Honorat indicts seventeen years of Duvalierism from inside Haiti

Jean-Jacques Honorat published Enquete sur le developpement in 1974, a study of the Haitian economy that amounted to a condemnation of seventeen years of Duvalier rule. Two of his arguments cut hardest. The first concerned the church. Francois Duvalier had fought Rome, been excommunicated, and won the right to name Haitian bishops, all of which the government presented as a nationalist victory. Honorat treated the new hierarchy as a change of personnel that left the institution's relation to the peasantry untouched. The second concerned the countryside, where he found labour and produce being pulled out of small farmers exactly as before, whatever had changed in Port-au-Prince. Publishing this inside Haiti in 1974 was possible only because the younger Duvalier had loosened the press rules to keep foreign donors comfortable. Honorat later served as prime minister for the junta that overthrew Aristide in 1991, which is not the ending his book predicts for its author.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

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.

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.