Lectures: Atlas d'Haïti

Summary

This article is an academic review of the Atlas d'Haïti published by CEGET-CNRS in 1985. The author first acknowledges the atlas's near-perfect quality in terms of information richness, cartographic craftsmanship, and reference value, filling a gap in Haiti's national cartography. However, the author argues that the work fails to fully achieve the goals stated in its foreword—providing a clear and synthetic image of Haiti's spatial reality. Criticisms focus on the traditional thematic organization that disperses key information, such as separating food production systems from related rural development and geomorphology plates, and the absence of thematic maps addressing the plight of poor peasants and networks of economic, political, and religious control. The author suggests that adopting the approach from his doctoral thesis—reconstructing social geography through coffee trade networks—would have better demonstrated the value of cartographic methods in analyzing development issues.