The regime's paper insists that the battle has never actually ended

Le Glaunec tracks a formula through the newspaper of the Duvalierist state. On 17 November 1963 the journalist Nelson Bell published a piece arguing that the battle continues, that the present is loaded with the past, that the history of so young a people is defined by the deliberate replaying of the past, and that although the sun of 18 November 1803 set long ago the sky remains on fire. The next year another writer used the title Vertieres continues, the year after that Duvalier called the soldiers of the army the living continuation of the dead heroes, and in 1970 Bell reused his own headline. The author's point is that the rhetoric never varies. Under the dictatorship the battle was stripped of its historical distance and turned into a permanent condition of which the ruler was the sole guarantor.

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.

In West Africa constitutional change had been shifting power toward African representatives. In Kenya the British treated white settlers as the territory's future and designed multiracial councils that guaranteed those settlers a majority. Rural violence began in the late 1940s and by the early 1950s included the killing of prosperous Kikuyu as well as white farmers. The fighters were mostly Kikuyu, with Embu and Meru among them, bound to each other by oaths, drawn from squatters pushed off land and from the urban poor, and operating in the forests and hills of southern-central Kenya. In 1952 Britain declared a state of emergency, arrested the leadership of the Kenya African Union including Jomo Kenyatta, and brought in the army. Villages were targeted and indiscriminate sweeps put thousands of Kikuyu into detention camps. The brutality drove more young men into the forest, while Kikuyu loyalists were armed as a home guard. The revolt was suppressed by 1956 and never built a base beyond the Kikuyu, and the world read it through British reporting as tribal savagery. By the middle of the decade officials were questioning whether the settlers belonged at the centre of Kenyan politics.

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.