Haiti agrees to kill every pig and to let its boats be turned back

In July 1981 the government signed a protocol with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture providing for the killing of every pig in Haiti within two years, so that African swine fever should not reach the North American mainland. Peasants were to be compensated and foreign animals brought in afterwards. What the countryside saw was the forced sale, often at distress prices, of the one asset a family could turn into cash in a bad month. Some hid their animals. Others killed them as offerings to the lwa rather than hand them to the blan, and such sacrifices were reported from every part of the country. Within a year registration at rural schools had dropped by thirty percent. On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be stationed permanently off Haiti, with other vessels rotating through, to stop boats carrying Haitians toward Florida. The United Nations questioned whether it was legal. Haitian officials spent October in Washington settling their price, and in November American aid was increased.

By early 1981 a group of faculty physicians at the University of Miami had worked back through every Haitian patient admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital over the previous year. What they found fitted neither tuberculosis nor poverty nor hunger. The patients were young, had lived in the United States for a few months to a few years, held ordinary jobs and had been well nourished before falling ill. They arrived with fungal infections in the nervous system, viral infections of the gullet, parasites in the brain, yeast in the mouth, swollen glands in several places and Pneumocystis in the lungs, frequently two or three of these in one person. Pneumocystis appears only where immunity has already failed. One of the group, Margaret, connected the pattern to reports of the same infections in previously healthy gay men. The Miami patients included women and heterosexual men. The condition had no name yet outside a billing category.

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.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.