1957–1971, July 1971: (The New Prosperity and Its Contradictions: The Régie du Tabac vs.

1957–1971, July 1971: (The New Prosperity and Its Contradictions: The Régie du Tabac vs. the Reformers, Quickie Divorce Tourism, $14 Million in Refugee Remittances, Péligre Dam Finally Generating Power, 7,000 Factory Jobs, and Port-au-Prince Bursting from 200,000 to a Million): The financial team — Francisque as Minister of Finance, André at the Banque — knew that certain of the regime’s more blatant practices would need facelifts if the spigot of international aid was to be turned on. In particular, the channeling of so much of the tax receipts to the unaudited Régie du Tabac had been a long-standing complaint of potential donors. But in their reform efforts they ran straight into the very forces on whose support the regime depended and to which the Régie’s coffers had always been generous — Luckner Cambronne, Simone Duvalier, and the whole VSN/macoute structure throughout the country. There was, mercifully, more to play with than before. The new jet airport was bringing in tourists in numbers not seen since the Magloire heyday; a new type of tourist was appearing, drawn by package tours offering quickie divorces hawked by New York travel agents — for $1,200, one received a two-day trip to Haiti, Haitian legal representation, food, hotel, and a divorce decree as a souvenir to bring home to an often-surprised spouse who had not been offered the chance to contest it, while the now thoroughly Haitian Catholic clergy offered only the faintest of protests. Further fattening the treasury were remittances from the one Haitian export that had multiplied under Papa Doc — economic and political refugees, who sent home some $14 million in 1971 alone; in 1970, Haiti had enjoyed its first balance-of-payments surplus in many years. The generators were finally installed at Péligre Dam, begun under Magloire, and came on-line in July 1971, ending the chronic blackouts that had been so long a fixture of Port-au-Prince life. Factories, assured at last of steady power, were being set up by foreign investors on the outskirts of the capital to profit from Haiti’s cheap labor, providing by mid-1971 some 7,000 sorely needed jobs. The prospect of jobs hastened the flight from the countryside of peasants who could no longer eke out subsistence from the eroded plots divided, split, and divided yet again that had been given their great-great-grandfathers by Pétion. Port-au-Prince, whose infrastructure — an inheritance from the 1915–1934 American occupation — could barely support its 200,000 population in 1957, was by 1971 bursting at the seams with nearly a million inhabitants. The World Bank, in yet another study, opined that Haiti’s future was destined to be urban. USAID representatives made an official visit that summer, and in the fall a $750,000 agricultural development loan on soft terms was approved — Haiti, it seemed, had shed its label of pariah.