An exile lands on La Tortue and Namphy and Regala put him down

On 9 January 1982 a party of exiles led by Bernard Sansaricq landed on La Tortue, the island off the north coast, having set out from Grand Turk ninety miles away. Sansaricq's family had been destroyed at Jeremie in 1964, when his two year old nephew Stephane was blinded with a cigarette by an army captain. The regime had lost the habit of answering this kind of thing. Several days passed before the Leopards and troops from the Casernes Dessalines were organised, and militiamen already on the ground opened fire on the soldiers, taking them for the invaders. Henri Namphy and Williams Regala ran the operation. Those who did not escape were killed, or captured and then killed. The interior minister told the radio that the landing had been crushed at once, which was contradicted by the airlifting of every surgical resident at the General Hospital to Port-de-Paix. Mother Teresa, visiting that season, was photographed with the president and his wife and said she had been given a lesson in humility.

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.

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.

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.