republic. Magloire’s assets were considerable: the country still enjoyed relative stability, and if the economy had been stagnant under Estimé it was comfortable stagnation — the gourde was sound, and after four years of Estimé people had had enough social tinkering. Land reform, a burning issue elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, had for good or ill been completed a century and a quarter earlier. Yet the central problem — too little land, too many people — grew inexorably with Malthusian certainty, and scarcely less critical were uncontrolled deforestation and soil erosion. Bananas and cotton were dead; sugar and sisal were at the mercy of fluctuating markets. The budget still represented the take from an archaic system of import duties at seventy percent, income taxes from a few thousand elite and Syrians at ten percent, and miscellaneous sources — a fiscal structure that, unchanged in its essentials since the days of Boyer, extracted revenue from the peasantry through import tariffs on the goods they consumed while leaving the land itself — the peasant’s sole asset — virtually untaxed, a system designed not to fund development but to sustain the state apparatus through which the elite administered its own privileges.