Volume 14, Number 5 · March 12, 1970
Vodou Power
By Raymond Carr
Papa Doc: The Truth About Haiti Today
by Bernard Diedrich, by Al Burt
McGraw-Hill, 393 pp., $8.95
The Haitian People
by James Leyburn, with a new Introduction by Sidney Mintz
Yale, 342 pp., $2.45 (paper)
In Haiti, as Nassau Senior once remarked of Ireland under English rule, almost all the moral objects are painful. For generations tourists and diplomats used their impressions as proof that a Black Republic must fail. In 1780 the richest colony in the world, where Rousseau's opera Le Devin du village was a great favorite, independent Haiti had become by 1958 the country with the lowest national income, highest illiteracy rate, and the worst government in the Western hemisphere. Papa Doc looked like the culmination of a century and a half of negro ineptitude.
Review, 2335 words
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