A boat breaks up two hundred yards from a Florida beach and thirty two die

In 1984 the bodies of thirty two Haitians washed up on a beach just north of Miami. Their boat, built by hand and open to the weather, had broken apart in a squall before dawn about two hundred yards from shore. Survivors said they had paid smugglers two hundred dollars a head and that forty people had crowded aboard for the run up the Windward Passage from Haiti to Florida. Most of those who died were too worn down by the crossing to swim the last stretch. Television carried the footage that evening: the wreck half buried in sand, waves breaking over it, the dead lying along the beach and shifting slightly with each wave. The station apologised the following night for having broadcast it. Those who lived were taken to the detention camp on Krome Avenue. They were not allowed to attend the funerals of the people they had sailed with.

On 20 May 1984 staff at the CARE warehouse at Cap-Haitien loaded spoiled food onto trucks bound for animal feed. Word went round the market that supplies were being diverted for sale, a crowd stormed the warehouse, and militiamen fought them for four hours. Three people died, none of them militiamen. Whether by Radio Soleil or by word of mouth, the news reached Gonaives, where residents marched on police headquarters to protest at the beating to death of a pregnant woman. They were clubbed at the barricades, and this time they hit back. Thousands protested over two days and looted food warehouses until reinforcements arrived from the capital with machine guns. Ministers sent to find out what had happened reported that the food riots had become something else, that the crowds were calling for the expulsion of the Bennett family and the president's divorce. Five ministers were dismissed for reporting it. Eighty two thousand children in the Cap region alone were living on rations from foreign agencies.

The article closes its evidentiary sequence with an official memorandum advising Congress that the Haitian government had given full cooperation and should continue to receive assistance. Only months before Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall, the United States was still certifying his compliance with the standards it had set. The contradiction the article draws out is procedural rather than moral. The same government whose documented abuses were on record was declared eligible for aid, while Haitians who fled it were denied refugee status on the grounds that Haiti was not communist, so migrants from Cuba and Vietnam were labelled refugees and Haitians were labelled migrants. An immigration official is quoted explaining that Cubans could not be deported because no agreement existed with Castro, while in Haiti's case the United States had made an agreement with a dictator to intercept and return them.

A public argument over Kreyol opened in Haiti in the early 1970s. On one side stood the French embassy and its cultural apparatus, which held that French was the only route to a modern population and that the local language could carry nothing serious. On the other stood a group of young writers, among them Dieudonne Fardin and Franck Etienne, who wrote in Kreyol and defended it as capable of literature, argument and instruction. The stakes were not abstract. Almost every Haitian spoke Kreyol and only a small educated minority spoke French, so a school system and a legal system conducted in French shut most of the population out of both by design. Establishing Kreyol as a written language of the country was therefore a claim about who counts as a citizen. Franck Etienne published Dezafi, the first novel written in Kreyol, in 1975. The constitution made the language official in 1987.