The Kamoken burn a sawmill and overrun a border post in one week

The Haitian Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as the Kamoken and led by the former Jacmel schoolteacher Fred Baptiste, returned to their old camp in the Morne La Selle on 5 August 1964, a stone's throw from the Dominican post at El Aguacate whose commander had ordered his soldiers to ignore them. On 11 August they sabotaged the Pine Forest sawmill belonging to Duvalier's sister in law and her husband, who held the timber monopoly. Four days later a column took the military border post at Savane Zombi by night, capturing its archives when soldiers and militia fled, and burned the post and two houses belonging to the local Macoute chief. The same afternoon another column ambushed a truckload of militia on the mountain road from Thiotte. Diederich, who supplied them, drove up with food and clothing on 24 August through Hurricane Cleo.

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.

The Algerian war of decolonisation ran from 1954 to 1962 and ended with the country's liberation, which is dated to 1961 in the sequence set out here. Malik Bennabi, who lived from 1905 to 1973, wrote through those years and through the earlier decades when Algeria was ruled first from Istanbul and then from Paris. His two short works on the question of ideas in the Muslim world were conceived in late 1960 and 1961 and published a decade later. He was asking why ideas go dead in the societies that hold them, and what bilingualism does to a people who think in one language and are governed in another. Anyone whose body came into the world before 1961 and lived through that war carried a different set of intellectual and political concerns from anyone who did not. Haitian writers under the American occupation had made the same observation about themselves thirty years earlier.

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.