Washington quietly rearms the man it had cut off

Duvalier survived three attempts to remove him, in 1968, in 1969 and in 1970. Part of the reason sat in his hangars. In September 1964, while the American economic squeeze was officially still running, the United States allowed military aircraft to be exported to Haiti, two T-28 trainers among them, and began helping to rebuild the Corps d'Aviation. It later licensed one more F-51 fighter and paid in some fashion for commercial overhauls in Miami of every Haitian F-51 and of other planes that had been sitting grounded. In November 1970 the Nixon administration gave up the pretence of an arms ban altogether, issuing licences to private dealers for light weapons and six patrol boats for the coastguard. By 1971 more than a million dollars of private American arms sales to Haiti had been approved. None of it passed through Congress. Duvalier voted with the United States against Cuba at the Organisation of American States, and that was the service being paid for.

Changes to United States immigration law after 1965 encouraged millions of Caribbean immigrants to come, and the decades that followed produced substantial educational and economic gains among them. Shared ideas about equality had already given way to the American civil rights movement and to Caribbean independence in the 1960s, so the new arrivals entered a country that had just rewritten its own rules. Some historians and sociologists point to Caribbean advances that run ahead of those of African Americans and read them as a breach in the diaspora unity of the earlier twentieth century. The comparison is contested. Winston James argued against it in 2002, examining Afro Caribbean social mobility in the United States and rejecting the standard explanation built on it. What is not in dispute is the scale. A region that had been sending tens of thousands began sending millions, and cities from New York to Miami were remade.

Julius Nyerere spent the late 1950s doing two things at once. He built the confidence of the British administration in Tanganyika while turning TANU into a territory wide party with grassroots organisation as strong as any on the continent. London opened the handover with a multiracial constitution that gave the small European and Asian communities a voice out of all proportion to their numbers, an arrangement borrowed from neighbouring Kenya. Nyerere talked the settlers' representatives into supporting TANU instead of fighting it, and the party took a majority in the 1958 assembly elections. Independence came in 1961. Britain held Zanzibar until 1963, and within weeks of the island's independence African rebels overthrew the Arab government in a revolution whose violence drew on racial resentments a century old. In early 1964 Nyerere brought Tanganyika and Zanzibar together as Tanzania. The island stayed politically restless for decades, and every quarrel came back to its terms with the mainland.

Francois Duvalier died in 1971 and was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude, who was nineteen. The new administration understood that it had an image problem and set about rebranding the dictatorship. It released some political prisoners, loosened press censorship, invited politically harmless exiles home, courted foreign investors and encouraged tourism. Many Haitians read the peaceful handover as a real opening and allowed themselves to expect reform. Haitians abroad came back and put money into land and houses. Government figures record the construction sector growing by 12 percent in 1971, by 21 percent in 1972 and by 25 percent in 1973. United Nations reports described a wave of building that pulled along the production of rebar, sand, rock and cement, and created work for labourers, engineers and architects. The Port-au-Prince that stood on 12 January 2010 was largely built in this decade.