A stroke on Armed Forces Day starts the succession moving

On 18 November 1970, the anniversary of the battle of Vertieres, Francois Duvalier reviewed the army, gave one of his deliberately murky speeches in mixed French and Creole, and pinned medals on loyal officers, General Constant among them. The effort was too much. The next day he complained of dizziness and a violent headache, could not stand steadily, and began to slur. He had had a similar warning in 1962 and knew what it meant. Early in December he removed Constant, eight years his obedient chief of staff, and installed his godson Claude Raymond in the post. On Ancestors' Day he told a silent crowd that when the moment came he would stand aside for youth, and promised Haiti a young leader. The following day the government newspaper Le Nouveau Monde remarked that a Duvalier might one day follow a Duvalier, and that this ought to alarm nobody.

Portugal answered the rising in Angola with force and held on longer than any other European power in Africa. The war that followed drew in everybody. The Marxist MPLA was supplied by the Soviet Union. UNITA was armed by South Africa, which wanted a movement it could live beside. The FNLA was funded by the United States once Washington decided that paying a rival guerrilla army worked better than paying Lisbon. When the Portuguese left, the country went directly into civil war, and by early 1976 the MPLA held the capital while UNITA still held the southeast. The three movements were more than foreign clients. Each drew on a different population, the MPLA on the Mbundu, UNITA on the Ovimbundu, the FNLA on the north, so the Cold War money ran along divisions that already existed and deepened them. Mozambique went the same way, where South Africa paid RENAMO to fight the government that had won the independence war.

In 1970 Louis Brun stood for a seat in the New York State Legislature, the first Haitian migrant to run for office there. He later returned to Haiti. What he started held. Haitians who learn campaign politics in the United States carry that training back and use it in Haitian political life, and the traffic runs both ways. By 1998 five Haitians were standing for local or state office in south Florida and one in New York, and Haitians were working in campaigns in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Fritz Longchamps, who ran the Washington Office on Haiti for the anti-Duvalier exiles, went home with Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1994 and became foreign minister under Rene Preval in 1996. These families conduct their political life in two countries at once, and have done so for longer than either country's political class has been willing to admit.

Haiti lodged its first membership application three years after Jean-Claude Duvalier took over, and twelve months after the regional body itself came into being. Duvalier officials led by Serge Fourcand, minister of commerce and industry, campaigned in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Guyana, arguing that Haiti stood at the threshold of CARICOM. Eric Williams in Trinidad saw promise in bringing Haiti closer to the English-speaking Caribbean, and the strongest support came from P. J. Patterson in Jamaica. The Secretariat nonetheless declined membership and agreed only to a special relationship. Smith's finding is that the dictatorship was not what restrained CARICOM. Heads of state avoided statements about the Haitian government even as the regional press highlighted Duvalier's abuses. The obstacle was anxiety about the strain that widening membership would put on an institution still establishing its own legitimacy. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith rejects the assumption that CARICOM held Haiti at arm's length in 1974 because of the Duvalier dictatorship, arguing the restraint was institutional caution about enlargement.