A crusade kills worshippers and a temple in the Artibonite is abandoned

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.

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.

Jean-Claude Duvalier had ruled Haiti since 1971, when he inherited the presidency at nineteen from his father Francois. Trying to buy time in January 1986, he dismissed several hated officers and brought back others, and in doing so handed command of the units around the palace to men already working against him. Riots spread through Cayes, Jacmel, Leogane and the Goaves. His father had left him a saying: trouble in the capital can be beaten and trouble in Gonaives can be bought, but when Cap-Haitien rises, leave. On 28 January the army stood and watched a crowd at the Cap loot a warehouse and pull down a statue of Francois Duvalier. On 31 January the family drove to the airport, then turned back, and the president went on Radio Nationale to say he was standing firm, firmer than a monkey's tail. Six days later he told his prime minister he wanted to go that night. An American transport carried him and twenty two others to France.

Mutinous soldiers stormed the National Palace at half past five in the evening on 30 September 1991 and took Aristide prisoner. There was talk of shooting him where he stood, and nobody would do it. He was walked across the square to army headquarters instead, and from there the officers bargained with foreign embassies until they agreed to let him leave the country. He reached the airport by half past ten, met by the American and Venezuelan ambassadors, and waited among scores of jeering soldiers until a Venezuelan air force plane landed just before three in the morning. He flew to Caracas and on to Washington. Over the following days he gathered the members of his government who had escaped or who happened to be abroad, at the Haitian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Jean Casimir was his envoy there, Fritz Longchamps spoke for him at the United Nations, and the exile organisations in New York went back to the work they knew. Haiti now had two governments.