Six people out of twenty one thousand are brought ashore

Between 1981 and 1989 United States immigration officers working from Coast Guard cutters stopped 21,461 Haitians at sea. Six of them were carried to the United States for a fuller interview. That is under one quarter of one percent of the people they questioned. The written standard was not demanding. Officers were told to stay watchful for any sign, including a bare claim, that someone aboard an intercepted vessel might qualify as a refugee. A senior immigration official with direct knowledge of the program later said the interviewers had received no instruction and no training, that they went on whatever they felt at the moment, and that everyone in front of them was black. Former colleagues of his said much the same. Nobody supervised the interviews. A judgement was reached on a deck in the Windward Passage, written into a file, and almost never read again. The boats went back to Port-au-Prince.

On 28 November 1985 soldiers and tontons macoutes killed three schoolchildren in Gonaives. The country caught fire from that town, and the burning ended with the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier on 7 February 1986. Twenty six years later, on 16 December 2011, the law faculty of Gonaives invited the former president for life to sponsor its graduating class. He came, and he asked the audience for a minute of silence in memory of the three children. The bar association of Port-au-Prince made no comment, although its own head had joined the first defence team for the former dictator. Through the twenty nine years of the dictatorship young people of both sexes went to the front line for liberty more than any other group. One survivor described the regime by a single act, the turning of the only library in a provincial town into a barracks for its militiamen.

By early 1981 a group of faculty physicians at the University of Miami had worked back through every Haitian patient admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital over the previous year. What they found fitted neither tuberculosis nor poverty nor hunger. The patients were young, had lived in the United States for a few months to a few years, held ordinary jobs and had been well nourished before falling ill. They arrived with fungal infections in the nervous system, viral infections of the gullet, parasites in the brain, yeast in the mouth, swollen glands in several places and Pneumocystis in the lungs, frequently two or three of these in one person. Pneumocystis appears only where immunity has already failed. One of the group, Margaret, connected the pattern to reports of the same infections in previously healthy gay men. The Miami patients included women and heterosexual men. The condition had no name yet outside a billing category.

In October 1981 a boat carrying Haitians broke up off Hillsboro Beach, near Fort Lauderdale, and thirty three people died. Television carried pictures of black bodies washing onto Florida sand. The Reagan administration was already caught in a comparison it could not win, granting political asylum to Cubans who arrived by sea while jailing Haitians who arrived the same way, when both groups were leaving dictatorships. Its answer was to go on incarcerating the Haitians. The crisis had been building since 28 November 1980, when the Duvalier government arrested opposition leaders and expelled them, sending a fresh set of exiles to New York and more people onto boats. Haitian organisations in New York of every political stripe used the drownings and the jailings, the left to show the hypocrisy of American policy and the right to show its contradictions.