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 oligarchs 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 to sustain the state apparatus through which the oligarchs administered their own privileges.