A Haitian doctor arrives in a country with no Congolese doctors

Athemas Bellerive had been director general of health in Haiti. He reached the Congo in July 1960, weeks after independence, as a malaria specialist directing the World Health Organisation emergency team. He described the situation as dramatic. There was not one Congolese doctor in the country. Almost every foreign doctor had left. Fighting between groups was under way, telephone links between the provincial capitals had been cut and the roads no longer carried traffic. Patients had walked out of the hospitals because the hospitals had turned dangerous, and those without the strength to leave died in them. His answer was to build a Congolese medical profession rather than staff the system permanently with foreigners. More than a hundred Congolese who had worked as assistants to expatriate doctors were selected, sent to Europe with their families, and given theoretical and practical training leading to a medical diploma. A French colleague on the Leopoldville team later called that his most important achievement.

The general instructions prepared by the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs before the ministerial conference on the Alliance for Progress in June 1961 set the American objective in Haiti as keeping the country in our camp, and the line of action as living with Duvalier. Dean Rusk, who called Haiti the cesspool of the western hemisphere and its government enormously repugnant, argued for support anyway, on the ground that a Castro type regime might be no worse for Haitians and would be bad for the United States. Adolph Berle argued the opposite case and lost. What Duvalier delivered was concrete. Communists in Haiti were hunted actively. He offered Eisenhower and then Kennedy a military base in Haiti to replace Guantanamo. During the missile crisis he let American ships patrol Haitian waters to enforce the blockade of Cuba. His vote at Punta del Este gave Kennedy the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States.

Ugandan nationalism was weakened from the inside by the position of Buganda. The Ganda had received privileges from the British in return for helping to establish colonial rule, and other peoples resented them for it. When the kabaka objected in 1953 to a British plan to fold his kingdom fully into a single Uganda, the colonial authorities deported him, which turned Ganda grievance into a mass movement. The British then conceded, and the 1961 constitution gave Buganda internal self-government separate from the central state. Other divisions ran alongside that one. Northerners distrusted the educated nationalists, who were mostly southern and Christian, and in the south Protestants and Catholics had been competing for office since the late nineteenth century. The Uganda National Congress, founded in 1952 and renamed the Uganda People's Congress in 1960 under Milton Obote, drew on northern and Protestant support. The Democratic Party drew on southern Catholics. The Ganda formed Kabaka Yekka. Independence was as much a contest over who would hold power afterwards as a campaign against Britain.

The first Haitian refugee boat detected in Florida arrived in 1963. Its passengers asked for asylum, were refused and were sent home. Ten years passed before another sailboat reached the state. Richman takes the dates from Alex Stepick, and those isolated arrivals stand at the head of a movement that later became the defining image of Haitian migration. Through the first half of the twentieth century Haitian workers had gone instead to Cuba, to other parts of Haiti and to the Dominican Republic, following North American investment in capitalised agriculture. In the second half of the century they went to the United States and Canada, with New York the principal destination, and also to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Quebec, Boston and Chicago. One wooden boat turned away in 1963 sits at the beginning of a sequence that put more than two hundred thousand Haitians in South Florida within two decades of the first large crossings.