EDITED BY PETER ORNER AND LAURA LAMPTON SCOTT
Jean Marseille: An Introduction
Jean Marseille was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents during what his mother and father thought was only a brief stop. This was in 1970, during the waning days of Papa Doc Duvalier’s dictatorship. Life in Haiti had gone from worse to unimaginable. As Jean once put it to me, “At that time, the Tonton Macoute”—Duvalier’s vast network of henchmen—“would kill you for anything.”
Laurent Dubois, in his book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, quotes a resident of Port-au-Prince telling a journalist in the late sixties, “Duvalier has performed an economic miracle. He has taught us how to live without money and eat without food.”

