The United States paid the informant who built the death squad

Emmanuel Constant, known as Toto, founded the Front pour l'Avancement et le Progres Haitien in 1993 to break popular support for the deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Constant was a paid informant of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1992 to 1994. He said that Patrick Collins of the Defense Intelligence Agency had urged him to create the organisation. The Clinton administration denied any American role, and evidence later emerged that the United States had a hand in setting FRAPH up and in paying for it. Human rights groups attribute more than three thousand deaths to the group. Its signature method was to peel the skin from a living victim's face with a machete. Antoine Izmery, the businessman who had financed Aristide's campaign, was murdered on 11 September 1993, and the justice minister Guy Malary on 14 October. Washington was imposing sanctions in the name of Haitian democracy while paying the man who was killing the people who had voted for it. That was the policy.

Haitians had been settling in New York for thirty years, and Rara had surfaced there in bursts: at demonstrations against the Duvalier government in the early 1980s, and during strikes involving Haitian labour groups. None of it was organised. The summer of 1990 changed that. A band called Rara Djakout was founded in Brooklyn, and a full Rara went out in Prospect Park every Sunday, the same people returning each week to dance and to add verses. Musicians from the Haitian roots movement started it after a drumming circle in the park refused to lend them a drum. They borrowed drums from a friend, came back the next day playing Rara, and walked past. Word of mouth brought hundreds of young people out. By 1995 four separate bands were playing in Prospect Park and in Central Park on summer weekends. Lifted out of Lent into July, the New York Rara had no queens, no cemetery visits and no seven year contracts with the spirits.

Alerte Belance sold in a Port au Prince market and had organised her neighbourhood for Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidential campaign. After the coup of September 1991 the paramilitaries of the group known as FRAPH taunted her as the godmother of the militants, and she spent two years moving between hiding places. The Governors Island accord signed in New York promised that the president would come back on 30 October 1993, so she came out. Men seized her on 15 October and took her to Titanyen, the killing ground north of the capital, where they cut her apart with machetes. They cut out part of her tongue, took the gums, teeth and jaw on her right side, opened her face, her eye and her ear, severed her right arm and cut the fingertips from her left hand. She woke in the brush the next morning, dragged herself to the roadside and raised the stump of her arm so a passing driver would see she was alive. She was thirty two and had three children.

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.