The last big sugar mill shuts and three thousand go home

In April 1987 the Haitian American Sugar Company closed its mill outside Port-au-Prince and put more than three thousand people out of work. Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, had been the largest sugar producer on earth in the eighteenth century, and that wealth is why France fought so hard to keep it. Two centuries later the country could not sell sugar at the price of the sugar arriving through its own ports. The same pattern was running through rice in the Artibonite valley. Each mill worker in Port-au-Prince supported a household, often a dozen people, so the closure removed the income of tens of thousands in a capital already swollen with families who had left the land. This happened one month after Haitians voted overwhelmingly for a new constitution. The political calendar and the economic one were moving in opposite directions, and the crowds who filled the streets for the rest of that year had every reason to be in them.

Tens of thousands of Haitians reached Palm Beach County by boat between 1979 and 1981. Almost all of them arrived as Catholics and found no Catholic church that could receive them in their own language. The church in Miami, dominated by Irish Americans, was slow to notice them. The first Haitian priest settled in the area in 1987, a Scalabrinian raised and trained in Haiti who moved down from New York and founded Notre Dame in Delray Beach. A second Haitian church followed in the 1990s at Fort Pierce. The evangelical congregations had meanwhile answered quickly, repatriating parts of North American missions with Haitian pastors at their head. Many Catholics who wanted to worship in Creole went to Protestant services, some staying Catholic and some converting. By 2001 the priest at Delray Beach, serving about seventeen thousand Haitians, the densest concentration in the county, reckoned Protestants slightly outnumbered Catholics.

Competitive elections have become common across Africa since 1990. In Benin the Marxist ruler Kerekou accepted defeat at the polls in 1991 and won office back legitimately in 1996. A popular rising in Mali ended military dictatorship, and the elections held since have survived deep poverty. Botswana has held contested votes and watched incumbents retire since 1966. Ghana transferred power peacefully on a razor thin result in 2008, on the eve of an oil boom. Richard Reid treats a tally of elections as a poor measure of democratic depth. Nigerian votes are still bought by those with cash. The loser of the 2010 Ivorian election simply refused to leave. Kenya's 2007 result produced killings and an internationally brokered power sharing deal. In Ethiopia the ruling front suppressed the opposition after the disputed 2005 vote and took ninety nine percent of parliamentary seats in 2010. Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda and Isaias in Eritrea all came out of liberation armies, and all of them treat political control as something they earned by fighting.

Francois Duvalier won the presidency of Haiti in 1957 and never gave it up, and in 1971 his son Jean-Claude took it over at nineteen. On 7 February 1986 the son, his wife and their household boarded a United States Air Force jet and flew to France. Twenty nine years of family rule ended in a morning. What followed was called the dechoukaj, the uprooting. Crowds went after every mark the regime had left on the country, and after the men who had enforced it. Former militiamen were hunted through the streets and more than a hundred were killed, many of them burned inside tyres. General Henri Namphy stepped in and formed a military government. The constitution written the following year did something no Haitian charter had done before. It made Kreyol an official language beside French, in a country where almost everyone spoke only Kreyol, and it split executive power between a president and a prime minister so that no single office could be held the way the Duvaliers had held it.