The first Haitian refugee boat reaches Florida and is sent back

The first Haitian refugee boat detected in Florida arrived in 1963. Its passengers asked for asylum, were refused and were sent home. Ten years passed before another sailboat reached the state. Richman takes the dates from Alex Stepick, and those isolated arrivals stand at the head of a movement that later became the defining image of Haitian migration. Through the first half of the twentieth century Haitian workers had gone instead to Cuba, to other parts of Haiti and to the Dominican Republic, following North American investment in capitalised agriculture. In the second half of the century they went to the United States and Canada, with New York the principal destination, and also to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Quebec, Boston and Chicago. One wooden boat turned away in 1963 sits at the beginning of a sequence that put more than two hundred thousand Haitians in South Florida within two decades of the first large crossings.

Under Francois Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, the men who worked for him carried the bodies of their victims out to Titayen, a stretch of desert ground at the foot of the coastal mountains a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and left them there for crows, goats and vultures. Everyone understood the choice of ground. Haitians who serve the spirits hold that a permanent link runs between a person's spirit and the physical remains, which is why tombs are built above ground with flat roofs that work as tables for offerings of food and rum on birthdays, on All Saints' Day and on the first of January, which is Ancestors Day and Independence Day at once. To withhold the body was to cancel all of that for the whole family. The name of Titayen stayed in the national memory, and in 2010 whoever picked the site of the mass graves for earthquake victims picked the same ground.

From 1955 the British in Kenya accepted that the colony had to change and began consolidating African holdings and issuing title under a new Kikuyu settlement scheme. They left untouched the grievance that had produced Mau Mau. Land went to men classified as loyal and the landless got nothing. Then the Hola Camp killings came out, detainees beaten to death in a system that treated Mau Mau as a disease to be washed out of the mind. The revelations disgusted British opinion. Harold Macmillan had already begun doubting that colonies paid for themselves, and now they were costing him votes. Multiracial power sharing was dropped in favour of African majority rule, the nationalist parties were legalised, and Jomo Kenyatta came out of prison to lead KANU and take Kenya to independence in 1963. In the last months Britain bought more than a million acres from departing European farmers for redistribution. Seller and buyer both had to be willing, so the buyers were men who already owned land.

Greene spent August 1963 in Haiti and found the Oloffson almost empty, with an Italian casino manager and an elderly American couple as the only other guests, a scene he transposed almost unchanged into his novel. The gossip columnist Aubelin Jolicoeur announced his arrival on 13 August and became the model for Petit Pierre. A New York paper ran a piece on 18 August noting that Greene was thinking of writing an entertainment beginning with a hotel keeper who returns to find only two guests. His own article appeared in a London Sunday paper on 29 September 1963 under the title Nightmare Republic, a bleak account of a people living under a strange curse in which he cast Papa Doc as the Vodou spirit Baron Samedi, a figure in top hat and tails haunting the cemeteries in dark glasses with a cigar. Diederich later learned Greene had been watched day and night throughout the visit.