An executive order turns the Windward Passage into a checkpoint

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

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.

The creole pig was small, black and hardy, and it lived on household waste and whatever it could root out of a yard. A family kept one the way people elsewhere keep a bank account. It was sold when school fees came due, when a roof went, when somebody fell ill. African swine fever had crossed from the Dominican Republic in 1978, and in 1981 the extermination of the entire Haitian pig population began, on the argument that the disease would otherwise reach the herds of North America. Compensation was promised. Much of it never arrived, and what did arrive bore no relation to what the animal was worth to the household. Replacement stock was imported later from temperate farms. Those animals could not live on garbage, needed bought feed and a concrete pen, and were therefore useless to the people whose pigs had been destroyed. Registration at rural schools fell by roughly a third within a year, because the thing that paid the fees was gone.

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.