The Salesians expel Aristide and a colonel eats his last soup

Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, indicted in Miami and an obstacle between Prosper Avril and American money, died suddenly in the autumn of 1988. The story in Port-au-Prince was poisoned pumpkin soup. The State Department released fifteen million dollars of suspended aid and held back seventy million more. France waited. More than a thousand people attended Paul's funeral, a good number of them senior officers, which said something about how much of the army lived off the drug trade. In December, with no further money coming, Avril let Franck Romain leave for exile. That same month the Salesian order expelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the grounds that he incited violence and class struggle. He had called the senior church hierarchy imperialists in cassocks. This time the marches and sit-ins that had reversed earlier decisions changed nothing. Still a priest and no longer in the order, Aristide went back to the orphanage he had opened for street children in Port-au-Prince and considered what to do next.

Joseph is careful about priority in the debate that now dominates Haitian revolutionary studies. In a Sorbonne dissertation of 1989 titled Hegel, critique de l'Afrique, Pierre-Franklin Tavares argued that the revolution in Saint-Domingue and the birth of Haiti, taken as a double event, were the principal historical source, though not the only one, of the famous figure of consciousness entitled domination and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a figure Tavares follows Kojeve in saying is improperly called the dialectic of master and slave. Joseph presents Susan Buck-Morss's later work as building on this thesis, and notes that Tavares extended his argument in further studies on Hegel and the Abbe Gregoire and on Hegel as an anti-slavery philosopher, including a lecture at the College de France in January 1996. The point restores a francophone genealogy to an argument usually credited to an American book. Where this account departs from the standard one: Assigns the Hegel and Haiti thesis first to Tavares in 1989, ahead of the Buck-Morss article of 2000 with which it is usually identified.

Francois Duvalier won the presidency of Haiti in 1957 and never gave it up, and in 1971 his son Jean-Claude took it over at nineteen. On 7 February 1986 the son, his wife and their household boarded a United States Air Force jet and flew to France. Twenty nine years of family rule ended in a morning. What followed was called the dechoukaj, the uprooting. Crowds went after every mark the regime had left on the country, and after the men who had enforced it. Former militiamen were hunted through the streets and more than a hundred were killed, many of them burned inside tyres. General Henri Namphy stepped in and formed a military government. The constitution written the following year did something no Haitian charter had done before. It made Kreyol an official language beside French, in a country where almost everyone spoke only Kreyol, and it split executive power between a president and a prime minister so that no single office could be held the way the Duvaliers had held it.

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.