1957: (Haiti Retrogressed to Normal: The Fruits of the Second Independence, 1957 Compared with 1827, and the Americans Who Modernized Everything but Haiti): …

1957: (Haiti Retrogressed to Normal: The Fruits of the Second Independence, 1957 Compared with 1827, and the Americans Who Modernized Everything but Haiti): If when the second independence began in 1934 comparisons with 1804 were inevitable, how would the year 1957 — twenty-three years later — compare with 1827? The answer is that 1957 and 1827 held far more in common than 1934 and 1804. The condition of 1827 had been described as general ruin — fields dead, French roads and bridges gone, cities ruined, seaports decayed or closed, economy at a standstill, the army in miserable deterioration, political institutions deadlocked, noir and mulâtre at each other’s throats. By 1957 the modernized Haiti of two decades earlier seemed to have glimmered away like a mirage: exports, mostly agricultural, had declined by twenty percent between 1946 and 1956 and were still going down. American-built roads and bridges had ceased to exist — in 1934 one could drive from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel in less than two hours, in 1957 it took nine hours by jeep in good weather. Communications had collapsed, the telephone system was dead, ports were silted, unlighted, and obstructed by wrecks, docks had crumbled. Desperately ill patients lay on the floors of stinking hospitals. Sanitation and electrification were in precarious decline; political institutions and army were in shambles; races, classes, and regimes contended bitterly. In the words of the new president-elect, Haiti two decades after the occupation was rotting in poverty, hunger, nudity, sickness, and illiteracy. The Americans had modernized everything but Haiti and the Haitians — by 1957 Haiti had retrogressed to normal, and these were the fruits of the second independence. The verdict that Heinl rendered on the eve of Duvalier’s accession — the Americans had modernized everything but Haiti and the Haitians — captured in a single sentence the structural failure that connected the occupation of 1915 to the catastrophe of 1957: the infrastructure of modernity had been imposed upon a society whose internal logic — the monopoly of the elite, the exclusion of the peasantry, the instrumentalization of the state as a mechanism of extraction rather than development — remained untouched, so that each improvement decayed at the rate determined not by the quality of the engineering but by the depth of the dysfunction, and the roads that had taken the Marines five years to build took the Haitians twenty years to destroy, not through malice but through the simple operation of a political economy in which no one’s interest was served by maintaining what everyone’s taxes had paid to construct.