Foreign aid arrives and passes through one man's hands

Donor countries divided Haiti's aid projects between them like assignments. The French took a road to Jacmel again, the Canadians the road to Cap-Haitien, and the list ran on. Money was in the air and so were the commissions. Most of what came in passed at some stage through Luckner Cambronne, whom Port-au-Prince had begun calling the Premier, a post the constitution does not provide for. Tourists landing at the airport were met by a portrait of the new president for life above his slogan: his father had made the political revolution and he would make the economic one. Many concluded that the chief beneficiary of the economic revolution was Cambronne. On 22 April 1972 Jean-Claude marked the first anniversary of his father's death at the cemetery and left as soon as the bugler finished. In July a team of American officers arrived to assess the army's needs, and the military academy reopened after eleven years.

Three sister organisations were founded in the early 1970s to carry the cultural work of the Haitian opposition abroad, all affiliated to the Marxist Patriotic Action Movement: Soley leve in New York, Haiti Culturelle in Boston, Vaccine in Montreal. The last is named for the bamboo trumpet blown in the Rara. Their reasoning was that reaching the Haitian countryside meant using Creole and the music of Vodou, since around eighty five percent of the population had learned what it knew through ritual song. So they kept the tunes and replaced the words. About 1974 in Boston the poet Koralen Jean Claude Martineau composed Ayiti demen on the melody of a well known song for Saint Jacques Majeur and Ogou Feray. They translated Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew into Creole for the first time and staged it with a live rooster and ritual drums, and their cassettes were carried back into Haiti.

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.