Haitian children in Boston had been apart from a parent for years

Clinicians reviewing outpatient charts at five community mental health clinics in the Boston area recorded whether a child had been separated from a parent or guardian. For Haitian children the note appears in fifty six percent of charts, against twenty seven percent for African American children and twenty two percent for white children. The separations were also much longer. The Haitian average came to forty four months, roughly double the twenty three months for African American children and the twenty months for white children, and the average Haitian child had been seven or eight years old when the separation started. That is the arithmetic of chain migration written into a clinical record. One parent goes first, works, sends money home and files the paperwork, and the child follows years later after being raised by a grandmother or an aunt. The clinic sees only the arrival. The four years happened in Haiti and reach the chart as a single line.

On 5 February 2004 the FLRN seized Gonaives, the town where independence had been proclaimed two hundred years and one month before. Cap-Haitien fell on 22 February. By the end of the month the rebels stood at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Aristide resigned on 29 February and left the country, saying afterward that the American ambassador James Foley had forced the resignation and that he had been carried off against his will. Washington called it a rescue. Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre became interim president and invited American, French and Canadian troops in to hold the capital. In March the United Nations authorised MINUSTAH, a peacekeeping force under Brazilian command that stayed thirteen years. Aristide settled in Pretoria. Whether his removal corrected a democracy or interrupted one has never been agreed, and the argument has the shape of most arguments about Haitian sovereignty, with Haitians on both sides of it and foreign governments holding the aircraft.

The Aristide administration collapsed on 29 February 2004, the culmination of a four-year campaign that intensified after the contested legislative elections of May 2000. Smith argues CARICOM misread the situation badly, partly because it had been the only foreign presence at the internationally boycotted 2000 elections, which opponents mistook for an endorsement and which Colin Granderson said did tremendous damage to the organisation's credibility. After the removal CARICOM took firm positions on Aristide's Jamaican exile from March to June and on the interim government, and objected that the appointment of Gérard Latortue as interim prime minister had been initiated by Washington without regional consultation. Its own decision to suspend Haiti in March 2004 has not helped, Smith writes, since the isolation coincides with the damage of tropical storm Jeanne in Gonaïves and deepens Haitian cynicism about the region. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that CARICOM's suspension of Haiti after the coup was counterproductive and that a hard line endangers future relations, a position he notes was already contested among heads of government.

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.