Fuel prices rise during a World Cup match and the capital burns

For nearly a decade Venezuela had sold Haiti oil on long credit through the PetroCaribe arrangement, and the proceeds financed government spending outside the regular budget. By 2018 the shipments had dried up as the Venezuelan economy collapsed under sanctions, and the Haitian government needed a deal with the International Monetary Fund. Ending fuel subsidies was the condition. In the first week of July, while Brazil played Belgium in the World Cup and officials reckoned the country would be in front of its television sets, the administration of Jovenel Moise announced the increase. Black smoke was in the streets within hours. Businesses were looted and three days of rioting closed the international airport and shut down Port-au-Prince. The government reversed the decision. The previous November a Senate commission had published 650 pages on a decade of PetroCaribe spending, listing overbilling, ghost companies and contracts for work never done. Protest built toward 17 October 2018, the anniversary of the death of Dessalines.

Jennifer L. Baker, Charles N. Rotimi and Daniel Shriner published a study in Scientific Reports in 2017 examining how human genetic variation is distributed. They found that ancestry corresponds to the languages people speak and that race works badly as a way of classifying genomes. Linguists and anthropologists had reached that conclusion by their own routes decades earlier, and the genetic data now agrees with them. The result carries most weight in Africa, which holds more human genetic diversity than any other part of the world. Speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages across the Sudan belt, Cushitic speakers in the Horn, Niger-Congo speakers through West and Central Africa and Khoisan speakers in the south are each varied within themselves and overlap heavily with one another. Sorting them into races produces categories with no biological content. What holds any of these groupings together is history: migration, settlement, marriage and the exchange of goods and words, all of which move genes along the same paths that carry language.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.

The website Marronnage in Saint-Domingue transcribes advertisements for enslaved people who had run, together with the lists jails kept of those recaptured. Every document appears twice, as a photograph of the original page and as a searchable transcription. By 2020 the project had taken in material from newspapers in Guadeloupe, Guyane, Jamaica, Louisiana, Lower Canada and South Carolina, and was renaming itself Marronnage in the Atlantic World. Those additions carried the advertisements to 15,638 and the jail lists to 6,846. The figure the site gives for people identified, 22,638, cannot be right. An advertisement usually named one person and occasionally a few, while a jail list was generally longer and sometimes very much longer, so the count of individuals recorded has to be considerably higher. Jail lists appear to be peculiar to the French colonies, which is why historians have rarely been able to compare who escaped with who was caught. Saint-Domingue still supplies most of the material.