Two Rara bands fight and each president loses a son

Rara bands compete for the largest following, and the competition sometimes turns into a fight with fists, rocks, clubs and machetes. The hospital at Leogane puts on extra staff every Easter week to treat the wounded. In 1986 two bands, Rara Rosalie and Rara Rosignol, arranged a battle in advance. Two men were killed in it. One was the son of the president of Rosalie, the other the son of the president of Rosignol. The two bodies were laid across one another in the street. Five years later the bands were reconciled and invited each other to feasts. Deaths in Rara also breed stories that grow in the telling. More than one man swore he had watched a musician decapitated by a machete during a band fight, and had then seen the body carry on dancing while the head lay on the ground and went on blowing its trumpet.

Michel records, on information from the Marine Corps, that Brigadier General Hermann Hanneken died aged ninety-three in California, where he had long been retired, and notes pointedly that he had for years absolutely refused to let the historian Roger Gaillard interview him. Michel places the death in the year of the hundredth anniversary of Peralte's birth and collects other coincidences of dates in history to frame it, including two American presidents dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration they had both signed. He allows himself one question and no answer, wondering whether Hanneken saw his victim as he passed out of life. The dating carries a small internal problem, since Michel's own chronology of birthdays and the book's subtitle both point to 1885 rather than 1886. Michel gathers further coincidences, including a Swedish count killed on the anniversary of a royal flight and a Russian prince who died soon after helping film the killing he had committed. Where this account departs from the standard one: Michel dates Peralte's centenary to 1986 here, while his own birthday arithmetic and the book's subtitle place the birth in 1885.

Jean-Claude Duvalier had ruled Haiti since 1971, when he inherited the presidency at nineteen from his father Francois. Trying to buy time in January 1986, he dismissed several hated officers and brought back others, and in doing so handed command of the units around the palace to men already working against him. Riots spread through Cayes, Jacmel, Leogane and the Goaves. His father had left him a saying: trouble in the capital can be beaten and trouble in Gonaives can be bought, but when Cap-Haitien rises, leave. On 28 January the army stood and watched a crowd at the Cap loot a warehouse and pull down a statue of Francois Duvalier. On 31 January the family drove to the airport, then turned back, and the president went on Radio Nationale to say he was standing firm, firmer than a monkey's tail. Six days later he told his prime minister he wanted to go that night. An American transport carried him and twenty two others to France.

Mutinous soldiers stormed the National Palace at half past five in the evening on 30 September 1991 and took Aristide prisoner. There was talk of shooting him where he stood, and nobody would do it. He was walked across the square to army headquarters instead, and from there the officers bargained with foreign embassies until they agreed to let him leave the country. He reached the airport by half past ten, met by the American and Venezuelan ambassadors, and waited among scores of jeering soldiers until a Venezuelan air force plane landed just before three in the morning. He flew to Caracas and on to Washington. Over the following days he gathered the members of his government who had escaped or who happened to be abroad, at the Haitian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Jean Casimir was his envoy there, Fritz Longchamps spoke for him at the United Nations, and the exile organisations in New York went back to the work they knew. Haiti now had two governments.