Papa Doc is buried on Bawon Samdi's day, and the wind comes up

Nothing was left to chance. A refrigerated glass box with fluorescent lighting was brought in secretly so the president could lie in state with his spectacles on. Twenty two soldiers and twenty two miliciens attended, the number chosen because Duvalier's political numerology ran on twenty two. A 101 gun royal salute was fired for a republic. Beethoven's Ninth was performed with lyrics rewritten in his praise. The burial fell on a Saturday, which belongs to Bawon Samdi, who holds the cemetery, and as the cortège reached the gate a violent wind came up and scattered the crowd. Everyone present read it, and they did not all read it the same way. The regime had spent fourteen years staging itself in the visual language of Vodou, and at the funeral the language answered back in a register the staging did not control.

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.

The Caribbean Community was launched in 1973. Writing in 1997, Best asks whether the intellectual climate of the preceding years set limits on what the new body would attempt and achieve, in Georgetown, in St George's, in Kingston and almost everywhere else. His charge is that it gave primacy to relations between governments rather than between the peoples and islands of the region, and that it framed how those governments dealt with Cuba. He connects that to the near collapse of any working idea of sovereignty, regional or territorial. By 1994 the working slogan coming quietly out of Port of Spain was NAFTA at any price. Shridath Ramphal had by then invented the Association of Caribbean States as an invitation to the twelve English speaking members to widen their relations, on the theory that a Spanish speaking pond would teach them to swim. Best doubted they would swim, and asked whether the region had decided instead to drown.

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.