Two thousand people are held on the decks of Coast Guard cutters

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.

Jean Bertrand Aristide took the oath of office as president of Haiti in February 1991 in Kreyol, and received the presidential sash from a manbo, a priestess of Vodou. Both acts were read exactly as he meant them. French was the language of the elite and Catholicism was its religion, official in law until 1987, and the new president used the language of the majority and the hands of their priesthood at the moment of assuming power. In 1995 he opened the gates of the presidential mansion and served food to beggars himself, turning a white house built on the model of the Petit Trianon into something that could be called a national palace. Underneath the symbolism sat a hard count. Five provisional governments held power between 1986 and 1991, and after the coup a military dictatorship under Raoul Cedras ran three separate administrations from 1991 to 1994.

Haitians had been settling in New York for thirty years, and Rara had surfaced there in bursts: at demonstrations against the Duvalier government in the early 1980s, and during strikes involving Haitian labour groups. None of it was organised. The summer of 1990 changed that. A band called Rara Djakout was founded in Brooklyn, and a full Rara went out in Prospect Park every Sunday, the same people returning each week to dance and to add verses. Musicians from the Haitian roots movement started it after a drumming circle in the park refused to lend them a drum. They borrowed drums from a friend, came back the next day playing Rara, and walked past. Word of mouth brought hundreds of young people out. By 1995 four separate bands were playing in Prospect Park and in Central Park on summer weekends. Lifted out of Lent into July, the New York Rara had no queens, no cemetery visits and no seven year contracts with the spirits.

By early November 1987 it was clear that the governing council meant to sabotage the elections set for the 29th. It withheld all logistical support from the independent electoral council and allowed soldiers and macoutes to run a month-long campaign of terror. When people turned out to vote anyway, soldiers and macoutes opened fire, killing at least twenty-two and wounding sixty-seven. The council immediately cancelled the elections and dissolved the electoral commission. Dupuy identifies the mechanism as an existential calculation: control of the state was the only guarantee the Duvalierist forces had for the interests built up over thirty years of dictatorship, and any result they had not chosen would have been unacceptable. Namphy justified the cancellation by claiming the commission would have handed victory to the left, a claim Dupuy says had no basis in fact.