Martha Jean-Claude is born, and Haiti will exile its own voice

Martha Jean-Claude was born in Port-au-Prince on this day. She began singing in the late 1930s and built her repertoire out of Haitian folklore and Vodou lyric, in Creole, at a time when that was treated as an embarrassment. In 1952, under Paul Eugene Magloire, she was arrested over her play Anriette, which the government read as an attack on itself. She was pregnant, and was let out two days before she gave birth. She left for Cuba and stayed there for decades, singing Haiti to Cubans and becoming one of the best-known Caribbean voices of her generation. She came home in 1986 after Jean-Claude Duvalier fell, and died in Havana on 14 November 2001.