Children born in Haitian cities under autocracy grow up shorter

Using four rounds of survey data on children under five, the authors find that being born in an urban area during an autocratic period is associated with a decline in both weight-for-age and height-for-age scores. In the full sample from 1991 to 2012 with birthdate fixed effects, urban children born under autocracy are 0.14 standard deviations shorter than their rural peers; the effect strengthens to 0.16 in the sample starting with Aristide's second mandate and to 0.18 when children under six months are excluded. They call the effect substantively large, roughly equal to the difference in height between boys and girls and about eight to fourteen percent of the gap between Haitian children and the global reference mean. Specifications with a birthdate trend show autocracy itself depressing nutrition for rural children too. They found no significant effect on under-five mortality.

Richard Reid argues that the collapse of the Soviet bloc changed what Western governments said they wanted from Africa. Human rights, good governance and elections replaced anticommunism as the stated test. Guilt drove part of the shift. The Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s became the defining image of the continent, and the failure to act in Rwanda in 1994, where about a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed while foreign governments watched, sat badly beside the readiness to intervene in the Balkans. The offer put to African states was that accepting structural adjustment, meaning political and economic liberalisation, would bring investment and World Bank money. Reid points out that intervention aimed at remaking African societies runs back to the abolition campaigns of the early nineteenth century. Bill Clinton toured the continent in 1998 announcing a renaissance. After September 2001 the old bargain returned, and governments that helped against Islamist movements found their conduct at home overlooked. Africa remained a problem for outsiders to fix, and the fixing carried no memory of how the problem was made.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.

Haitians began settling in New York City between 1915 and 1934, during the American occupation of Haiti. A larger flow came between 1957 and 1971 under Francois Duvalier and his son, and boat arrivals began around 1972. The early leadership expected to go home. It ran hometown associations aimed at conditions in Haiti and at removing the Duvaliers, and it discouraged members from spending time on American politics, which it treated as a distraction. The habit outlasted the reason for it. When Yvette Clarke gave up her city council seat after winning election to Congress, ten Haitian candidates entered the race for it. Activists asked for a single agreed candidate to stop the vote fragmenting and nobody withdrew. Mathieu Eugene won that seat in 2007 and became the first Haitian American to hold elective office in the city. Clyde Vanel became the second in 2016, in a New York State Assembly race.