1957–1967: (The Decade of Development: Per Capita Income Falling 2.3 Percent Annually, Agricultural Production Down 13 Percent, Cement Down 43 Percent, and t…

1957–1967: (The Decade of Development: Per Capita Income Falling 2.3 Percent Annually, Agricultural Production Down 13 Percent, Cement Down 43 Percent, and the New York Times Correspondent Who Found Haiti Worse Off Than Under the French): Over Duvalier’s first decade — which the président-à-vie proclaimed the decade of development — Haiti’s economic regression was staggering. The United Nations confirmed that Haiti was the only nation on earth experiencing virtually no growth during most of the 1950s and 1960s, while an expanding birth rate dragged per capita gross national product down at an annual rate of 2.3 percent between 1961 and 1967. The cost of living spiraled from an index of 112 in 1957 to 135.2 a decade later. Agricultural production declined thirteen percent; electricity generation dropped four percent; cement production — an index of housing construction — plunged forty-three percent. Internal debt ballooned from $4 million in 1946 to $52.1 million twenty-one years later. When the New York Times correspondent Henry Giniger visited Port-au-Prince in August 1967, he reported that every other country in the hemisphere showed some economic growth while Haiti showed none, that it was generally agreed the country had been better off two centuries earlier when French colonists efficiently exploited it, and that projects to develop farm production required restoring roads and irrigation ditches to the condition they had been in during colonial days. This was the condition of Haiti in 1967, advertised and proclaimed as l’An X de la Révolution Duvalieriste — Year Ten of the Duvalierist Revolution — a Jubilee whose economic ledger recorded, with the precision of a death certificate, the cost of sovereignty exercised as predation: a state that extracted everything and invested nothing, that consumed its own infrastructure as fuel for the maintenance of power, the decade of development distinguished from all prior Haitian decades only by the completeness with which development had been arrested.