Written in the wake of the 1994 American intervention, Dupuy's study asks why Washington broke with its Cold War habits and opposed the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His answer is that backing the generals would have invited coups elsewhere and wrecked the neoliberal programme the United States wanted for the region, so returning Aristide, once he had conceded on economic policy, served that agenda better. Dupuy traces the failure of the post-Duvalier military governments to impose World Bank and USAID reforms, the popular movement that carried Aristide into office, his liberation theology and the Lavalas alternative, and the moderation pressed on him during exile. He counts the dissolution of the Haitian army as a genuine defeat for the antidemocratic side. An epilogue on 1995 is sharper about Aristide himself, whose cult of personality and abandonment of his own prime ministers left supporters disengaged from electoral politics.