Mexico and Venezuela cut off Haiti's concessionary oil

Mexico and Venezuela sold oil to Haiti below the market price, an arrangement meant to keep small importing countries in the region solvent while prices were high. In 1981 both suppliers suspended it. The Duvaliers had sold a cargo before it reached Port-au-Prince, pocketing the difference between the concessionary price they paid and the market price a third party would pay. The same trick had already been worked on a shipment resold to South Africa, where an oil embargo made buyers generous, and only Interpol had kept those profits from reaching the president's father in law. What the state lost was more than one cargo. Concessionary oil was one of the few forms of assistance that arrived as a commodity rather than as a project, which made it difficult for donors to supervise and easy for a government to turn into fuel for its own country. After 1981 Haiti bought at the full price, in a year when its foreign reserves had already been emptied.

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.

Britain had spent years worrying that its Central African territories would go the way of South Africa, with a white settler minority dug in for good. Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament that a wind of change was blowing across the continent. Between 1963 and 1964 the Central African Federation came apart. British intervention did much of the work and so did African opposition, which Hastings Banda in Nyasaland and Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia had built. Those two territories emerged as Malawi and Zambia. Southern Rhodesia refused. Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front declared independence on their own authority in 1965, and United Nations sanctions at first helped the economy, since Portuguese Angola and Mozambique and South Africa were willing trading partners. From the early 1970s ZANU built a guerrilla war out of bases across the Mozambican border with FRELIMO support. Falling employment and worsening conditions on the reserves filled its ranks. By 1980 the settlers were beaten in the field, Smith accepted majority rule, and Robert Mugabe took power in a country renamed Zimbabwe.

Through the 1970s and early 1980s Haiti's apparel plants employed between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand people in more than a hundred factories, and only money sent home by Haitians abroad brought in more. Baseballs belonged to the same trade. Until 1987 every ball used in a major league park in the United States had been sewn in Haiti. Then the end of the Duvalier governments, the struggles that followed Aristide's election and a long trade embargo took the industry apart. By 2009 twenty three factories were left, employing twenty five thousand people, about sixty eight per cent of them women. Thirteen belonged to Haitian companies, four to South Koreans, three to American firms and three to Dominican ones. All but one stood in the capital. The exception was CODEVI, owned by Group M, in the free trade zone at Ouanaminthe on the Dominican border.