Haitians, he had been warned, were too poor to be taxed. There had even been mutterings among the coffee-colored aristocracy about an armed rising. But last week, as President Dumarsais Estimé's income-tax lawthe first in Haiti's 144-year historywent into effect, Haitians were too absorbed by the things Estimé was doing with his record-breaking $13,000,000 budget to take much notice of the new tax.
Chichi aristocrats and ragged mountain peasants alike chattered excitedly about the model town of Belladère, on the Dominican border. At a cost of some $600,000, government architects and engineers had transformed it from a cluster of thatched...