Every car carries the sentence that makes Duvalier into the country

Cars across Haiti carried an official slogan in the late 1960s: to wish to destroy Duvalier is to wish to destroy Haiti. The sentence does a specific piece of work. It equates the survival of one man with the survival of the republic, which converts every form of opposition into an attack on the country itself and every opponent into a traitor by definition. There is no room left in the proposition for a Haitian who wants a different president and the same nation. Duvalier had been making the claim since August 1958, when he announced that he had mastered the country and was the new Haiti, and by the end of the sixties it was riding around on the back of taxis and trucks where nobody could avoid reading it. Slogans painted on vehicles are ordinary in Haiti, usually proverbs or appeals to God. This one arrived in that idiom and asked to be treated as common sense.

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.

Francois Duvalier died in 1971 and was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude, who was nineteen. The new administration understood that it had an image problem and set about rebranding the dictatorship. It released some political prisoners, loosened press censorship, invited politically harmless exiles home, courted foreign investors and encouraged tourism. Many Haitians read the peaceful handover as a real opening and allowed themselves to expect reform. Haitians abroad came back and put money into land and houses. Government figures record the construction sector growing by 12 percent in 1971, by 21 percent in 1972 and by 25 percent in 1973. United Nations reports described a wave of building that pulled along the production of rebar, sand, rock and cement, and created work for labourers, engineers and architects. The Port-au-Prince that stood on 12 January 2010 was largely built in this decade.

Jean-Claude Duvalier was sworn in on 22 April 1971, in a private ceremony his mother organised and at which she held the list of cabinet appointments. He was in shock, and palace doctors were giving him tranquillisers on Simone Duvalier's orders. He did not walk in his father's funeral procession. A day later he met the foreign press, introduced by Fritz Cineas, the new information minister and Cambronne's man, read a short statement in French asking for objective coverage, shook hands and left. He then toured police stations, army posts and militia posts around the capital, where the declarations of loyalty were emphatic; Constant's removal had been noted. On the Thursday he addressed the assembly, speaking so quietly that parts of the chamber could not hear him, a trick his father had used to keep people guessing. There would be no pardons and no tolerance of communists, he said, and the United States could count on Haiti.