UNESCO lists the Citadelle and the ruins of Sans-Souci

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.

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.

In the spring of 1981 American newspapers carried short reports of an illness killing gay men, which they called gay related immune deficiency. Within a year it had a new name, AIDS, many more victims and no explanation. Physicians in south Florida noticed that a number of their heterosexual patients with the disease were Haitian immigrants, and the observation hardened into a category. Haitians were listed alongside homosexuals, haemophiliacs and heroin users as a group at risk, a classification Haitians shortened bitterly to the four H's. Journalists supplied mechanisms: Vodou ceremonies involving blood, ritual scarring, whether the men had caught it from New Yorkers on holiday or given it to them. The epidemiology arrived later and pointed the other way, indicating that the virus had reached Haiti from North America and moved through the population the way it moved in African cities, by heterosexual contact. By then it made no difference. This did more damage to the Haitian economy than the scandals, the human rights reports and the boat people together.

Tens of thousands of Haitians reached Palm Beach County by boat between 1979 and 1981. Almost all of them arrived as Catholics and found no Catholic church that could receive them in their own language. The church in Miami, dominated by Irish Americans, was slow to notice them. The first Haitian priest settled in the area in 1987, a Scalabrinian raised and trained in Haiti who moved down from New York and founded Notre Dame in Delray Beach. A second Haitian church followed in the 1990s at Fort Pierce. The evangelical congregations had meanwhile answered quickly, repatriating parts of North American missions with Haitian pastors at their head. Many Catholics who wanted to worship in Creole went to Protestant services, some staying Catholic and some converting. By 2001 the priest at Delray Beach, serving about seventeen thousand Haitians, the densest concentration in the county, reckoned Protestants slightly outnumbered Catholics.