Haiti's vote helps expel Cuba from the Organization of American States

The article treats the vote as the concrete yield of the cold war bargain. Having received military, financial and technical assistance without which the article judges Duvalier would probably not have lasted fourteen years, Haiti voted with the United States to expel Cuba, supported economic sanctions against Cuba in 1964, and backed the creation of an inter-American peacekeeping force that legitimised American intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Duvalier had earlier offered Washington sites for a naval base should Guantanamo be dismantled. The mechanism the article isolates is an exchange in which a weak state sells diplomatic alignment and buys immunity from scrutiny of its domestic practices, so that the defence of human rights was made to look contrary to the American national interest for authoritarian rulers across the Caribbean.

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.

The approach to independence in Rwanda was dominated by the split between Tutsi and Hutu, which German and then Belgian administrators had hardened out of older and looser social categories into a fixed racial hierarchy with identity cards to match. In 1959 a Hutu rising against the Tutsi monarchy killed a great many people, and the Belgians restored order only to begin managing a transfer of power to the majority they had spent decades governing through its rivals. Parmehutu, the main Hutu party, swept the local elections of 1960. The monarchy was abolished the following year, and Parmehutu took the country to independence in 1962. Ethnic violence did not stop. The fear that the Tutsi were about to take power back was the trigger for the massacre in 1994 of Tutsi and of the Hutu thought to be friendly to them. In Burundi next door the Tutsi held power from independence until 1993. The categories were an administrative convenience. They became the lines along which two countries tore.

Changes to United States immigration law after 1965 encouraged millions of Caribbean immigrants to come, and the decades that followed produced substantial educational and economic gains among them. Shared ideas about equality had already given way to the American civil rights movement and to Caribbean independence in the 1960s, so the new arrivals entered a country that had just rewritten its own rules. Some historians and sociologists point to Caribbean advances that run ahead of those of African Americans and read them as a breach in the diaspora unity of the earlier twentieth century. The comparison is contested. Winston James argued against it in 2002, examining Afro Caribbean social mobility in the United States and rejecting the standard explanation built on it. What is not in dispute is the scale. A region that had been sending tens of thousands began sending millions, and cities from New York to Miami were remade.