Estime is reburied and Duvalier claims the inheritance

In 1968 the remains of Dumarsais Estime were moved to a monument on the Bicentenaire waterfront in Port-au-Prince. Estime had been president from 1946 to 1950, the first man from the black middle class to hold the office in the modern period, and the army pushed him out before his term was finished. He died in New York in 1953. The ceremony included Vodou symbols, which no Haitian state funeral had displayed so openly. Duvalier had served as a minister in Estime's government and had built his own politics out of that period, so the reburial let him present himself as the man completing what Estime began. He used the speeches to attack the elite for measuring Haiti against Europe. Moving a body is cheap and it works. A government with nothing left to distribute can still distribute the past, and this one spent the late 1960s doing exactly that, with flags, monuments and reburials.

The film, shot in Dahomey after the director toured the Caribbean and West Africa looking for a country that could stand in for Haiti, was released late in 1967 with Greene's own screenplay. On 1 November 1967 the Haitian embassy in Washington issued a long statement attacking it on the government's black and red letterhead, which Diederich says may be the first time an embassy has officially protested against a movie. An American newspaper devoted an editorial to the comedy of the protest at the end of that month. Diederich adds a coda Duvalier is likely to have enjoyed. Four weeks after the film opened, on Christmas Day 1967, President Soglo of Dahomey was removed by his own subordinates, and while there were ordinary explanations there were also those who blamed the long reach of Papa Doc in revenge for the filming. Greene said Vodou deserved some credit.

Belgium gave up the Congo in 1960 after years of unrest, and moved so fast that the nationalists themselves were caught unready. Parties multiplied, most of them regional and built on one language group. Patrice Lumumba tried to hold a national coalition together while the army mutinied under him and Katanga, which held the copper, declared itself separate. Americans, Russians, Chinese and Belgians all involved themselves. The United Nations sent its first large African force, and the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, died when his plane came down in Zambia in September 1961. Peacekeepers brought Katanga back under central control by 1962. Lumumba was gone by then, kidnapped and killed, with American knowledge and to American satisfaction, since Washington feared both his politics and his ability to hold a crowd. The army commander Joseph Mobutu, backed by the Americans, took power outright in 1965 and kept it for thirty two years. He renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and the West paid the bills until the Cold War ended.

Richard Nixon's administration handled Haiti with fewer scruples than its predecessors and more clarity. Ambassador Clinton Knox repeated in his telegrams that Haiti had no democratic tradition, and that democracy, corruption and good governance therefore could not serve as measures for judging the Duvalier government. Nelson Rockefeller had come back from his own visit with recommendations along the same lines. Henry Kissinger proposed to Nixon a more open policy toward the country. On 21 April 1971 the United States approved the succession of Francois Duvalier by his son. Knox described what was arriving as a new Duvalierism deserving every form of official American encouragement. Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled until 1986. He promised an economic revolution to follow his father's political one. Under him the violence grew quieter, in order to improve the image of the regime and attract foreign lenders, and the machine still went out whenever the government judged itself threatened.