Cement demand in Haiti triples in five years

Demand for cement in Haiti tripled between 1968 and 1973. Ciment d’Haiti, which had idled at half capacity through the 1960s, hit its full productive capacity in 1972 and had to build new facilities to keep up. Sand and steel reinforcement bar moved with it. Since cement, sand and rebar are the three components of reinforced concrete, those figures establish what the new districts spreading over the edges of Port-au-Prince were made of. The geographer Henri Godard recorded why returning Haitians built as they did. They wanted respect, and property was the visible proof of having risen. Nobody could count the returnees or the money they carried, because Haiti kept no reliable demographic statistics and no record of remittances, so the cement figures serve as the closest thing to a census of the boom that reshaped the capital.