Aristide takes the oath and retires six of the army's eight generals

Legislative elections on 20 January 1991 passed without incident and with light turnout, leaving Aristide to face a chamber he did not control. Rumours in late January that Lafontant would be freed from jail brought barricades and burning tyres to the poor quarters; four macoutes were lynched and six people died as the army cleared the streets. Aristide left as planned for two days of talks in France with Francois Mitterrand. George Bush stayed away from the inauguration on 7 February 1991 and sent his ambassador and his health secretary instead. Aristide, thirty seven years old and from Port Salut, took the oath and accepted the blue and red sash from a peasant woman, then went to the cathedral for the traditional Te Deum while the ruins of the church burned a month earlier still smoked a few hundred yards away. He retired six of the army's eight generals with thanks for their service and named Raoul Cedras chief of staff. The next day he announced that Fort Dimanche, the Duvalier torture prison, would become a museum.

The historical research department of the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in Chicago in 1991. Its claim was that Jews had dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Through the late 1980s and the middle 1990s the same claim was preached on American college campuses by Nation of Islam speakers, among them Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, who described Jews as bloodsuckers, and it was taken up by Afrocentric professors such as Leonard Jeffries. This happened as the alliances between Black and Jewish organisations formed in the civil rights years were falling apart. Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders denounced the charge, and historians of slavery including David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher published refutations. The book did not go away. A reader looking for material on Blacks and Jews still meets it first, together with a supply of reviews praising its research.

The 1987 constitution sent the presidency to a member of the Cour de Cassation, and the judge next in line, Gilbert Austin, was thought too close to the departing general to be able to govern. Austin removed himself. The post went instead to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, at forty six the youngest judge on the court, appointed to it by a liberal justice minister during the years of the military council. Prosper Avril had agreed to leave office while refusing to leave the country, where he would have served as a rallying point for the right. American pressure settled that too, and on Monday at dawn a United States Air Force plane carried him and his family to Florida. Pascal-Trouillot was sworn in on 13 March 1990 as the first woman to head the Haitian state. General Herard Abraham handed her the blue and red sash and said that the army awaited her orders. In a white linen suit she told a cheering crowd that she wanted nothing except to serve the country. Elections were set for December.

In 1991 the painter Edouard Duval Carrie produced a representation of Baron Samdi, head of the spirits of the dead, in which the figure's resemblance to Francois Duvalier is unmistakable and blood streams from his exposed phallus. Duvalier had ruled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971 and had deliberately dressed himself in the iconography of the Baron, black suit, black hat, nasal voice. The painting takes the borrowing back. It is a standing feature of Haitian art that the spirits are shown intervening in politics, quarrelling over the country, removing presidents and installing them. Camaau Rameau painted an assembly of the principal spirits, Azaka, Ezili Freda, Ogou, Ezili Danto and Baron Samdi, gathered to give counsel on the bloody dramas that surround power in Haiti. Duval Carrie's version is less consultative. It says that the evil forces running the country have taken up residence in the cemetery.