Barbot goes to Fort Dimanche for having been too useful

Clement Barbot was arrested in July 1960 and held at Fort Dimanche. He had been the most powerful man in Haiti after the president. He had organised the tonton macoutes, commanded their personal loyalty, and governed the country for several weeks in 1959 while Duvalier lay ill. Two things finished him. His influence had grown to the point where the militia looked like his rather than the president's, and he had built close relations with the American embassy, which raised the possibility that Washington had found somebody it preferred. Duvalier's method with subordinates never varied after this. Build a man up, use him for the work that could not be done in uniform, then remove him before he became an alternative. Barbot was let out in 1961, went underground, and was hunted down and killed in July 1963. Every strongman the regime produced afterwards understood what the job's ceiling was.

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.

In a footnote added to the 1963 edition of his history, and stressed again in his later lectures, C. L. R. James distinguished the Jacobins from the sansculottes and mapped that distinction onto the Haitian conflict. The Jacobins he treats as authoritarian enlightened despots, while the sansculottes wanted a dictatorship over the aristocracy and a free democratic state among themselves. On this reading the labourers who rose against Toussaint were not simply avengers, they wanted to hold the former masters down while governing themselves democratically. Ciccariello-Maher uses the point to argue that repressing an avowed enemy is compatible with popular democracy and does not forfeit any future claim to universal equality. He notes that this distinction is missing from Buck-Morss, who treats every identity based opposition as brutality feeding an endless cycle of victim and aggressor.

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.