A Port-au-Prince schoolteacher earns forty dollars a month

Monthly salaries recorded in Port-au-Prince in 1971 and 1972 ran as follows. A primary school teacher took between forty and seventy dollars. A laboratory technician took ninety. An office secretary took a hundred. A middle-ranking state official took a hundred and fifty and upward, and a university chair paid the same hundred and fifty. A lawyer took two hundred. A doctor with a private clinic took six hundred. These are the figures for salaried people in the capital who counted as petty bourgeois or better. Against them stands the countryside, where eighty two per cent of the agricultural population received about forty dollars a year, and where national income per head, at eighty five dollars, was the lowest in Latin America. In the same years a carreau of land in the Leogane plain was worth more than a thousand dollars and a rum still was worth ten thousand.