Claudette Werleigh becomes the first woman to head a Haitian government

Claudette Werleigh took office as prime minister on 7 November 1995. She was the first woman to hold the post in a country whose executive had belonged since 1804 to soldiers and to men who governed with soldiers standing behind them. Born on 10 November 1946, Werleigh had worked as an educator and a diplomat and had served as foreign minister before moving into the premiership for the closing months of Aristide's restored term. That amounted to three months of authority in a government about to hand over power, dependent on foreign money and foreign troops for its survival. It counted anyway. The same year brought Bill Clinton to Haiti on an official visit, the first by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt came in 1934 as the occupation was winding down. Aristide also resigned formally from the priesthood, closing a separation the Vatican had imposed on him years earlier. The man who reached the National Palace as a parish priest left it as a layman.

In the Dominican presidential election of May 1996 Jose Francisco Pena Gomez took almost 46 percent of the vote. Fifty percent was needed to win outright, so a runoff against Leonel Fernandez was set for June. Balaguer was not a candidate this time and the campaign was less openly dirty than the one two years earlier, though Fernandez's party had already claimed that many registered voters were in fact Haitian nationals. Two weeks before the second round Balaguer announced that his party would unselfishly support Fernandez in order to keep the Dominican nation out of hands that were not truly Dominican. The combined vote of the two parties gave Fernandez 51.25 percent. Direct appeals to whiteness make little sense in a country where most candidates have some black African ancestry and where voters are themselves mostly of mixed descent. What both campaigns worked with instead was the implicit cue, in which a candidate's dark skin was made to stand for foreign origin.

Decolonisation happened inside the Cold War, and the continent was treated the way Southeast Asia and Central America were treated, as ground where the two blocs could fight without meeting. African governments and liberation movements tried to use the rivalry, taking money and weapons from whoever offered them, and became its casualties. The effect was to start some conflicts, extend others, and give Western governments a public reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended, from Mobutu in Zaire to the apartheid government in Pretoria to Mengistu in Ethiopia while Moscow was paying him. In the Horn, Ethiopia sold itself as the Western position against communism, which is part of why Eritrea was refused independence and why the Americans built a large base on the coast. In Angola and Mozambique the wars of liberation turned into competitions between Soviet, American, Cuban, South African and Chinese interests, and lasted longer for it. When the Cold War ended the money stopped, and several of the governments it had propped up fell over.

Average daily calorie intake in Haiti stood at 1869 in 1997, about eighty percent of the standard recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and below the figures estimated for the 1960s, which were 2140 in 1962 and 2000 in 1966. Life expectancy at birth was a little under fifty four years in 1998, an improvement on the figure below forty eight in 1970, and the gain came from sharp reductions in infant and under five mortality. The share of fifteen year olds who would die before reaching sixty rose for both sexes in the late 1990s and was the highest in the Western Hemisphere, at 340 per thousand for women and 432 for men. There were 0.2 physicians per thousand people in 1995, up from 0.1 in 1990, a figure that had been flat since the early 1970s and was barely above the level reported in 1952.