A tent city goes up on an abandoned airfield at Guantanamo

The court orders that stopped repatriation left the United States holding thousands of Haitians and no plan for them. Within three days of the first restraining order people were being taken to Camp Bulkeley, a remote corner of the naval station at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and housed in permanent shelters and tents. Bulkeley was small. Within a week navy construction battalions were putting up a far larger tent city on the abandoned airfield at McCalla for the nearly five thousand others coming off the cutters. Meanwhile the district court turned its restraining order into an injunction, the appeals court dissolved it, and the sequence repeated until the legal shape of the border had been redrawn seven times in a little over a month. Some order or other held the ships back for about six weeks. Guantanamo answered the government's problem. People could be kept there without entering the United States, on ground leased from Cuba, in a place lawyers for the government said American courts could not reach.

On 16 December 1990 Haitians went to the polls in an election that international observers judged clean. It was the first time in the country's history that the outcome was genuinely open and the count genuinely honest. Since independence in 1804 Haiti had held rigged plebiscites and army managed successions, and the presidency had passed by coup far more often than by ballot. The winner was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a parish priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince who had entered the race two months earlier. He took roughly two thirds of the votes cast, about three times the share of his nearest rival, the World Bank economist Marc Bazin. The margin mattered as much as the result. A president chosen by that many poor voters carried a mandate for land reform, higher wages and the prosecution of the old regime's killers, and everyone who stood to lose by those things understood it the same day. Aristide would hold the office for seven months.

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.

A survey directed by Francois Houtart and Anselme Remy in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince in 1997 asked people what religion they practised. Three and a half per cent said openly that they served Vodou. Just under fifty per cent answered Catholic and thirty nine per cent answered Protestant. Protestant denominations had been growing very fast in the capital, and part of the result records that growth. The rest of it records fear. Hurbon reads the low number as evidence that two centuries of pressure still worked, and that many Haitians would not put their name to a religion the state, the Catholic Church and the newer Protestant churches had all treated as shameful. He ties the finding to the constitution of 1987 and to the question it opened about whether the Haitian state can stand neutral between religions, which in his view has to be argued in public before anyone answers honestly.