The communist party is destroyed in the space of three weeks

The Haitian communists had only just combined into a single party when the regime came for them. On 14 April 1969 a gunfight between militiamen and communists at Boutilliers, on the slope above Port-au-Prince, opened into something larger, and within days Radio Moscow was reporting arrests and summary executions. At Cazale near Arcahaie the organiser Alix Lamaute was killed. At the Cap, according to a letter Graham Greene sent to the Times of London, the shooting took in poor residents of La Fossette who had nothing to do with any party. On 2 May soldiers and militia surrounded a house at Fontamara and fired into it with automatic weapons and grenades for about seven hours, killing at least twenty two people inside, among them Joseph Roney, who had led the student strikes of 1960. The bodies were displayed outside Fort Dimanche. More than two hundred cadres died. In July Nelson Rockefeller arrived from Washington and the last American reservations were dropped.

By 1965 Duvalier had won, and the country looked much as before. Time reported in 1966 that the telephones did not work, the lights flickered, the roads were holed or buried in mud, and business was stopping. A visiting African diplomat said that if his own country were in that condition in fifty years he would wish it had never taken independence. The ways out were the ones open to the enslaved in Saint-Domingue, death or flight. The new marronage was exile. By 1970 nearly 35,000 Haitians were in the Bahamas, and by 1976 there were 150,000 in New York City, with large communities in Montreal, Chicago and Washington. Rotberg found that by the middle of the 1960s four fifths of Haiti's qualified professionals were abroad. More than a thousand were working in the Congo. Over three hundred specialists went through the United Nations to jobs across Africa. By 1970 Montreal and New York each held more Haitian physicians than Haiti did, and Montreal had ten times the number of Haitian psychiatrists that Port-au-Prince had.

Charles Gabriel Seligman published The Races of Africa in 1930. Its organising claim was the Hamitic hypothesis, which held that any large achievement in sub Saharan Africa had been the work of lighter skinned invaders arriving from the north. Ehret describes the book as a racist tract wearing the clothes of scholarship. Oxford University Press and the International African Institute reissued it in 1957 and again in 1967, by which point no one defending it could claim ignorance. It remains available for sale. The consequences reached well beyond libraries. Belgian administrators in Rwanda used the same racial ladder to sort Tutsi above Hutu, issued identity cards on that basis, and hardened categories that had been fluid into fixed racial facts. The propaganda of the 1994 genocide, which described Tutsi as foreign invaders to be driven out, drew on that scheme. A university press had supplied the authority. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the habit of crediting African achievement to somebody else is the habit that turned Saint Domingue into a French accomplishment.

In 1969 the International Monetary Fund estimated that the annual income of the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes came to about 50 million gourdes. In 2019 money that is roughly 68 million United States dollars, and at the time it stood at approximately 40 percent of Haiti's entire national budget. The Regie held monopolies on the distribution of cement and of dozens of other goods, among them flour, tomato paste, soap and beer, and it added a commission to each unit sold. Almost none of that revenue entered the public budget or paid for anything public. It went into personal accounts held by members of the Duvalier family, and bought cars, villas and shopping trips abroad. An American diplomat called the office an untouchable instrument of personalist rule. Its books were among the closest guarded secrets of the regime, so no full accounting of what passed through it exists.