Seventy five people in the Northwest die of hunger in two days

The depression of the 1970s cut agricultural production and investment in Haiti. World demand for commodities was falling, and the Duvalier government had no agricultural policy that might have absorbed the shock. In 1977 the opposition newspaper Le Patriote Haitien, published by exiles, reported that seventy five people in the Northwest Department of Haiti had died of starvation and disease inside two days, and that a number of students at Cap-Haitien, the country's second city, had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The Northwest is the driest part of Haiti. When the same depression came back in the late 1980s it produced famine there again, and thousands left by boat for the United States and for other islands of the Caribbean. Pierre-Louis lists the economic crisis as the second of three things that turned Haitian migration into a mass movement, after the election of Francois Duvalier and before the drive against the peasantry under his son.

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.

Diamonds were found at Orapa in the lands of the Ngwato people in 1967, after prospectors spent twelve years following a small collection of rough stones picked out of a dry riverbed in 1955. By 1969 the size and quality of the deposit were proven and a joint company called Debswana existed, owned 85 per cent by De Beers and 15 per cent by a new and inexperienced Botswana government. In 1973 a far larger find was made at Jwaneng, west of Gaborone. Seretse Khama said in 1973 what other African leaders said about mineral wealth, that it belonged to the nation. Then he did something different with it. After four years of very tough bargaining, in 1975 Botswana and De Beers agreed to share Debswana with revenue split seventy per cent to the country and thirty per cent to the firm. Jwaneng was later split the same way. Diamonds have since run at times to half of Botswana's annual output.

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.