Only Jesus Christ is forever, and the referendum returns 99.9 percent

Jean-Claude Duvalier announced a referendum on 29 June 1985. It was Roger Lafontant's idea, and it asked Haitians to approve the creation of a prime minister and the legalisation of opposition parties, both conditional on their approval of the presidency for life. Almost nobody voted, except where free kleren was handed out at the polling station. Priests of the Ti Legliz movement had been telling congregations to stay away, one of them preaching that only Jesus Christ is forever, and Radio Soleil carried the sermon nationwide. Lafontant expelled three foreign priests connected with the station, and more than two hundred priests and church workers marched through Port-au-Prince to say they would not be silenced. The result was announced as 99.9 percent in favour. Clovis Desinor, who had served Francois Duvalier as a minister and believed the succession should have been his, said in public that half the nation had never voted for a leader and that he would found a party of his own. Lafontant was put on a plane to Montreal.

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.

Light assembly manufacturing grew fast in Haiti from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s and was for that whole stretch the one part of the economy that worked. In 1990 it employed 46,000 people spread across some 250 firms. The workforce was mainly women, and each employee supported about three or four other people, mostly in the capital. The industry ran on imported raw materials, sold into the American market, and made toys, electronics and textiles on the strength of Haiti's one comparative advantage, low wages. Its share of total export value rose from under five percent in the mid 1960s to over two thirds by the mid 1980s. After the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, international sanctions sent energy costs up, removed spare parts and inputs from the market, and took the customers away. By the beginning of 1995 no more than 5000 workers were left in the sector.

The Haitian writer Sanba Gregory Sanon, known as Azouke, was among the worshippers attacked during a crusade against the religion in 1986, in which a number of people were killed. He wrote about the building afterwards. Spirits had come to that small run down house from the four corners of the country, and inside it the members wrote poetry, composed songs, learned to dance and argued politics. They lost one of their brothers, a man Sanon calls very dear to the struggle, and from that day they decided to move the house elsewhere. The spirits, he says, visited them wherever they went. Anti-Vodou crusades ran from the colonial period into contemporary times without a long enough break for anyone to grow up without seeing one. Abandoned temples stand in the Artibonite valley, and they are as much a record of Haitian religious history as the ones still in use.