A president paid 24,000 dollars a year buys a million dollar yacht

To keep African swine fever out, the authorities acted on foreign advice and killed every pig along the Dominican border, paying almost nothing for them. Land went the same way. Haiti had no cadastral survey, so Duvalierists took plots that families had worked for generations from people who could not read the paper that proved title, and anyone who objected was beaten and left for the towns. The president told an audience that the country had once exported mahogany and now imported formica. Nineteen thousand hectares near Fort Liberte, once the largest sisal plantation in the world, were handed to Marie-Denise Duvalier for a tourism scheme. Cocoa exports worth three million dollars a year stopped because the monopoly was held jointly by her and the husband she was divorcing. On a salary of 24,000 dollars a year the president bought a yacht costing a million, ranches, and a villa in Monaco worth three million. The World Bank could not account for 45 million dollars of government money in 1975 alone. Foreign officials had begun admitting that they did not know where the money went.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

By the 1970s most of newly independent Africa was in economic crisis. Populations had grown fast since the 1950s while states still lived on the sale of one or two commodities, so when agricultural export prices fell through the 1970s and stayed low through the 1980s there was nothing to fall back on. Copper dropped and took Zaire and Zambia with it. The oil price rises of the early and middle 1970s wrecked importers and let road and rail systems rot. Governments made their own contribution. Convinced that development meant repeating European industrialisation, and inclined to treat peasants as an embarrassment, they starved agriculture. Ghana built the Volta dam and let cocoa production collapse, which helped end Nkrumah. Tanzania moved whole villages at gunpoint under Nyerere. Factories needed foreign machines and foreign loans, the debts grew, and servicing them meant exporting still more crops and minerals. Independence had changed the flag above an arrangement built in the nineteenth century.

For roughly two decades after 1958, archaeologists working in the Caribbean sorted the earliest island material into stages taken from North America and from Old World sequences. The schemes of Gordon Willey, Philip Phillips and Irving Rouse became the standard way to name what came out of the ground, and the islands acquired a Lithic age and an Archaic age on that authority. A classification is an argument about what a society was. Categories designed for stone using hunters on a continent make island people look like a rough opening chapter waiting for something better to arrive. Keegan and Hofman note that the rigid schemes survived long after specialists agreed they had stopped working, and that they survived because so few researchers cared about the oldest periods. The Greater Antilles, Haiti among them, are where the newer evidence keeps landing. This is the machinery that lets a timeline of the Caribbean begin in 1492 and call everything before it prehistory.