A new bronze monument becomes the place where ancestors are addressed

Le Glaunec follows the commemorative wave through the months after the anniversary. On 18 November 1954 the inhabitants of Cap-Haitien assembled in front of the newly erected bronze monument to continue the practice of honouring their ancestors, reciting patriotic poems, singing and making speeches. He treats this as evidence that the passion did not fade after the celebrations, unlike the earlier surge that had died away once Borno left the presidency. The following July a statue of Capois on horseback and two paintings of the battle went on show at a museum inaugurated that year in Cap-Haitien and named after the sitting president. On 18 November 1955 pupils at a religious school in Port-au-Prince staged a theatrical version of the battle, and about a year later a bust of Capois was set up near Limonade, the village where he was assassinated.

Twenty nine Asian and African countries took part in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The word decolonisation acquired its modern meaning there, as a third option alongside capitalism and communism, at a moment when the Cold War was pressing every new state to choose one of the two. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries followed in 1961. Non-alignment was itself a statement that the choice on offer was not the only one available. Bandung allowed Islamic and Indian arguments to be linked with the struggles in Africa and Asia, and it gave a vocabulary to people who wanted independence without simply changing patrons. In the early nineteenth century the words used for the same ends had been independence and revolution, as in the American and Haitian revolutions and the Mexican and Argentine independences. Haiti had made the case a hundred and fifty years before there was a conference at which to make it.

The Haitian communities abroad that now send money home began as an escape. Through the 1960s educated Haitians left in numbers as Francois Duvalier fastened his grip, and the Haitian population of the United States grew from about five thousand in 1960 to about thirty thousand in 1970. The people who went were the ones a poor country can least spare: lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, civil servants and owners of businesses. Schools and hospitals lost the staff who ran them and the state lost the people who knew how to make it work. The movement never stopped. By the early twenty first century more than 2.5 million Haitians lived outside Haiti, roughly a million in the Dominican Republic and roughly a million in the United States, about three hundred thousand in Cuba, and close to a hundred thousand each in the Bahamas, Canada and France. Money sent back by those households became one of the largest sources of income in the Haitian economy.

The second half of the 1940s was a good stretch for Haitian exports, with coffee and sisal prices rising, and the boom around the Korean war in 1950 and 1951 kept coffee high and demand for sisal strong. From late 1951 to the summer of 1952 sisal prices halved. The coffee harvest of 1953 was very small, and the following year coffee prices fell sharply. In the same year, 1954, Hurricane Hazel struck Haiti and destroyed forty percent of the coffee harvest and fifty percent of the cocoa harvest. By 1955 coffee still accounted for over sixty five percent of total export value, followed by sisal at almost sixteen percent, sugar at more than three and a half, cocoa at about the same, and essential oils at three percent. Plantation Dauphin, once the largest sisal producer in the world, gave up the crop in 1971 after synthetic fibres undercut it.