Two officers and an old macoute plan the end of the Duvaliers

By the autumn of 1985 two things were running at once. In the streets a hungry and unarmed population was organising, largely through young priests. In private the institutions that had lived off the regime and saw no future in it, the army, the newer rich and the bishops, were looking for an exit. The plot formed around two officers. Henri Namphy, born at Cap-Haitien in 1932 to a mulatre family and commissioned in 1954, had survived every purge by staying out of politics; Duvalier made him a brigadier in 1981 and head of the army in 1984, and he had refused more than once to order his men to fire on crowds. Williams Regala was five years younger, black, and wholly a product of the regime, having served in the presidential guard, the Dessalines battalion and the Leopards. The militia had to be neutralised, so they sent Clovis Desinor to Madame Max Adolphe, who commanded it. She agreed on one condition, an American visa for herself. Washington objected, then supplied it.

Between 1981 and 1989 United States immigration officers working from Coast Guard cutters stopped 21,461 Haitians at sea. Six of them were carried to the United States for a fuller interview. That is under one quarter of one percent of the people they questioned. The written standard was not demanding. Officers were told to stay watchful for any sign, including a bare claim, that someone aboard an intercepted vessel might qualify as a refugee. A senior immigration official with direct knowledge of the program later said the interviewers had received no instruction and no training, that they went on whatever they felt at the moment, and that everyone in front of them was black. Former colleagues of his said much the same. Nobody supervised the interviews. A judgement was reached on a deck in the Windward Passage, written into a file, and almost never read again. The boats went back to Port-au-Prince.

The economies handed over at independence were organised around a handful of export crops. Colonial administration had never tried to feed the territories or to link them internally. The aim was a possession that paid for itself out of export duties and tax, so roads and railways ran from the growing districts to the nearest harbour and stopped there. By the 1950s the acreage under cash crops was rising while the capacity to grow food for local eating was falling, which put rural households in a position where growing more left them poorer. Marketing boards bought at fixed low prices and sold abroad at much higher ones, and independence did not close them. The pattern was old. In the nineteenth century the continent exported captives, ivory and palm oil. In the twentieth it exported cotton, cocoa and gold. Around 1950 there was reason for optimism, with high postwar prices, expanding mines, and a West African merchant class better off than its South Asian equivalent.

The popular overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier in February 1986 caught a region that had ignored the preceding decade. Smith lists what the region failed to notice: grassroots movements spreading through the provinces after 1980, the political weight of the diaspora and its part in eroding macoutisme, and a refugee crisis that kept growing. When the crisis broke it was again the Jamaican government, under Edward Seaga, that acted first, sending the education minister Neville Gallimore to negotiate with Duvalier. Smith notes drily that Gallimore was reportedly chosen because he spoke Spanish, a skill of little use in Haiti, and that many Jamaicans remained unconvinced his efforts contributed to the capitulation. CARICOM itself was slow, sending a group of Caribbean leaders to see president Henri Namphy only in December 1987 and returning again in 1989 under Prosper Avril.