The first Haitian runs for office in New York

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.

Francois Duvalier died on the evening of 21 April 1971, after dark, having tried to speak and failed to make himself understood. What happened next was arranged in the ounfo of the Cul-de-Sac plain. The rite is called desounen, and it separates the dead from the lwa that has ridden them in life. Edner Day is the oungan named. He traced a large cross in maize flour on the floor, the length of a body, then climbed onto the bed past the doctors and nurses, straddled the corpse under the sheet, and called on the met tet to withdraw and leave the dead in peace. Only when it has gone can the spiritual inheritance pass on, and it passed to Jean-Claude, standing silent at the foot of the bed with a candle. The body was seen to shift very slightly. The men in the room took that for the departure. Papa Doc had gone to Ginen.

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.

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.