Hurricane Allen takes the south and nobody sends sympathy

Hurricane Allen crossed the southern peninsula on 6 August 1980 with winds of 175 miles an hour. The population had four hours of warning. Les Cayes and Jacmel lay in the path, two hundred people died, more than 150,000 lost their houses, and the coffee bushes that had taken twenty years to recover from earlier storms were destroyed again. No wave of sympathy followed. Donors had already put a great deal into Haiti and did not care for what they saw. The International Monetary Fund had tied further money to demonstrable progress, and by the middle of 1980 the government had drawn almost none of it and was borrowing from commercial banks at commercial rates. The planning minister Edouard Berrouet explained the position to the Wall Street Journal by saying that Haitians were not angels, that corruption existed, and that one had to learn to live with it. That summer the state had closed Sylvio Claude's newspaper after a single issue. Haitians who could raise 800 dollars paid it to boat captains and took their chances on the Florida Straits.

About fifty thousand Haitians applied for asylum in the United States between 1972 and 1980. Twenty five of them succeeded. The reason was not hidden. At a congressional hearing in 1980 Senator Dennis DeConcini said that a boat refugee from Cuba was automatically treated by the immigration service as a refugee, while a boat refugee from the Haiti of Jean Claude Duvalier was automatically treated as an illegal alien who had come for economic reasons. Admitting that Haitians were fleeing persecution would have meant admitting in public that a government Washington supported was persecuting its people. President Jimmy Carter tried a provisional answer on 20 June 1980 by creating a status called Cuban Haitian entrant, which covered people who had already arrived. The refusals resumed after the election, and between September 1981 and March 1985 not one intercepted Haitian was found to have a valid claim.

The borders of independent Africa were drawn in European capitals between the 1880s and the 1900s, and they cut through communities that shared a language, a history and a set of relatives. Peoples with no reason to form one state were expected to run one at once. When African leaders founded the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 they wrote the permanence of those borders into it, reasoning that opening any single line to argument would open all of them and produce a generation of war. The same governments inherited a colonial state built on force and answerable to nobody, and they used it as they found it. Parliaments with several parties were discarded quickly as unworkable, and by the early 1970s the single party state was normal, with Tanzania and Zambia keeping a limited local vote while most of the rest could only be changed by soldiers. The Big Man at the head of the one party held people by handing out money and posts, which is how ambitious men had built followings a century before.

William Hodges was a medical missionary at Limbe who dug in northern Haiti on his own time. He located En Bas Saline, a large settlement site near the north coast, and professionals took it up after him. Kathleen Deagan directed the excavations that followed, using electromagnetic conductivity survey, systematic surface collection and test pits laid out on a grid. The work produced a detailed topographic map of the village and identified features within it, among them residential mounds and a structure resembling a well. The object was to test the written record of Columbus's first voyage against material evidence, since the Spanish account of the settlement at La Navidad and of the Taino town beside it had stood unchecked for centuries. En Bas Saline is among the most important archaeological sites in the Caribbean, and it was found because an amateur living nearby paid attention. Professional archaeology in Haiti has never been funded to do that work on its own.