One elected president hands power to another after 192 years

Rene Preval was sworn in on 7 February 1996. It was the first time in Haitian history that one elected president handed the office to another elected president with no coup, no exile and no corpse in between. The country had waited a hundred and ninety-two years for it. Preval was born in Marmelade on 17 January 1943 and trained as an agronomist in Belgium. Back in Haiti he went into business with Michele Pierre-Louis, running a bakery in the capital. He ran the government for Aristide until the coup of 1991 threw them both out, and he took the December election of 1995 with eighty-eight percent. In office he carried out the reforms the International Monetary Fund required and began selling state industries, which set him against the man who had raised him. Aristide founded Fanmi Lavalas late in 1996 to fight the programme from outside the government. The two men who built Haiti's democratic movement now led opposing camps, and their quarrel organised the next ten years of Haitian politics.

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.

By the time Parham finished her fieldwork, an email list known as the Corbett List had been running for eight years and included some of the most influential leaders of the Haitian diaspora. Human rights advocates used it to circulate petitions and to gather support for changes in Haiti. Word of the list travelled along ties that already joined advocacy workers, academics and missionaries, and those ties held it together. She sets it beside a website forum that produced an organisation which folded inside a year. Her conclusion is that online space for a scattered nation serves expression well and organising badly, unless the people in it are already connected somewhere on the ground. About half the respondents in one Haitian forum she studied worked with advocacy organisations, and thirty of forty Haitian community groups she catalogued had an email address, a website, or both.

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.