Two thirds of the doctors Haiti trained are working elsewhere

Between 1945 and 1968 the medical faculty in Port-au-Prince turned out 761 doctors. By 1970 only 242 of them were still practising in Haiti. The rest had gone abroad, where their training was welcome and where nobody could arrest them for a careless remark at dinner. Two of every three physicians the country produced were working somewhere else. Each had been educated largely at public expense, so Haiti paid for the schooling and richer countries collected the labour. The number is the plainest measure available of what the Duvalier years cost, and it appears in no speech from the period. A government that jailed professionals, seized property and made every career depend on the goodwill of one household did not have to expel the educated class. It only had to make staying an unreasonable choice. The clinics that emptied in those years stayed empty for decades afterward.

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.

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.