28131: Sajous(History)Time Cover Story Feb.22 ,1954/Paul Magloire/Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Sajous
_sajousp@aol.com_ (mailto:sajousp@aol.com)

The  Hemisphere

Bon Papa


Monday, Feb. 22,  1954
(See Cover)
Cinnamon-skinned girls in Dior dresses, starchy diplomats and officers
sparkling with gold braid gathered one night last week in the majestic,
tile-floored great hall of the Presidential Palace in Portau-Prince. The
occasion: a
ball in honor of Jamaica's visiting Governor Sir Hugh Foot and  Lady Foot.
Just
at 10, the orchestra blared out a march, and Lady Foot  entered the room on
the arm of a huge, kingly-looking black man  resplendent in white tie, tails
and
full decorations. His Excellency Paul  Eugene Magloire (pronounced
mah-glwar), President of the Republic of Haiti  and host of the evening,
stayed on until
2, ceremoniously dancing with  each guest in the order of her husband's rank,
gravely bowing to Lady  Foot's parting curtsy.
The ceremonial public appearances of Paul Magloire are always kingly.
Usually he is in one of his uniforms (cost: $300-$1,000 each), which
variously
employ the old-fashioned trappingsâ??the plume, the spurred boot,  the epaulet
and
the aiguillette. His manner, too, is regal; one aide  carries his special,
seven-inch cigars in a leather box; another stands  ready to hold his gold-
headed
cane like a staff of office. A vast, burly  manâ??he stands six feet and his
chest measures 44 in.â??Magloire carries off  his formal appearances with
unerring
dignity. When on parade he is being  what he knows many lowly Haitians want in
a President: a father-king, a  national bon papa of regal mien. Loving it,
they sing:
He gives us jobs and moneyâ??oh! oh!
oh!
He can stay in the palace as long as he
wants!
In the palace, between ceremonies, Magloire puts aside fancy dress and
operates as the kind of detail-cracking, eleven-hour-a-day executive that  any
topflight Detroit industrialist could understand. He rises in the dawn
cacophony
of his capital's unbelievably numerous roosters, and hops on an  exercise
machine. After a rubdown, he breakfasts in bathrobed comfort on  fruit and
cafe au
lait. Then, in a suite filled with alabaster busts,  stuffed pink cranes,
Empire clocks and pictures of himself and other  Haitian heroes, the President
reads reports and mail, takes a thoughtful  second look at work saved over
from
the night before. At 7:30 he showers  and dresses, usually in grey gabardine
or white linen, a silk tie with a  gold clasp, grey suede shoes. Soon he is
sitting at a cluttered desk in a  smallish office conspicuously free of
ornament.

He speeds through his work, reading documents and penning "O.K. PM" on  them.
When his ministers call, he half turns in his chair, folds his hands  in his
lap, watches sidelong from penetrating brown eyes, and rumbles out  courteous,
unruffled answers. He usually lunches with his family of one  son and four
daughters (although Mme. Magloire is currently in a Baltimore  hospital for a
checkup and the two elder daughters are attending a  Brookline Mass, convent
school). After a siesta, he goes back to work  until dinner at 7. He sometimes
takes an evening off for poker or bridge,  and occasionally drops in at the
city's biggest nightclub, where he sits  with a few young aides, cradling a
highball in his big hand, beaming at  the dance-floor merriment but taking no
part
in it. More often he works  through until 10 or 11 p.m., especially if the
next
day's schedule calls  for another public appearance. Pageantry takes time â??
but Magloire  recognizes that it is part of his job of ruling tiny Haiti.
Mulattoes Y. Blacks. The nation ruled by President Paul Magloire is the
western third of Hispaniola, a mountainous, sun-drenched Caribbean island  on
the
rum-and-bougainvillea side of the Tropic of Cancer. The size of  Vermont, it
teems with more people per square mile (299) than any other  republic in the
hemisphere. Through the streets of its capital,  Port-au-Prince (pop.
150,000),
move midget French cars, bulging orange  buses, sad-eyed donkeys and a steady
trickle of sewage. In the city's  malodorous Iron Market, women traders, their
skirts hitched up to the  thighs, carry on a haggling commerce in used
bottles, flour-sacking for  dresses, red beans that are sometimes sold not by
weight
but by the bean.  Above all this, in fresh, violet hills overlooking the city
and the  turquoise bay are the villas and the hotels of the rich, the
diplomats,  the foreign business colony and the tourists.
Haiti is proud to be an all-Negro nation, a "Black Republic"â??but it is  by
no
means a classless nation. The creme is a hereditary, mostly mulatto  elite,
about 2% of the 3,500,000 population. Well-to-do lawyers, doctors,  poets and
government servants, the elite like to think of themselves as  "colored
Frenchmen." They quote Racine, appreciate fine wines, prize  lightness of skin
and
occasionally give elegant banquets at which the  waiters change gloves with
every course. Their language is French and  their religion Roman Catholic.
They
are Haiti's Brahmins, and just a  little way down the social scale, they are
beginning to blur into a  growing middle class of U.S.-style businessmen,
progressive farmers,  tradesmen and artisans.
But 90% of all Haitians are black, barefoot, unlettered peasants,  tilling
small patches of land. The peasant works the soil with a hoe  rather than a
plow, picks coffee from 25-ft. wild trees, builds  wattle-and-daub huts with
an
airy scorn for the right angle. His women  carry the freight of Haitiâ??on
their
heads. Almost any grandmother can  balance 100 Ibs. of charcoal, a huge basket
of cabbages or a severed cow's  head and tote it 40 miles.
Most of the peasants are God-fearing Catholics who go to Mass early  every
Sundayâ??just as soon, in fact, as the
Saturday-night voodoo dance is over. "Bon Dieu Bon," they say; God is  good,
and supreme in matters of the soul, but the voodoo loa of remote  African
memoryâ??Maitresse Erzulie. Papa Legba and the snake-god  Damballaâ??are still
highly
serviceable in such workaday matters as  appeasing the dead and assuring
successful births. The peasants are poor  (per capita income is $62 yearly,
lowest
in the hemisphere), but they  somehow rise above the deadening poverty of the
Andean Indian or the  Moscow streetsweep-er. They have sun, fertile (but dry)
land, fruitful  trees, personal freedom and hot-blooded vitality.
The conflict between these two extremesâ??the rich and the poor, the  cultured
and the uncouth, the mulatto minority and the black massâ??has kept  Haiti
aboil
for most of the 150 years since it first proclaimed its  independence, yet
the contest is basically economic, i.e., the haves to  keep and the have-nots
to
get, rather than racial. Say the Haitians: "The  rich Negro is a mulatto, the
poor mulatto is a Negro."
Queen of the Antilles. Modern Haitians can trace the roots of this  basic
division back through a turbulent history that still clings like a  remembered
nightmare. Columbus discovered the island on his first voyage,  pronouncing
the
estimated 1,000,000 Arawak aborigines "lovable, tractable,  peaceable, gentle,
decorous and praiseworthy." Spanish exploitation and  smallpox soon wiped out
the lovable Indians. In the 17th century, French  buccaneers loosened Spain's
grip on the island and France fastened onto  the western end; a century later
Saint-Domingue was France's proudest  colony, the "Queen of the Antilles."
Its foreign trade of $140 million  yearly dwarfed that of the infant United
States, and the profits from  sugar, chocolate, indigo, coffee and cotton
built
many a chateau on the  Loire or town house in Paris.
To till the plantations, the French repopulated Saint-Domingue with  Negroes
from Dahomey, Senegal and the Congo. On jasmine-scented nights,  white
planters took to wenching with African maids, and ultimately  produced a
light-skinned class of freedmen with color lines so finely  drawn that a
contemporary
record recognized 250 different blood  combinations. By the time the French
Assembly pronounced the Rights of  Man. 40,000 whites were lording it over
28,000
gens de couleur, while both  were keeping a firm hand on 450,000 black
slaves.
One Saturday night in 1791, the drums at a plantation voodoo dance  subtly
changed their beat. On other plantations the talking drums picked  up the word
and passed it on. Minutes after the signal, the lush, peaceful  colony of
Saint-Domingue flamed up in murderous revolt. With pruning  forks, machetes
and
torches, the slaves massacred 2,000 French planters  and their families, fired
the canefields and the great houses. In the  following decade of turmoil,
Toussaint L'Ouverture, an obsequious slave  coachman until he turned himself
into a
general, led his black armies to  bloody victories over the French and the
interventionist Spanish and  English as well.
"Gilded African." In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte scoffed at the "First of  the
Blacks" as a "gilded African," and sent 90 ships and 40,000 veterans  of the
Egyptian campaign to retake Saint-Domingue. By treachery, the  French captured
Toussaint and shipped him off to France to die in a  moutain prison. But in
the end, black troops and yellow fever smashed the  French for good.
The new nation picked the Arawak word Haiti (meaning Mountainous Land)  for a
name, then proceeded to split itself in two. In the north, the  fabulous
Henri Christophe made himself King, set up a ludicrous  aristocracy and built
a
monumental stone fortress on a needle-top  mountainâ??history's greatest feat
of
construction by Negroes. Christophe's  labor force, mostly sugar workers,
toiled from dawn to dusk to keep his  treasury solvent. Once the King spotted,
far
below him, a subject asleep  in the door of a hut. A 56-pounder was loaded,
aimed, touched off; loafer  and house vanished.
But such cruelty taught the Negroes, as they say now, that "the stick  that
beats the white dog will beat the black dog too." In the end, led by  the
rebel
Duke of Marmelade, they revolted, and in 1820 Christophe,  brought to bay,
killed himself with a silver bulletâ??providing a theme, a  century later, for
Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.
In the south, meanwhile, a mulatto general, Alexandre Petion, held  office as
President over a government of elite former freedmen. He gave  black war
veterans bits of land and ruled with an easy hand. When  Christophe died,
Haitians
gratefully turned their backs on the Emperor's  ruthless labor discipline and
embraced the subsistence economy Petion  developed. Sugar production, 67,000
tons in 1791, dropped to 15 tons in  1826. The less populous, Spanish-speaking
eastern end of the island broke  away, resumed the old Spanish name Santo
Domingo, and became the Dominican  Republic. The world forgot the drowsy
little
island, and Haiti itself  seemed somehow hypnotized for nearly a century,
while
rivers ran dry, land  was worked out, men grew torpid, and government
degenerated into a  quickening cycle of revolutions.
Enter the Marines. By 1912, rebellions had ousted eleven of 18 Haitian
Presidents. Then, in the space of 43 months, one President was blown up in
his
palace, another was poisoned, three more deposed. The U.S., fearing  the
European
powers might try to intervene, decided to act first.
A new revolt was forming near Cap-Haitien, under an ambitious politico  named
Guillaume Sam. Admiral William B. Caperton, U.S.N., on the U.S.S.
Washington, met Sam unofficially and offered him tacit support, urgently
warning Sam
not to "loot or burn down the cities." But once in office, Sam  balked at
signing a treaty for U.S. occupation of Haiti. Instead, he  jailed and
massacred 167
suspected revolutionariesâ??then panicked and fled  for asylum to the French
legation. A raging mob broke into the building,  found Sam hiding under a bed,
dragged him out, literally tore him limb  from limb, and paraded through
Port-au-Prince with his head on a pole.  Haiti's history had hit bottom.
Admiral
Caperton, waiting in the harbor,  immediately landed two companies of marines
and
three of bluejackets, and  the U.S. occupation began.
Exit the Marines. There was much in the occupation to trouble the U.S.
conscience. Puppet Presidents, all of the elite class, were shuttled in  &
out.
With almost embarrassing speed, the U.S. gave Haiti a new  constitution,
masterminded by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D.  Roosevelt; the
document
removed the defiant clause of all 16 previous  Haitian constitutions
forbidding
foreigners to own land. Officers from the  U.S. South ("they know how to
handle the blacks, you know") humiliated  highbred Haitians.
But the Marines effectively ended the cycle of revolutions, disarmed  rebels
and bandits in mountain warfare (the death toll: 1,500 Haitians),  restored
peasants to the land, improved health and sanitation, built  roads. Setting up
a
small gendarmerie, they lifted from Haiti the crushing  burden of an army
that once had 6,500 general and staff officers. They  trained civil servants,
building a nucleus of Haitians competent to run  the machinery of government.
Most important, they set up rural schools,  where peasants could begin to get
the
education they needed to compete  with the elite. Such was the reputation of
the Americans for efficiency  that the surname of Dr. W. W. Cumberland,
customs receiver, became an  accepted Creole word meaning shortcut.*
With the Good Neighbor policy, occupation became obsolete. In 1934,
Roosevelt visited Port-au-Prince, ordered the Marines to run down the U.S.
flag and
pull out. For Haiti, it was the end of one era, the opening of  another.
Under the Citadel. When the marines were first splashing ashore at
Port-au-Prince in 1915, Paul Eugene Magloire had just turned eight years  old.
His
birthplace was Quartier-Morin, a few miles southeast of  Cap-Haitien. His
father
was Eugene Magloire, a peasant so energetic that  he rose to be one of the
many
generals then running Haiti's army. The  general was killed in a shooting
accident in 1908, and the infant Paul was  brought up by two brothers in
Cap-Haitien. The Brothers of Christian  Instruction gave him a Catholic
education,
stressing French and Latin,  while in his family's fields he learned the
peasant's ways and Creole  tongue. Cap-Haitien, "Paris of the New World" under
the
French but since  burned and sacked a dozen times, gave him a sense of past
glory
and  present despair.
Magloire got a degree in arts and letters from the National School in
Port-au-Prince and taught school for a year, but soon concluded that he  could
not
live on a teacher's pay. He transferred his ambitions to the  military, and
graduated from a Marine-supervised gendarmerie training  school. Soon
Magloire's
political education began.
President Stenio Vincent, a poet-nationalist elected on an  oust-the-U.S.
platform when the Marines supervised an honest election in  1930, picked
Lieut.
Magloire for his aide-de-camp. But Vincent's  government stumbled in 1937,
when
the Dominican Republic's Dictator Rafael  Leonidas Trujillo, in a moment of
rage, let his forces massacre an  estimated 15,000 Haitian cane-cutters who
had
crossed the border to seek  harvest work. The Haitian President settled for
an indemnity of $550,000  from Trujillo. With murdered Haitians thus
officially
priced at $37 each,  Haiti soured on Vincent, and his government succumbed in
1941. The next  President was Elie Lescot, a member of the elite, who chose
Magloire first  to be chief of the national police, then head of the palace
guard, a key  position.
Tableau in the Palace. President Lescot was snobbishly antiblack, and  word
got around that he had accepted favors, up to & including a  $35,000 gift from
the hated neighbor. Dictator Trujillo. One day early in  1946, blacks appeared
in the streets carrying signs "A bastesmulatres!"  Stores hastily shuttered
their windows and women in the hills refused to  come to town with food for
the
market.
Soon Magloire and other officers called on the President. The scene  that
followed had the studied formality of an 18th-century tableau.  Magloire
informed
the President that he could not fire on the people. The  military men offered
Lescot safe conduct to the airport and a ticket to  Canada. Lescot,
essentially a logical man, accepted. Thus ended a classic  Haitian coup de
langueâ??a
"tongue revolution" in which rumors of  discoatent, troubles or violence
brewing
in the capital bring on a  spontaneous general strike and shake the regime
down.
To rule the country, the officers first set up a temporary military  junta,
then ordered an election for Congressmen who would choose a  President. One
candidate was a brooding, ulcer-afflicted lawyer named  Dumarsais Estime, son
of
black peasant parents who lived in the  voodoo-haunted pine forests near Mount
La Selle. His strongly anti-mulatto  position made him the idol of the
blacks, and won him the election.
Heyday of the Authentiques. Black Haiti entered a time of tumultuous
transformation. For his peasants, his "authen-tiques," (his "real"  Haitians)
Estime
schemed to smash the elite and create a new ruling group  of rich, powerful
blacks. The authentiques quickly caught the idea: the  soul of Africa began to
show itself in novels and paintings. A written  form of Creole was devised.
Voodoo, which elite laws passed under Catholic  pressure had driven
underground,
was openly tolerated again. Estime  dreamed big: schools, hospitals, roads,
docks, industrialization. He did  succeed in raising wages for black workers.
But all he really built was a  rainbow-painted fairgrounds for a pathetically
unsuccessful 1950  International Exposition. He crippled the U.S.-owned
Standard
Fruit Co.'s  Haitian operation, then found that the country had no banana
business  left. Meanwhile, official corruption got out of hand; a few insiders
got  rich quick; word got around that $10 million of the $26 million spent
for
the fair had never been accounted for. The big wheel that turns once and
flips out a Haitian President began to move.
Decline & Fall. The President lost control of his ministers; some  of the
followers he had enriched turned on him and the newspapers called  his
government
a "tremendous scorpion." Frustrated and frenzied, but sure  that he was still
the choice of the blacks, Estime tried to alter the  Constitution so that he
could run for a second six-year term; to back him,  20,000 of his supporters
rioted in the streets of Port-au-Prince. But the  disorder was quelled, and
presently the same junta that had deposed Lescot  marched again on the same
red
carpet to Estime's office and sped him on  his way to Manhattan (where he died
last year, a lonely exile).
For Magloire, the moment of decision had come. The boy who had played  in the
ruins of Haiti's glory below the Citadel, who had ushered in one  President
and sent two on their travels, resolved to be President himself.  He had the
election law changed to allow direct vote of the people, staged  a sure-fire
campaign with festive bamboches with free rum, food and  dancing. By 151,115
votes to 2,000 for his opponent, an obscure architect,  the people voted him
in.
Magloire took officeâ??and took with him his conviction that 1) neither
blacks
nor mulattoes should dominate Haiti at the expense of the other  group, and
2) he must avoid quick, flashy works (e.g., Estime's  Exposition) and
concentrate on long-haul technological advances.
No Little Troubles. "Zafair nèg pas jamm piti" say the Haitians. "Negro
troubles are never small." But before facing the troubles of his country  upon
taking office, Magloire counted his assets. The economy was stable at  its
simple, garden level; the currency was sound (and convertible) at five
gourdes to a
dollar. The culture, traditions and national vitality were so  rich and
varied that only overwhelming reasons could justify much social  tinkering.
And
land reform, the crying need of most of Latin America and  the Far East, had
been
a fact in Haiti for more than a century.  Nevertheless, the central problem
was land and agriculture, partly because  the population was shooting up (at
the present rate of growth, it will  reach 6,300,000 by the year 2000).
Magloire
singled out more efficient  food production as his No. 1 task.
Man with a Plan. In 1951, Magloire announced a five-year development  plan
emphasizing agriculture. Its costâ??$40 millionâ??was a measure of his
political
daring; in impact it was as though the U.S. were to put $100  billion toward a
single end. The plan's axis is the damming of Haiti's  biggest (and only main)
river, the central Artibonite, and the irrigation  of some 80,000 acres that
are now dusty desert in the dry season and muddy  lakes in the wet. The U.S.
Export-Import Bank lent $14 million, Haiti  voted $8,000,000, and last year
the
engineering contract was let to  Houston's Brown & Root, Inc. Concrete work
is about to start on the  storage dam, to be 225 ft. high and 1,075 ft. long.
Downstream, a  diversion dam and a net of canals will distribute the
Artibonite's tamed  waters, better the lives of 160,000 peasants. Forty
thousand
kilowatts of  power can be added later, doubling Haiti's present output of
electric
energy.
Magloire's plan also calls for agricultural schools, a county-agent  system,
cooperative use of tractors, a farmers' bank, reforestation and  grain
storage. Construction of 300 miles of new roads is an important  corollary,
raising
hope for the time when a peasant can send more to  market than his wife can
carry down a mountain trail. And because three-R  learning is basic to all
up-to-date farm technology, Magloire's modern  Black Magic includes new
schools: 74
have been built, with room for adults  as well as one-third more children than
ever before.
FOA & FAO. Impoverished Haiti draws valuable technical aid from the  U.S. and
the U.N. The FOA and FAO (the U.S. Foreign Operations  Administration and the
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization) are among  seven alphabetical
agencies helping in Magloire's plan. One man leads a  Brahma bull through the
country
to help breed good Haitian cattle. Another  patiently instructs peasants in
the use of the wheelbarrow. Another  explains what a plow is, and how to guide
oxen. One group of U.S.  technical experts set up several dozen credit unions
to fight usurers  lending to farmers at 20% a month; others showed how to grow
1,600 Ibs. of  rice on an acre that formerly gave 280 Ibs.
The technical aid men's biggest achievement has been in health; the
loathsome, running-sore disease of yaws, which once infected 62% of  Haitians,
has
been almost wiped out by the injection of one massive shot  of penicillin into
each of 2,623,141 peasant rumps. 'Now Magloire and FAO  are tackling malaria,
venereal disease and tuberculosis. The U.S. has  spent $5,959,000 in technical
aid for Haiti, the U.N. $617,800. Haiti has  matched these contributions with
$8,200,000.
Magloire's be-kind-to-mulattoes policy has not slowed the cultural  tempo of
Estime's authentique movement. Over Francophile opposition the  President has
made Creole the beginning language in schools rather than  French; formerly
children entered school to be confronted for the first  time with a language
that, however admired in diplomacy, was gibberish to  them.
The greatest flowering of Haitian self-expression, the primitive  painting
that bloomed in Estime's time, goes on. This explosion of art,  the most
spectacular since Mexico's, has made painting one of the  best-paid
professions in
Haiti and planted colorful pictures in fine  collections from Paris to Beverly
Hills.
Supply & Demand. Most of the elite still cannot bring themselves to  hang
this peasant art in their homes. Nor has the extravert President  Magloire
much
time to puzzle out its moody meanings. He has other worries.  He knows that
the
cold historical odds are against his serving through the  end of his term in
1956; only twice has a Haitian President been on hand  to smile a welcome to
his legally chosen successor. And not every citizen  is singing. "He can stay
in the palace as long as he wants!"
Haiti's supply of government jobs at any given time is only about  one-third
as great as the number of people qualified by education or  training to fill
them. After any President has been in office three years,  it is plain who the
lucky ones are, and the hungry outsiders naturally  begin to grumble, agitate,
fire bitter charges of inefficiency and graft.  Magloire's good friend, Chief
of Police Marcaisse Prosper, has provided an  unfortunate focus for
criticism. The juiciest current gossip of Haiti  concerns Prosper's new
hilltop home in
fashionable Petionville, big as a  U.S. small-city high school, lavishly
furnished by Manhattan's W. & J.  Sloane. The prosperous Prosper's salary is
$350
a month.
The 6,000-man army backs Magloire (Congress made him its commanding
general), but might be helpless against a popular coup de langue. On the
other hand,
he has many strengths. Items: ¶ The price of coffee, Haiti's  No. 1 cash
crop,
is up, as every U.S. housewife knows, and the 1954 crop  is likely to be
good. Despite price drops in sisal and sugar (production  of which is almost
back
to where the French had it in 1791), exports plus  imports should stay steady
at the recent level of $80-$100 million yearly.  Since most government revenue
comes from import-and-export duties, the  budget is likely to remain at
around $26 million (v. $8,400,000 ten years  ago). CJ Magloire has been able
to get
along with Trujillo on a  general-to-general basis that lets ill-armed Haiti
keep its selfrespect  before its excessively well-armed neighbor, although
there is virtually no  trade across the border.
¶]f U.S.-Haitian relations are excellent. ¶ A promising tourist  industry
had
doubled since 1951, bringing Haiti as much cash income  ($2,750,000) as sugar
did last year.
Successful Failure. Tourism may be Haiti's greatest single asset in the
years just ahead. Holiday travelers, especially the kind who hope for
something
more than a kidney-shaped swimming pool at the end of their  plane rides,
quickly sense a warming magic in Haiti. Flaming poinsettias  and throbbing
drums
can make the blood run quicker, even in a dowager from  Des Moines. The heady
amber rum, made from whole cane juice aged in old  sherry casks, is so cheap
that a big evening can cost just $1 â?? which is  also the price of a savory
dinner
featuring flaming Haitian crayfish. The  weather is good the year around, the
scenery spectacular. Heroic history  seems to hang in the air, especially in
the north, around Cap-Hai-tien; it  becomes almost tangible in the presence of
the 3,000-lb. cannon, graved  with the arrogant "N" of the Napoleon who lost
them, in the gloomy gun  galleries of the Citadel.
By the standards of 1954-model materialism, the world's first black  republic
should perhaps still be reckoned an insanitary, barefoot failure.  But by
less pragmatic standards, it must be counted a heart-warming
successâ??gentle,
peaceable, individualistic, persevering and utterly free.  With an eye cocked
on
awakening Africa, Paul Magloire passionately argues:  "Haiti has shown by its
struggle for liberty and progress that the black  race and small nations can .
. . achieve a status equal to that of any  other human group. Haiti has given
the lie to those who pretend that  certain races are unfit for liberty,
equality and self-government."
-Nowadays, by derivation, Cumberland also means the wire-jumper used by  some
Haitians to bypass electric meters and thereby shortcut the bills  from the
U.S.-owned power company.

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