Colonial map labels do not describe the islands people actually used

Windward and Leeward are administrative terms European powers applied to the Lesser Antilles in the seventeenth century, and the boundary between them was drawn to suit shipping and colonial jurisdiction. Colonial usage puts the divide at Dominica. Many archaeologists put it at Guadeloupe and count northward from there. The disagreement is small and it exposes something larger. These names were never meant to describe how the islands were inhabited before Europeans arrived, and the societies living there were organised around canoe routes, marriage, exchange and language, none of which respect a line drawn for administrative convenience. Using the colonial vocabulary makes island groups look separate and fixed where the evidence shows movement and mixing along the whole chain. Keegan and Hofman argue for an archipelagic view instead, treating the sea as the thing that joined people rather than the thing that divided them. The map you are handed decides in advance what you can see.

Food production for local consumption fell in absolute terms through the 1970s while the population grew. The result was famine in 1977. A special correspondent of Le Monde reported that between March and June of that year about three thousand people died in the Northwest region alone, and that of the 245,000 people living there 170,000 were counted as in need. Agriculture by then covered somewhere between a third and a half of the country's food requirements. The annual rise in the price of food between 1970 and 1976 had been 16.5 per cent. Haiti exported sugar and imported refined sugar. It exported meat through a monopoly that paid producers eleven cents a kilo and imported powdered milk, condensed milk, animal fat, butter and tinned meat. It had fishing grounds all around it and imported dried salted fish. Rice left the country in a profitable export trade while the home market went short.

In 1978 the Haitian writer and painter Franketyen published Pelin-tet, a play whose whole action happens in a basement flat in New York City furnished with a bed, a table and one bare bulb. Two men share it. Piram is an unschooled factory worker who speaks only Kreyol and holds legal papers. Polido is a French speaking pseudo-intellectual who left Haiti after the tontons macoutes tortured him and who lives in fear of deportation. They argue through a single afternoon. The most quoted line in Haitian theatre comes out of it, when Piram says he wants to see flies, meaning the rubbish and the noise and the ordinary liberty of the street he grew up in. Writing in Kreyol put theatre within reach of everyone in Haiti whatever their schooling. The first Port-au-Prince run was interrupted when the authorities telephoned the author with threats. He started again two weeks later. In 1979 he stopped writing in French.

The Aristide administration collapsed on 29 February 2004, the culmination of a four-year campaign that intensified after the contested legislative elections of May 2000. Smith argues CARICOM misread the situation badly, partly because it had been the only foreign presence at the internationally boycotted 2000 elections, which opponents mistook for an endorsement and which Colin Granderson said did tremendous damage to the organisation's credibility. After the removal CARICOM took firm positions on Aristide's Jamaican exile from March to June and on the interim government, and objected that the appointment of Gérard Latortue as interim prime minister had been initiated by Washington without regional consultation. Its own decision to suspend Haiti in March 2004 has not helped, Smith writes, since the isolation coincides with the damage of tropical storm Jeanne in Gonaïves and deepens Haitian cynicism about the region. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that CARICOM's suspension of Haiti after the coup was counterproductive and that a hard line endangers future relations, a position he notes was already contested among heads of government.