Papa Doc serves his full term and dies in his own bed

Only Petion and Riche had managed it before. Duvalier served his full term and died naturally, in the palace, in 1971. He got there on suspicion that never rested and betrayal he practised without embarrassment, forgetting friends easily and enemies never. The Heinls set him beside Adolf Hitler, one white racist and one black one, sharing cruelty, fanaticism, superstition, megalomania and an appetite for power that nothing satisfied. He knew everybody in the country and everybody's secrets, and many peasants and more than a few oungan concluded that the lwa worked for him. To foreigners, whom he enjoyed misleading, he called himself an ethnologist and Vodou a folklore. He was unbelievably cruel to a mild and cheerful people, a conductor of human weakness, a xenophobe who outplayed the great powers and their organisations, an Ozymandias whose monument turned out to be rubble. He was also profoundly Haitian, in the line of Toussaint and Dessalines, and he voiced his countrymen's hopes better than anyone had. Then he betrayed them, and the hopes, and himself.

In 1970 Louis Brun stood for a seat in the New York State Legislature, the first Haitian migrant to run for office there. He later returned to Haiti. What he started held. Haitians who learn campaign politics in the United States carry that training back and use it in Haitian political life, and the traffic runs both ways. By 1998 five Haitians were standing for local or state office in south Florida and one in New York, and Haitians were working in campaigns in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Fritz Longchamps, who ran the Washington Office on Haiti for the anti-Duvalier exiles, went home with Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1994 and became foreign minister under Rene Preval in 1996. These families conduct their political life in two countries at once, and have done so for longer than either country's political class has been willing to admit.

Richard Nixon's administration handled Haiti with fewer scruples than its predecessors and more clarity. Ambassador Clinton Knox repeated in his telegrams that Haiti had no democratic tradition, and that democracy, corruption and good governance therefore could not serve as measures for judging the Duvalier government. Nelson Rockefeller had come back from his own visit with recommendations along the same lines. Henry Kissinger proposed to Nixon a more open policy toward the country. On 21 April 1971 the United States approved the succession of Francois Duvalier by his son. Knox described what was arriving as a new Duvalierism deserving every form of official American encouragement. Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled until 1986. He promised an economic revolution to follow his father's political one. Under him the violence grew quieter, in order to improve the image of the regime and attract foreign lenders, and the machine still went out whenever the government judged itself threatened.

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.