A compas singer takes the presidency of a ruined country

Michel Martelly was sworn in as president of Haiti on 14 May 2011, sixteen months after the earthquake that flattened Port-au-Prince. He was born in that city in 1961 to a middle class family and taught himself the piano. Under the stage name Sweet Micky he became one of the country's most popular compas performers, singing in Kreyol and building a following on stage behaviour that ranged from crude to obscene. He had approved of the removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. The first round of voting in November 2010, postponed by the disaster, put him third behind Mirlande Manigat and Jude Celestin. In February the electoral council struck Celestin from the ballot and Martelly took his place in the runoff, winning about sixty seven percent. Rene Preval handed over power without incident, the second time in Haitian history that one elected president replaced another peacefully. Martelly promised to bring back the army, empty the camps of displaced people, and rebuild the capital.

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.

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.

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.