The cordon fails and swine fever reaches the Artibonite

The barrier failed. Despite the killing of 27,000 pigs along the Dominican border, African swine fever appeared in the Artibonite valley, the best farmland in the country. Prices moved with it. Inflation in the United States passed straight into an economy now tied to it, and drought cut the Artibonite rice harvest. Workers at the sugar company HASCO, permitted months earlier to elect their own union officers, struck for higher pay and were put down by the army and the militia under a law against strikes promulgated at speed to protect the country's standing with investors. In the palace the family quarrelled. Marie-Denise Duvalier hired a leading Port-au-Prince lawyer to divorce Max Dominique and let it be known that he had squandered much of her fortune. The old Duvalierists who regarded her as her father's rightful heir took heart, and her brother sent her abroad again. The interior ministry announced that visitors would need passports from March 1979, then delayed the rule, then abandoned it for Americans and Canadians when the travel industry complained.

Between 1979 and 1981 as many as seventy thousand Haitians entered Florida by boat. Many of the vessels were small open sailing craft, the kanot used for fishing. Richman notes that during the 1970s a higher share of the Caribbean population emigrated than that of any other region of the world. The traffic stopped almost at once when Washington acted. Coast Guard cutters were stationed in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to intercept the boats and burn them, to weigh claims for political asylum and to send back everyone found ineligible. Virtually every claim was rejected. Arrivals fell to a dribble through 1982 and did not resume with any regularity for nine years. The people who had landed found work almost nowhere except migratory farm labour, settling in Belle Glade, Immokalee and Fort Pierce to cut sugar cane and pack vegetables, and moving each summer with labour contractors to the farms of the middle Atlantic coast.

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.