A law of 1969 makes communist belief a crime against the state

Between 1967 and 1970 Duvalier stepped up repression in the name of stopping communist subversion. The Parti Unifie des Communistes Haitiens did exist and did a little clandestine work, and that was enough. In April 1969 the government passed an anticommunist law which defined any profession of communist belief, spoken or written, in public or in private, as a crime against the security of the state. The penalty was death, and it reached whoever was named as an accomplice. Most of the people the law reached had no connection to any party. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's point is that violence which had been happening anyway was now written into the statute book, which is the step that separates a totalitarian state from a merely brutal one. A small real threat bought a general power. It also bought something abroad, since Washington in 1969 was grading Caribbean governments on their position toward Cuba. The law outlived Duvalier himself.

Haitians reaching New York in the 1960s found no government or civic body set up to receive them. The Catholic Church filled the space, sponsoring centres that offered help with employment, immigration paperwork, housing, literacy and English classes. Lyderick Bonaventure, a trade union leader and political activist pushed out of Haiti, founded and directed one of the first of them in 1967. The Haitian Neighborhood Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, became a place immigrants went for counselling, for news from home, or simply to meet other Haitians. Similar centres followed in Brooklyn and Queens, among them Charlemagne Peralte and Haitian Americans United for Progress. The people running them were educated, comfortable in American institutions, and had generally held prominent positions in Haiti before the Duvalier government forced them out of the country.

Uganda reached independence in 1962 through a short lived alliance between Milton Obote's UPC and Kabaka Yekka, the party of the Ganda monarchy, brokered in part by the British. The kabaka became executive president the following year. As Obote's own support grew he stopped needing the Ganda, pushed through a constitution in 1966 that made himself executive president, and sent the army against the kabaka's palace. The monarch fled into exile and Buganda lost its special status. Nothing underneath had been settled. In Nigeria decolonisation was slowed because the Northern People's Congress, the Yoruba Action Group and the NCNC could not agree on a constitution. The Muslim north expected to be dominated by Europeanised southerners, and the Christian south was itself split between Yoruba and Igbo. A federal system was the compromise, and Nigeria became independent in 1960 under Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The north controlled the first federal parliament while each region ran its own affairs, which left large minorities under whichever group was locally biggest.

In the summer of 1964 thirteen young men of the Jeune Haiti group landed near Dame-Marie, about fifty kilometres from Jeremie. A curfew from six in the evening followed. Pastor Rocourt, who survived, remembered night after night of DKW jeeps grinding through the town, the vehicle the macoutes had used since Barbot's time, carrying people to their graves. Three families were massacred. Twenty seven of their members went into a common grave on the airfield, eight Villedrouin, five Drouin and fourteen Sansaricq. Outside the town it was worse. Nobody could move. Peasants were stopped from bringing produce to market. Anyone suspected of having sheltered or helped the thirteen in any way, including selling them food, was killed systematically, and whole peasant families were liquidated so that no witness to the terror was left. Twenty four years later the pastor's wife still could not bear the sound of a DKW.