Five percent vote and the winner is given 50.27 percent

Three men agreed to run in the election the military council staged in January 1988: Hubert de Ronceray, once a Duvalier minister, Gregoire Eugene, and Leslie Manigat. Manigat was fifty seven and had written extensively on his country's history through more than two decades of exile. He had told television viewers that refusing to deal with the army was hothouse politics, since the army was there whether anyone liked it or not. On polling day the stations were almost deserted. Independent observers put turnout at five percent, the government said thirty five, and the appointed council retired to count in private and produced 50.27 percent for Manigat. He was sworn in on 7 February 1988, two years to the day after Jean-Claude Duvalier flew out, and looked small among the uniforms. It took him two weeks to assemble a cabinet, whose first instruction was to accept a ten percent pay cut. Foreign donors kept their money. Japan sent sixteen million dollars in vehicles.

On 10 April 1990 an estimated fifty thousand Haitians walked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan and surrounded city hall. The target was the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, which had classified Haitians as a group at risk for AIDS and kept the classification after the scientific evidence had gone against it. Traffic did not move. Taxis were hard to find because so many drivers were Haitian and had taken the day off to march. The same day brought demonstrations in Miami and outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince, and delegations went on to Washington to meet federal officials. Some months later the agencies stopped describing Haitians as a risk group. The march then travelled back along the radio and the telephone. In towns like Port Salut, people who had never left Haiti repeated one sentence about it for years afterwards: the demonstration was so big that the bridge shook.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.

Through the autumn of 1992 nobody in the exiled Haitian government would say publicly what should happen if negotiation failed. Calls for armed resistance came mostly from people at a safe distance. Foreign military intervention was the one proposal nobody would make aloud, though debate at the United Nations was moving toward it. Nor did anyone suggest cutting off the money Haitians abroad sent home, which ran to 250 million dollars a year and was the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Aristide worked the constituencies open to him, speaking at rallies in Central Park and with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency, called himself appalled that the Bush administration was sending Haitian boat people home. On 3 November 1992 he won. The Caucus counted for more in a Democratic administration, and Clinton had promised to change the refugee policy. One Haitian in four now lived outside Haiti. Who ruled in Port-au-Prince had become a question that American voters could be asked.