Greene predicted Aristide would not last, and he lasted seven months

In one of his last letters to Diederich, dated 20 November 1990, Greene predicted that if Father Aristide won the presidency he would not survive long. Aristide lasted seven months before the military overthrew him. Diederich records that the coup of September 1991 and the repression that followed set off an unprecedented flight by sea, with more than forty thousand people intercepted by the United States Coast Guard, unknown numbers drowned and thousands held at the American naval base at Guantanamo. He closes the Haitian part of the story with a question put in a Washington hearing in 1992 by a Supreme Court justice unhappy at the summary return of Haitians without any determination of refugee status, who asked the government lawyer in front of him whether he had ever been to Haiti.

In November 1991 roughly three hundred and ten Haitian men, women and children were held on the grounds of the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They lived in huts with tin roofs inside barbed wire, guarded by marines with automatic weapons, using portable toilets that were rarely cleaned, among rats and vermin. They tied plastic rubbish bags to the walls to keep the rain out and hung sheets for privacy. They could leave only under military escort and could be sent to the brig without a hearing for breaking camp rules. Soldiers in full riot gear swept the sleeping quarters before dawn. Judge Johnson described these conditions in his opinion in the Haitian Centers Council case. The camp, known as Camp Bulkeley, ran from 1991 to 1993, and every person in it had tested positive for HIV. It was the only detention camp anywhere built for refugees with that virus.

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.

Archaeologists working in the Caribbean have often judged the size of a pre-Columbian settlement from the spread of pottery and stone visible on the ground. Work published by Versteeg in 1993 showed that the measure is unreliable, because what reaches the surface is a small and uneven sample of what was buried and does not mark the edges of the place where people actually lived. Many island villages have therefore been recorded as smaller than they were. The finding carries a second warning. A finished artefact is the end of a process, and reading only the end product hides the labour, the movement of materials and the shifts of style that made it. Caribbean sites were reworked continually, and careful mapping and excavation are what recover that. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Taino settlements of Hispaniola were sized by the same rough method, and how many people met Columbus in 1492 has been argued over ever since.