A mambo says the repression stopped when the elections started

Hurbon reports a conversation with a mambo, a priestess of Vodou, held shortly before he wrote in 1999. She told him that conditions had changed for the religion and that she had felt no repression against the temples since the installation of a democratic government in Haiti. Protestant denominations went on preaching against Vodou, and she counted that as ordinary competition. Hurbon sets the remark against two centuries in which serving the spirits meant keeping quiet about it. He also notes what the change owes to method. Karen McCarthy Brown's study of a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn, published in 1991, worked by letting a woman who practised the religion speak for herself, which had rarely been possible while it was being hunted. The religious question in Haiti turns political at this point, since only a state bound by law will protect a cult the churches would rather see gone.

Unibank was founded in Haiti in 1993 with its headquarters in Port-au-Prince, and in 1999 it became the first Haitian multinational corporation. Its offices abroad sit along the east coast of the United States, placed where Haitian populations are dense, because its customers on both sides of the water are people of Haitian descent. The pattern is a homeland bank with branches in the diaspora, which is the reverse of an immigrant bank founded abroad by immigrants. Money transfer firms built in the diaspora moved the other way. HATREXCO, which operated from Boston, New York and Miami, merged into Unibank. The Caisses Populaires Haitiennes, the Haitian credit union federation grouped as Le Levier, later partnered with a bank headquartered in New York. A country that exports people ends up with financial institutions shaped around the routes those people take.

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.