Duvalier builds a private militia to shrink the army

Hurbon reads the creation of the Volontaires de la sécurité nationale, known as tonton-macoutes, as a precise institutional calculation made as soon as François Duvalier reached power. Staying in the presidency required limiting the army's prerogatives, and a special corps answering to the president alone did that. Duvalier described the body as having one soul and one chief, himself. Recruitment reached into the middle class and bourgeoisie, especially under his son after 1971, but drew mainly on the shanty towns and the countryside, and the corps was paraded publicly in the capital every year on 29 July. Hurbon estimates around forty thousand macoutes, planted through the army, the university, the churches, the press and the administration. Because each macoute dealt directly with the chief, each could inflate his own power, and the system dissolved family and neighbourhood solidarity into mutual suspicion.

The world of 1945 was a different place. Indian nationalist advances suggested an empire in retreat and encouraged movements on both sides of the Sahara. Japan, during the war, had beaten European powers across Southeast Asia and taken Singapore from the British with startling ease, showing that a non-European state could humble them, though Japanese conduct toward occupied populations destroyed any standing it had as a liberator. The United States mattered most. Franklin Roosevelt disliked European empire and pressed for a decolonisation timetable. After his death that priority slid down the American agenda as the Cold War took over. Washington's concern became keeping poor countries out of communist hands, and European empire could be recast as protection for peoples thought vulnerable to it. The United States went on preaching against colonialism while supplying military aid to Portugal's fascist government fighting Marxist guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. The Soviet Union declared itself anti-colonial by nature and from the 1960s offered African movements diplomatic backing and weapons.

Martha Jean-Claude was born in 1929 and sang in the cathedral choir in Port-au-Prince from the age of twelve. She began as a backing voice for her friend Emerante de Pradines and was pushed into the front when audiences demanded to hear her. On 20 December 1952, three months pregnant, she was arrested. The charges were vague and contradictory, covering criticism of the government, the communist activities of her husband, who was out of the country, and a plan to build housing for the poor that Paul Magloire found too revolutionary. Her health deteriorated to the point that she had to be moved to hospital, and on release she went into exile. She reached Cuba by way of a short stay in Venezuela, worked as a typesetter and a hairdresser, and in 1956 met Celia Cruz and recorded Canciones de Haiti. She did not sing in Haiti again until 1986.

The new government inherited an empty treasury, dead tourism, coffee production down by more than two fifths and American aid programmes closed. Before October was out the supporters of Dejoie called a general strike, and it broke in their hands. Heavy men in dark glasses with pistols under their jackets persuaded shopkeepers to stay open. Where persuasion failed, cutting tools opened the steel shutters and police invited passers-by to help themselves under a law permitting the redistribution of goods to needy persons. Nobody tried the business strike on Duvalier again. Inside two months the penitentiary and Fort Dimanche held at least a hundred political prisoners, with as many people again in hiding or inside embassies. Clement Barbot ran this. In January 1958 his men kidnapped, beat and sexually assaulted the feminist editor Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel. Kebreau, who had installed the president, missed the signals. Twenty of his key officers were posted to remote garrisons, and on 12 March 1958 he heard Fort National fire thirteen guns for someone else and drove straight to the Dominican embassy.