More Haitians live in New York than in Cap-Haitien

In 1976 Port-au-Prince held about 638 thousand people, fourteen per cent of all Haitians and fifty eight per cent of everyone living in a Haitian town. Around the same period New York held about 300 thousand Haitians, while Cap-Haitien, the second city of the country, held 54,691. The same was true of the neighbours. Miami held more Cubans than Santiago de Cuba and New York more Dominicans than Santiago de los Caballeros. Across the Caribbean the capital swallowed the country: in the early 1970s a fifth of Cubans lived in Havana, a third of Puerto Ricans in San Juan, a sixth of Dominicans in Santo Domingo and a quarter of Jamaicans in Kingston. Two consequences followed for Haiti. Remittances from abroad became a support of the capital's economy, and the strongest opposition to Jean Claude Duvalier organised itself in New York and Miami rather than at home.

The Duvaliers held power in Haiti from 1957, and by the end of the 1970s the reckoning stood at more than thirty thousand people disappeared, victims of a daily repression built up into a system of government, and close to a million Haitians in exile for economic or political reasons. The country was kept alive by international aid that in practice protected foreign capital and the local fraction allied with it. American power on its own does not explain how one family took the state and held it. Haitian opposition groups had proved unable to produce a radical critique of the language the regime spoke, and often reproduced that language without noticing, out of fear of an analysis that would show where it came from. Explaining the regime as a natural inclination of the masses toward dictatorship was the most common form of that failure.

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.

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.