Hurricane Hazel takes forty percent of Haiti's coffee bushes

Hazel came up from the south on 11 October 1954 with winds of eighty knots. It struck the coast at Port-a-Piment, tore past Les Cayes, wrecked most of Jeremie, flattened villages, killed at least a thousand people, stripped forty percent of the country's coffee bushes, destroyed the new banana plantations Magloire had sponsored and uprooted half the cacao trees. Nan Mapou, a well off village near Port-a-Piment, was left as a lagoon a mile long. Help arrived fast. The Saipan was off the coast within a day, and money came from the Red Cross, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Guadeloupe and the United States, whose grants eventually reached nearly five million dollars. Some of it reached the people it was sent for. Visitors to the back country found relief stores stacked in army depots, prefectures and private shops for years afterwards. The word entered Creole with a second meaning. Mink wraps on the wives of officials were known as les Hazels.

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.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.

Edmundo O'Gorman, a Mexican historian and philosopher of Irish descent, published La invencion de America in 1957. His argument was that America could not have been discovered, because no such thing existed before Europeans made one. The landmass was there. The entity called America was a European product, assembled out of expectation, cartography and law after 1492. O'Gorman was refusing the rules of evidence that European historical writing took for granted, and he said as much, proposing that historians work from other premises. Both accounts of 1492 can be internally consistent, which is the point of the exercise. What separates them is where the person speaking stands and what he assumes before he starts. For the Caribbean the argument bites directly, since the islands were the first ground on which the invention was carried out, and the first place where people already living somewhere were written into another continent's category.