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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 —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"—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 Haiti—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 Sunday—just as soon, in fact, as the