Half a million people surround the palace on 7 February 1986

Jean-Claude Duvalier left Haiti on 7 February 1986 under heavy American escort, after fifteen years as president for life and twenty nine years of family rule. As soon as the news was confirmed a cry went up across the country. In Port-au-Prince about five hundred thousand people, of every social category, poured around the presidential palace. Macoutes were identified with a speed that showed how much anger had been held in. The crowd went first for the symbols of the regime. The operation of uprooting everything that recalled duvalierism, near or far, was called dechoukaj. The celebration was short. The army, still omnipotent, gave the impression of siding with the people while intending to control the process. Families who had waited fifteen or twenty years to hold a public commemoration for murdered relatives were able to do it for the first time. The blue and red flag was restored and the militia was dissolved.

In 1984 the bodies of thirty two Haitians washed up on a beach just north of Miami. Their boat, built by hand and open to the weather, had broken apart in a squall before dawn about two hundred yards from shore. Survivors said they had paid smugglers two hundred dollars a head and that forty people had crowded aboard for the run up the Windward Passage from Haiti to Florida. Most of those who died were too worn down by the crossing to swim the last stretch. Television carried the footage that evening: the wreck half buried in sand, waves breaking over it, the dead lying along the beach and shifting slightly with each wave. The station apologised the following night for having broadcast it. Those who lived were taken to the detention camp on Krome Avenue. They were not allowed to attend the funerals of the people they had sailed with.

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.