A disputed count is argued out in Creole

When Haiti's provisional electoral council announced preliminary results from the general election of 28 November 2010, the quarrel that followed filled the radio and the street. All of it, on every side, was conducted in Creole, the language the whole country speaks. The exception was the press releases issued by the bodies representing the international community, which came out in French. Almost nobody remarked on this. Jean Casimir treats it as the one piece of evidence that matters about the crisis, because it shows a public sphere that already exists and functions in the national language, and a set of foreign institutions walled off from it by choice of vocabulary. He notes that the same thing had happened between 1986 and 1990, when the Duvalier regime fell and Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected, and that on both occasions the factions went back to ignoring one another as soon as the emergency passed.

An analysis published in 2011 tested samples taken from masonry blocks in Port-au-Prince buildings of various ages that had been damaged in the earthquake. The concrete measured between 545 and 1,135 pounds per square inch. The minimum acceptable standard set by the American Concrete Institute is 2,500 pounds per square inch, so the weakest samples came in at about a fifth of what the material was supposed to deliver and the strongest at under half. The assessment also worked out the remedy. Raising the proportion of cement in a block from one part in thirty to one part in six, and using better aggregate, doubled the compressive strength. The ratio was known and the ingredients existed. What was missing was money to buy cement at the price Haitians were charged for it, and any institution able to insist that they did.

Two months after the ruling, in November 2013, President Danilo Medina announced by decree that a regularisation plan would be created, and the plan itself was established in December. In 2014 the Dominican Republic passed Naturalisation Law 169-14. It divided people into two groups. The first was the roughly fifty five thousand people born in the country whose citizenship had been annulled; the law restored their nationality, and five years later about half of them had actually recovered their documents. The second was people born in the country whose births had never been registered, because they were born outside a hospital or left one without papers. To become citizens they had first to declare themselves Haitian nationals, enter the register for foreigners and wait two years for a naturalisation procedure nobody had defined. Enrolment took repeated journeys and money for transport. Before the deadline, 8,755 applications were filed.

Windward and Leeward are administrative terms European powers applied to the Lesser Antilles in the seventeenth century, and the boundary between them was drawn to suit shipping and colonial jurisdiction. Colonial usage puts the divide at Dominica. Many archaeologists put it at Guadeloupe and count northward from there. The disagreement is small and it exposes something larger. These names were never meant to describe how the islands were inhabited before Europeans arrived, and the societies living there were organised around canoe routes, marriage, exchange and language, none of which respect a line drawn for administrative convenience. Using the colonial vocabulary makes island groups look separate and fixed where the evidence shows movement and mixing along the whole chain. Keegan and Hofman argue for an archipelagic view instead, treating the sea as the thing that joined people rather than the thing that divided them. The map you are handed decides in advance what you can see.