Most of the labour on the Maissade check dams came from landless neighbours

In 1986 the Save the Children Federation, financed by the United States Agency for International Development, began a watershed project at Maissade on Haiti's central plateau. It formed peasant groups and promoted tree planting and soil conservation on individual plots. Two years in it started treating small degraded watersheds, each averaging nine hectares. After two more years across twenty two of them, farmers had built 590 check dams, about twenty seven to a watershed. The main ravine was completely treated in ten watersheds, partly in seven and barely in five. Fifty four per cent of landholders contributed labour. The striking figure is who else turned up. People who owned no land at all inside a watershed supplied fifty seven per cent of every recorded work event, and ninety per cent of them belonged to a groupman, a peasant labour group, although the project had never tried to recruit through those groups. Surveys taken in August, September and December 1990 covered 268 people.

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.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.

Jean-Claude Duvalier left Haiti before dawn on 7 February 1986 aboard a United States Air Force transport that carried him to France. He had been president since 1971 and his father since 1957, so the family had held the country for twenty nine years. The end took about four months. Gonaives had risen in November after soldiers shot schoolchildren, the demonstrations spread to the provincial towns, the schools emptied, the church had turned, and the business class that had done well out of the regime asked for a change. The Americans, who had underwritten the arrangement for a generation, organised the exit. The army command that had been preparing for it took power the same morning as a governing council under Henri Namphy. Crowds pulled down statues and broke into Fort Dimanche. What did not leave with Duvalier was the machinery: the militia, the officers, the men who had run the prisons, most of whom stayed in Haiti and were still there when the next government fell.