A writer close to the palace threatens Washington with the other camp

In August 1963 Gerard Daumec published an attack on the United States under the title Les prisons de la Democratie. Daumec wrote close to the palace, so the piece was not private opinion. Relations with Washington were at their lowest that year, with the ambassador withdrawn, the aid programme closed and an American amphibious force having sat in the Gulf of La Gonave a few months earlier. The argument of the article was that American democracy is itself a system of confinement, and the implication was that a government treated as a pariah by Washington had somewhere else it could go. Duvalier was already subsidising a Port-au-Prince paper that praised Moscow and Havana while his delegation voted with the Americans at the Organisation of American States. The threat to change camps was never carried out and was never meant to be. It was a quotation for services. Washington read it, and after Juan Bosch fell in Santo Domingo that autumn it started reading differently.

The Haitian communities abroad that now send money home began as an escape. Through the 1960s educated Haitians left in numbers as Francois Duvalier fastened his grip, and the Haitian population of the United States grew from about five thousand in 1960 to about thirty thousand in 1970. The people who went were the ones a poor country can least spare: lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, civil servants and owners of businesses. Schools and hospitals lost the staff who ran them and the state lost the people who knew how to make it work. The movement never stopped. By the early twenty first century more than 2.5 million Haitians lived outside Haiti, roughly a million in the Dominican Republic and roughly a million in the United States, about three hundred thousand in Cuba, and close to a hundred thousand each in the Bahamas, Canada and France. Money sent back by those households became one of the largest sources of income in the Haitian economy.

Dunduzu Chisiza was building the first economic plan for the territory about to become Malawi. He had drawn in experts from across the world to prepare an ambitious five year programme of economic recovery. One night in September 1962, racing home from a meeting in Blantyre, he drove into the abutments of a high level concrete bridge and was killed. Mourners came from the whole country to the funeral. He had been part of the group that did the practical work of government through 1962, when Kamuzu Banda formally held only the ministry of lands, natural resources and local government yet decided policy, approved legislation and directed the other ministers. In those months they widened secondary schooling, remade the native courts, improved conditions for agricultural labour, reformed the marketing of produce and replaced chiefs with elected district councils. The one man who could argue with Banda about the economy was gone two years before the country became independent.

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.