Every union is dead by 1963 except the one Duvalier built himself

Terrifying the elite took very little after the summer of 1958. The press was already half bought and half frightened: opposition papers had been shut, awkward journalists jailed or beaten quiet, and the Catholic La Phalange was the only critical voice left until the government seized it in 1960. The survivors were managed through subsidies, control of newsprint and electricity, macoutes installed in editorial chairs, and editorials supplied ready made. Foreign correspondents were expelled, their cables censored, and offending articles cut out of imported magazines with scissors. Labour went next. After arresting the head of the national workers union, Duvalier told a delegation that any popular movement would be put down with total and inflexible rigour. Unions were broken, driven underground or handed to macoute officers until by 1963 only the drivers union survived, the one he had cultivated himself and which had become the recruiting ground for his militia. No business could declare bankruptcy or close its doors without palace approval. Spontaneous contributions were collected through the Chamber of Commerce. O. J. Brandt bought the entire million dollar bond issue for repaving the Grand'Rue, and the sugar company paid four hundred thousand dollars of tax in advance.

In January 1965 Diederich met Greene at the airport in Santo Domingo and set out before dawn with the exiled priest Jean-Claude Bajeux in a chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle to drive the length of the Dominican side of the border. Their cover was that they were checking Dominican jails for missing Haitians. Bajeux was six months from the disappearance of his own family. Diederich's purpose was to get Greene close enough to Haiti to write about it, since Greene could not return. Greene later wrote in the American edition of his novel that the best he could do in January 1965 was to make that trip along the border in the company of two exiles and pass along the edge of a country they loved. The final chapter of the book, in which the guerrillas cross into the Dominican Republic, comes directly out of those three days.

The Suez Canal had offended Egyptian nationalists since it opened in 1869, and Gamal Abdel Nasser meant to remove every remaining Western hold on Egyptian sovereignty. Britain agreed in 1954 to pull its troops out. Two years later Britain, the United States and the World Bank withdrew the money promised for the Aswan Dam, and Nasser answered by nationalising the canal company. Britain and France invaded with Israeli help and the operation failed completely. Condemnation was worldwide and the loudest of it came from Washington. London and Paris backed down. Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister soon afterwards. Nasser had won a victory for pan-Arabism, and Africans read it as something wider, the postcolonial state proving stronger than the empires that had ruled them. No European power had been humiliated on African soil on that scale since Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Within a few years Britain and France were retreating from the continent altogether. The remaining question was when Africa would be free.

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.