The constitution grants religious freedom and a tenth department appears

Haiti's 1987 constitution recognises freedom of religion, and Fleurant reads it as recognising Vodou as the national religion of the Haitian people. The status remains ambivalent all the same, because many attempts have been made to uproot the practice, and although the purges have generally failed they leave doubt hanging over its worth. The school system, which favours a cosmopolitan approach, has still not put the mythology on any syllabus. For the last thirty years, he writes, people have practised openly. The expatriate community, called the Tenth Department because the national territory is divided into nine, numbers over a million Haitians and includes many advocates of the religion, among them the writer Franketienne and the musicians of Boukman Eksperyans, Boukan Ginen, RAM and the Fugees. A religion with no centre, no dogma and no head office turns out to travel well.

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.

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.

The Haitian army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency at the end of September 1991 and the boats began leaving. The United States would not send the people it stopped straight home as it had before, and it would not bring them ashore in Florida either, so the Coast Guard cutters became sea based jails while diplomats hunted for a third country willing to host the screening. By late November close to two thousand Haitians were crammed on the decks, some of the ships on patrol, others tied up at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay alongside an amphibious landing ship also being used to hold people. No third country agreed. On 17 November the cutter Confidence left Guantanamo with more than two hundred Haitians who had been screened out, and the next afternoon it put them on the docks at Port-au-Prince. Lawyers for the Haitian Refugee Center went to a federal judge in Miami that same day and obtained an order halting further returns.