1952–1954: (State Visits, the Smart Set, and the World Economy Smiles: Hector Trujillo, Somoza, Tubman, Sir Hugh Foote’s Meringue, and the Hotel Oloffson Dis…

1952–1954: (State Visits, the Smart Set, and the World Economy Smiles: Hector Trujillo, Somoza, Tubman, Sir Hugh Foote’s Meringue, and the Hotel Oloffson Discovered): The times were vibrant with modernization — Haiti, like its energetic president, was on the move. There were state visits: in April 1952, Hector Trujillo, brother of El Benefactor, came for four days; the next year Anastasio Somoza, president of Nicaragua; then in November 1954, Liberia’s William Tubman spent three days as Haiti’s first visiting African chief of state; and Sir Hugh Foote, the first governor of Jamaica to set foot on Haiti since Henry Morgan was shipwrecked and imprisoned 279 years earlier, visited in February 1954, laid wreaths on all monuments, and gamely accommodated his swooping waltz style to the intricacies of the meringue. Haiti, already discovered by foreign intellectuals during Estimé’s time, now swam into the ken of the smart set — Haitian weekends became the thing, while the improbable gingerbread-style Hotel Oloffson, last seen as the Marines’ hospital during the occupation, assumed its role as de rigueur watering place for writers ranging from Noël Coward to Truman Capote and of course Graham Greene, who would limn it so vividly a decade later in The Comedians. None of this would have happened if the world economy had not smiled on Haiti: by the end of 1954, tourism had expanded threefold over 1950, coffee exports were up twenty percent a year, sisal benefited from the Korean War, bank deposits were rising steadily, and a few light industries took root — a French cement factory, a Texas-owned flour mill, and an Italian shoe factory. To sweeten the economy further, in July 1952 France resumed purchase of Haitian coffee on terms that were extortionate — besides tariff concessions on French wines and luxury items, Haiti was compelled to liquidate the trumped-up claim for gold redemption of the 1910 bonds, whose provenance through successive refinancing went back to the grinding reparations of 1825 — but the immediate benefit was undeniable.