Their only worry was that so good a life could not last. On porches overlooking the improbable blue harbor of Port-au-Prince, the 200 or more members of the American colony in Haiti basked in a New World Majorca, living like nabobs on $300 a month, and comfortably on $150.
Choice sirloin and T-bone steaks cost 20¢ a lb., prime rib roasts 15¢ a lb., chickens and lobsters 30¢ apiece. Excellent Haitian coffee was 12¢ a lb., sugar 6¢:, and there was no limit on anything. As a matter of course, an American household was staffed by five competent servants—houseboy, cook, maid, yardboy and laundress. Total monthly wages: around $40.
An airy villa, with modern bath, electric and charcoal kitchen, and a gallery (porch) with a view of one of the most breath-taking harbors west of Naples, cost $60 a month. For $150 a month the lotus-eater got the sort of house awed tourists peer at in Palm Beach—shady, parklike grounds on the mountainside, a sweeping gallery on which a hundred people could be entertained at cocktails, a tile swimming pool. Often the lower-priced houses had swimming pools too.
Social life was founded on leisure and letters, and on what all agreed was the world’s finest rum ($3.75 a gallon in town). But whether at the American Club, the fashionable Centre d’Art, the Thorland Club’s new gaming casino, or one of Port-au-Prince’s two movie houses, the colonist was apt to see the same people—a writer of short stories for Collier’s, a retired Marine captain, a rich cosmetics importer, a sculptor or two. Some sailed, some swam, some drove to resorts in the mountains, and some just sat on their porches in the moonlight, sipping rum drinks handed them by white-coated houseboys, listening to the beat of far-off voodoo drums.
Sometimes the Americans met and played tennis with upper-class Haitians at the swank Turgeau Club. And businessmen with a stake in Haitian foreign trade watched closely last week as President Dumarsais Estime dropped nationalist leaders from his Cabinet. But mostly the escapists lived far above and remote from the impoverished millions of the black republic. Their chief worry: that other Americans would come to Haiti, run up prices, put an end to paradise.
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