Peasants stone Jacques Alexis to death on the president's order

Duvalier kept communists close and used them. Paul and Jules Blanchet and Herve Boyer sat in his circle, contacts with Havana and with the French and Mexican parties were allowed to continue, and in November 1961 he sent Jules Blanchet to Warsaw and Vienna to ask for Russian aid. Washington was the audience. The American ambassador said in 1963 that he did not think the president a communist, only a man who found them useful to wave. The tolerance ended wherever a threat appeared. In April 1961 the novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, who had travelled to Moscow, Peking and Havana for his party, sailed from Baracoa with four companions and twenty thousand dollars and came ashore at the Mole. The peasants he had come to liberate tied him up and delivered him to the nearest garrison. After some days of beating in the cells of Fort St George the five were taken out under the walls and stoned to death by those same peasants, on orders from the palace. The rival party led by Rene Depestre lost its leaders in 1966. The two merged in 1968 and proclaimed a single communist party on 31 March 1969.

Greene told Diederich in a letter of 20 December 1965 that a novel about Haiti was coming out at the end of January, and a copy reached the Diederich house in the middle of the Dominican civil war. In the prefatory letter Greene wrote that poor Haiti and the character of Duvalier's rule were not invented, and that the latter had not even been blackened for dramatic effect, since it was impossible to deepen that night. Diederich read it in one night and concluded that Greene had protected everyone concerned and had breached no confidence, and that the book gave the poor of Haiti something the dictatorship had taken from them, a voice. He identifies the models as he knew them, Jolicoeur as Petit Pierre, Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe behind the young Philipot, Bajeux as the refugee priest, and Doctor Camille Lherisson, a revelation Greene made only in 1980, as Doctor Magiot.

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.

Statistics kept by the Haitian Ministry of Education for 1964 traced how many children entering public primary school were still present at each later stage. The figure at the end of the sequence was 0.65 percent, which is fewer than seven pupils in a thousand of the school population completing the secondary cycle. The rate of enrolment was falling rather than rising. Between 1960 and 1967 the school age population of Haiti grew from about one million to about 1.8 million, while the number of children actually enrolled went from 249,000 to 300,113. What the school did in Haiti was mark a threshold. Passing through it meant crossing from the condition of a cultural laggard to the status of a civilised person, and the crossing was made in French, a language almost nobody in the country spoke at home.