Seven hundred offices carry two hundred million dollars home

Unitransfer USA was created in 1999 to move money from Haitians in the United States to families and institutions in Haiti. By 2013 it ran 716 offices, 284 of them in Haiti and 432 in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Europe. Its chairman put the annual traffic at 275 thousand people in the diaspora sending more than two hundred million dollars home. Its headquarters is in Hollywood, Florida, and it is licensed to operate in eleven states. Before the earthquake of 2010 it claimed more than fifty offices and three hundred agents inside Haiti. It has since followed Haitian workers into Aruba, the Bahamas, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Sint Maarten and the Turks and Caicos, so money now moves between one Haitian settlement abroad and another as well as toward the island. Staff work in French, English, Spanish and Creole.

Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti on 16 January 2011, twenty five years after leaving, having spent the whole period in France without ever being troubled by the authorities there. Duvalierists gave him a triumphal welcome at the airport and declared that the country had been in better shape under him. Onlookers cheered a president for life whom their own age made it impossible for them to remember in office. Police and soldiers of the United Nations mission escorted him to a hotel in Petionville. On 19 January the first victims filed complaints against him and his associates. Haitian justice charged the former dictator that same day with crimes against humanity, financial crimes, corruption, embezzlement of public funds, theft and criminal association. In February 2011 plaintiffs and human rights organisations formed the Collective against Impunity. The general population said little in public, and most victims kept silent for about a year.

Archaeologists long assumed that the first settlers of the Caribbean preferred the larger islands, reasoning that a small island holds fewer animals and less ground to farm. The excavated evidence does not support that. Land animals were never a large part of the diet in these islands. The food came from the sea, and many small islands sit on banks more productive than the water around their bigger neighbours. Saba is one of them. A village of this period worked a catchment of about five kilometres around itself, which an island of five square kilometres supplies without difficulty. Once that is understood, the distribution of Early Ceramic Age sites stops being puzzling. Settlements turn up on islands that earlier scholars had dismissed as too small to hold anyone permanently, because the calculation was being made from the land rather than from the water. People who lived by sailing between islands did not measure them the way people who live on continents do.

A 2017 study by Baker, Rotimi and Shriner in Scientific Reports demonstrated that human ancestry correlates with language rather than with race, and that race is not an objective genomic classifier. Linguists and anthropologists had been saying this for most of a century. What the genomics did was close the last exit, because the racial categories inherited from the nineteenth century had been kept alive on the argument that biology might eventually vindicate them. It did not. I put this at the far end of a Haitian timeline for a specific reason. Haiti's 1805 constitution declared all citizens black regardless of complexion, which was a political act with no biological claim behind it and it was correct. The country made race a legal category it defined for itself, two hundred and twelve years before a genome paper confirmed there was nothing underneath the category to argue with.