Avril buys a crowd at three dollars a head, then shuts the press

General Prosper Avril, Haiti's military ruler, came home from a trip abroad in mid January 1990 to a rally at the airport whose participants had each been paid three dollars to attend. In a hungry capital the money found takers. The show of support did not hold. Haiti's ambassador in Washington, Benoit, resigned, saying that no election could be free while Avril governed, and pointed to the arrests and beatings of opposition figures the previous November. Two days after the general landed, gunmen killed a colonel of the presidential guard, Andre Neptune. On 22 January the government declared a state of siege, cut the electricity and imposed censorship on every radio and television station. Most stations outside government control stopped broadcasting altogether, so Haitians never heard Bishop Romelus denounce the siege from Jeremie. Two leading opponents, Louis Roy and Hubert de Ronceray, were flown to Miami and described their expulsion to reporters there. The merchant Antoine Izmery was taken in the same sweep. The siege was lifted by early February.

Joseph is careful about priority in the debate that now dominates Haitian revolutionary studies. In a Sorbonne dissertation of 1989 titled Hegel, critique de l'Afrique, Pierre-Franklin Tavares argued that the revolution in Saint-Domingue and the birth of Haiti, taken as a double event, were the principal historical source, though not the only one, of the famous figure of consciousness entitled domination and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a figure Tavares follows Kojeve in saying is improperly called the dialectic of master and slave. Joseph presents Susan Buck-Morss's later work as building on this thesis, and notes that Tavares extended his argument in further studies on Hegel and the Abbe Gregoire and on Hegel as an anti-slavery philosopher, including a lecture at the College de France in January 1996. The point restores a francophone genealogy to an argument usually credited to an American book. Where this account departs from the standard one: Assigns the Hegel and Haiti thesis first to Tavares in 1989, ahead of the Buck-Morss article of 2000 with which it is usually identified.

Roger Lafontant, the Duvalierist enforcer, came home from Santo Domingo once Avril was gone and spent the autumn of 1990 rebuilding his following. The electoral council barred him from standing, and he answered with threats to wreck the vote as the 1987 election had been wrecked. Among the candidates who qualified, Marc Bazin was seen as Washington's man and the leading leftist, Victor Benoit, was thought dull. On 18 October the priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he would run, and the campaign changed shape overnight. His platform came to three words in Creole, participation, transparency and justice, with no mention of reconciliation. A grenade thrown into one of his crowds on 5 December killed seven people and wounded fifty three. More than a thousand foreign observers came, Jimmy Carter among them. Voters queued before the polls opened to mark the small fighting cock that was the symbol of Lavalas, and went home with a thumb stained in indelible ink. Aristide took sixty seven percent, three times the share of Bazin.

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.