A cutter stops a sloop and sends fifty six people back the next day

On the evening of 25 October 1981 the United States Coast Guard cutter Chase met the wooden sloop Exorde in the Windward Passage, the stretch of water between Haiti and Cuba that Haitian boats crossed on their way north. An immigration examiner named Henry Boyce went across in one of the Chase's small boats. With an interpreter he carried out what amounted to a single group interview of the fifty six Haitians on board. The following day all of them were put ashore at Port-au-Prince. None had set foot on American soil, and that was the design. Under the arrangement the Reagan administration had assembled a month earlier, a person stopped at sea never reached United States territory and so never gained the standing to ask an American court for anything. Three days later the New York Times ran a short piece on a congressional hearing where a deputy immigration commissioner defended the operation and others questioned whether it was lawful.

An estimated 540,000 hectares of good arable soil existed in Haiti in 1938. By 1954 the figure had shrunk to 370,000. By 1970 it was 225,750 hectares, and the figure reported for 1985 was 205,000, with no sign afterwards that the trend had reversed. In the mid 1980s between six thousand and ten thousand hectares of arable land were being lost each year, and in the early 1990s the range ran from six thousand to fifteen thousand. The mechanism is a substitution. As the rural population grows, labour intensive food crops replace land intensive export crops, above all replacing coffee, whose roots and canopy hold the soil, on steep hillsides. Food crops are cleared and replanted in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, and the downpours then wash the soil into the valleys and streams. Once running, the process feeds itself without further population growth.

In 1960 South African police fired on an unarmed crowd at Sharpeville, and most of the dead were hit from behind as they ran. The government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, which pushed the opposition underground and into exile. The ANC formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and in 1963 Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were sentenced to life. Resistance came back through trade unions and through Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. In 1976 police fired on fifteen thousand schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting against the schooling designed for them, and parts of the country stopped being governable. Biko died in police custody. Botha declared a state of emergency in 1985. In 1989 F W de Klerk repealed the Population Registration and Group Areas acts, lifted the bans, and released Mandela in February 1990. The first election open to every adult was held in 1994 and Mandela won it. Political rights changed hands that year. The ownership of the economy did not move.

UNESCO placed Haiti's National History Park on the World Heritage list in 1982. The park is the Citadelle Laferriere, the ruins of the palace at Sans-Souci and the buildings at Ramiers, all of them in the mountains above Cap-Haitien, all built in the decade after independence on the orders of Henry Christophe. The Citadelle is the largest fortress in the Americas and was raised against a French return that never came. Sans-Souci was designed to stand comparison with a European court. Both were put up by people who had been enslaved twenty years earlier and who were proving, at their own cost, what a free black state could build in stone. It remains the only World Heritage Site in the country. The listing came in a year when Haiti was governed by a man whose accomplishments were the enrichment of his family and the impoverishment of everyone else, which is the sort of coincidence a timeline should keep rather than tidy away.