Duty free garments on condition the cloth is woven and cut in America

Special Access Programs opened in 1987. Countries covered by the Caribbean Basin Initiative could now send assembled garments into the United States with duty charged only on the labour added, on condition that the cloth had been made and cut in the United States. Guaranteed Access Levels came with them and lifted the quota ceilings on those garments. Haitian exports to the United States rose. American mills kept the fabric business, and the cutting stayed in the southeastern states where the fibre was grown. Measures of this kind were presented as market opening, and they were designed by and for the vertically integrated textile companies, which planned and financed the manufacturing that poorer countries were invited to carry out. Haiti suited the arrangement because it offered tax holidays, wages low enough to compete with East Asia, and very little union activity.

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 left Haiti before dawn on 7 February 1986 aboard a United States Air Force transport that carried him to France. He had been president since 1971 and his father since 1957, so the family had held the country for twenty nine years. The end took about four months. Gonaives had risen in November after soldiers shot schoolchildren, the demonstrations spread to the provincial towns, the schools emptied, the church had turned, and the business class that had done well out of the regime asked for a change. The Americans, who had underwritten the arrangement for a generation, organised the exit. The army command that had been preparing for it took power the same morning as a governing council under Henri Namphy. Crowds pulled down statues and broke into Fort Dimanche. What did not leave with Duvalier was the machinery: the militia, the officers, the men who had run the prisons, most of whom stayed in Haiti and were still there when the next government fell.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.