1978–1979: (We Don’t Know Where It Goes: 250 Assembly Plants and 60,000 Jobs, Club Med Behind the Chain-Link Fence, Coffee Exports Half of 1910’s, Pétion’s P…

1978–1979: (We Don’t Know Where It Goes: 250 Assembly Plants and 60,000 Jobs, Club Med Behind the Chain-Link Fence, Coffee Exports Half of 1910’s, Pétion’s Plots Divided and Subdivided Until the Land Played Out, Peasants Hack Down Once-Sacrosanct Mango Trees for Charcoal, and the African Swine Virus Arrives): The average Haitian, city dweller or peasant, was far too caught up in the struggle to survive to be interested in the capers of the ruling class. Duvalierism was so institutionalized by 1978 that a numbed population accepted it with resignation — far more important was the regime’s ability to provide jobs, roads, security, things that even a population with such reduced expectations demanded. But crucial shifts, long in the making, were transforming the country in ways visible only in hindsight. Like France’s ancien régime, the Duvaliers sat atop a volcano, insensitive to the trembling beneath them. The surface veneer of prosperity was built on shaky foundations, though to a casual observer progress was visible: new roads stretched from Jacmel to the Cap and west from Léogâne to Les Cayes, Jacmel’s traditional charms were being rediscovered by tourists who could make reservations overseas on the revitalized phone system, and the trip from Port-au-Prince took an hour as in the 1930s instead of eight. Port-au-Prince, now thoroughly captive to the containerization technology set up by Rigaud, thrived as increasing numbers of assembly factories disgorged production for North American consumers — baseballs, circuitry, clothes, wicker furniture, anything requiring manual dexterity and a docile cheap labor force seemed to be coming from Haiti. Some 250 assembly plants provided low-paying jobs to nearly 60,000 people; one economist estimated that a third of Port-au-Prince’s population — some 300,000 — benefited directly or indirectly. Tourism continued to thrive, with Club Med opening a branch along a pretty stretch of beach fifty miles north of the capital, where with imported foodstuffs tourists could bask in the sun and claim they had been to Haiti while safely insulated from the poverty beyond the compound’s chain-link fence. But the factories exacerbated the exodus from the provinces — what had begun under Papa Doc as political strategy, the isolation and slow death of any place he could not constantly watch, now gathered momentum as peasants voted with their feet. Agriculture, long hobbled by inefficiencies inherent in Pétion’s division of land into subsistence plots, became increasingly tenuous as holdings were divided, subdivided, and divided yet again among heirs. The same population explosion that caused a multiplicity of heirs for every plot drove peasants ever further in search of wood for charcoal; the machetes that hacked down trees for fuel hastened erosion, reducing yields and rendering whole sections of the country such as the Northwest susceptible to increasingly violent climatic shifts. The land was simply played out. Haiti, the major exporter of sugar to eighteenth-century Europe, two centuries later became a net importer of sugar. Coffee exports in 1977 amounted to 450,000 bags — half that exported in 1910. A hurricane in 1979 destroyed many of the coffee bushes that had managed to survive increasingly frequent droughts; more menacingly, peasants began to hack down coffee bushes and mango trees, once sacrosanct, in their ever more desperate search for fuel. In Miragoâne, Reynolds aluminum struggled to extract increasingly marginal bauxite deposits while dealing with an ever more restive labor force. To add to the burden, a swine virus that had originated in Africa appeared in 1978 in the Dominican Republic, threatening to spill over the porous frontier into Haiti — pigs, in a largely non-cash rural economy, constituted the reserve savings accounts that enabled peasant families to weather bad times.