Haiti: The Birthday Blowout

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Drained Dry. Still, it is very profitable to be President of Haiti, or even close to the President. Under Duvalier, the government has become completely corrupt. Most Cabinet ministers are on the payroll of companies operating in Haiti, and bribes are a standard part of every government decision, from the granting of exit visas to the collection of corporate taxes. Duvalier himself, whose official salary is $14,000 a year, has acquired an estate worth millions in Haiti alone, is reputed to have millions more stashed away in numbered Swiss bank accounts. The primary source of his wealth is the Régie du Tabac, a government agency that was started to collect tobacco taxes but has since expanded to levy unofficial (and unreported) taxes on every single product sold in the country.

Such practices have drained Haiti dry. Once the most prosperous colony of the old French empire, it is today the poorest nation in all of Latin America. Its economy has been reduced in the main to rudimentary farming on worn-out land. Its once profitable tourist trade has been scared away by the bogeymen and their works. Starvation and disease are so widespread that Haiti, alone among all the countries of the hemisphere, refuses to publish figures on the life expectancy of its population. The reason: they would be too shamefully low.