Kennedy's death in Dallas rescues the Duvalier government

John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas on 22 November 1963. For Francois Duvalier the date settled a three year contest. The Kennedy administration had pulled its ambassador out, closed its aid programme, ended its military mission, backed attempts to remove him and parked a marine force off the Haitian coast in May. None of it had worked. With Kennedy dead, and with Juan Bosch overthrown in the Dominican Republic two months earlier, American policy moved towards accepting the Caribbean governments that existed instead of sponsoring the ones it preferred. Relations improved from that point and the aid was moving again within a few years. Haitians noticed the date and said so. Duvalier had made a charm against Kennedy earlier in the year with the help of the palace boko, and champagne was reported to have been served in the National Palace when the news came through. He later sent a man to Arlington for earth from the grave.

The Congo became independent from Belgium in June 1960 and the Belgian administrators went home. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold set up the Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo, which spent four years recruiting French speaking professionals from around the world to keep the country's services running. Hundreds of Haitians went, as teachers, professors, engineers and doctors. By 1962 Haitians formed the second largest national contingent of United Nations staff experts in the Congo. Maurice Dartigue was chief of the Africa Division of UNESCO. Athemas Bellerive, once director general of health in Haiti, ran the World Health Organisation medical team. In 1963 the military force of the operation was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville of Haiti. Large numbers of Haitians also worked in United Nations programmes in Benin and Cameroon, and an estimated 7,500 Haitians were living in African countries. Haitian migration is usually written as a movement towards New York, Montreal and Paris.

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.