Washington decides to live with Duvalier and keep Haiti in its camp

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.

Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was flying to negotiate a ceasefire in the Congo war in 1961 when his aircraft came down in Northern Rhodesia. His bodyguards were Haitians and they died with him. Elizabeth Wilson, who was born in the Congo while her father Arnauld Wilson worked there as a public health engineer for the World Health Organisation, has written that several hundred people serving under the United Nations flag in the Congo were killed, many of them unnamed anywhere, and that the Haitian bodyguards were among them. She asks for a monument in Kinshasa, raised in the name of the United Nations, to everyone who lived and died there for an impossible ideal. Her own father is absent from the official record too. That absence is what she is arguing against, on behalf of a family memory and of a Haitian presence in Africa that nobody wrote down.

Most of British and French tropical Africa reached independence with little organised violence. Kenya was the exception, because land dispossession and urban poverty had made its political situation explosive by the early 1950s. Its decolonisation falls into three stages. From about 1945 to 1952 the crisis built until the colonial government declared a state of emergency. From 1952 to 1956 came the main period of Mau Mau fighting, which the British defeated militarily while learning that neither their own position nor the settlers' could be sustained. From the mid 1950s into the early 1960s, with the emergency lifted in 1959, the settler polity was taken apart and the colony moved toward the independence it received in 1963. The rebellion failed as a military campaign and achieved what decades of petitioning had failed to achieve. It demonstrated that dispossession would keep producing violence, and that holding white privilege in place would cost Britain more than the privilege returned.

By 1971 money had started to move again. The finance minister and the head of the bank knew that foreign donors would not reopen the taps while tax receipts kept vanishing into the unaudited tobacco monopoly, and their attempts at reform ran straight into Luckner Cambronne, Simone Duvalier and the whole militia structure that the monopoly had been feeding. There was more to work with than before. The new jet airport brought tourists back, including a new kind sold package deals by New York agents. Twelve hundred dollars bought two days in Haiti, a lawyer, a hotel and a divorce decree to hand to a spouse who had not been consulted. Haitians abroad sent home about 14 million dollars in 1971 alone, and the country ran its first balance of payments surplus in years. The generators at Peligre, begun under Magloire, came on line in July and the chronic blackouts ended. Foreign investors put up factories on the edge of the capital for the cheap labour, some 7,000 jobs by midyear. Port-au-Prince had held 200,000 people in 1957 and was approaching a million.