A communist guerrilla comes home and ends at Cazale

The Unified Party of Haitian Communists launched an urban guerrilla campaign in 1966 against a state whose chief had declared himself president for life two years earlier. Young men and women of the organisation left their studies in Europe and returned to Haiti in complete secrecy. Duvalier put his whole apparatus of surveillance, repression and terror on to them. An informer working for the regime led the security forces to them, and they were located and killed resisting. Reprisals followed against the parents, friends and populations who had received them, notably at Cazale, a locality north of Port-au-Prince. Two fighters taken alive there, Alix Lamaute and Lamarre Saint-Germain, were beheaded. Their heads were sent to Duvalier in a bucket. Bernard Diederich, who recorded the episode, noted that this kind of work always brought a generous reward, and that delivering such a trophy to the president for life had become something close to a ritual.

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.

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.

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.