Washington exempts the factories and Haiti paves the smuggling road

In February 1992 the Bush administration exempted goods made in Port-au-Prince assembly plants from the embargo. More than fifty thousand jobs in that sector had gone already. Writing in March, Elliott Abrams set out the trap the policy had built: the United States was wrecking an economy, producing emigrants, and then refusing them shelter. Guantanamo filled and Washington began returning people to Haiti. Water was diverted from the Artibonite to drive the Peligre generators, which hurt farming, while Petionville dined on French wine and Norwegian salmon. The officers found the money to surface the last rough stretch of road to the Dominican border at Malpasse, through which the embargo leaked. A fresh proposal that acknowledged Aristide's title without fixing a date for his return, and offered the officers amnesty, could not win a majority in the rump parliament, where members waved guns during debate. Petrol reached eighteen dollars a gallon. Georges Izmery was shot dead in daylight two hundred yards from a police station. Marc Bazin took over as de facto prime minister in June.

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.

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.

In 1997 the New York State education authorities ruled that Haitian Kreyol was one of the official languages in which students could sit the Regents Examinations, the most prestigious school leaving qualification the state awards. The ruling followed litigation that Haitians in New York had brought against the state over its handling of bilingual education. Its practical effect was limited, because most Kreyol speakers do not read or write the language, having been schooled in French in Haiti or in English in the United States. Its symbolic effect was larger. A state education system had conceded that there was a Haitian population in New York substantial enough and organised enough to have to be counted. Haitians had arrived at that point through two decades of court cases and street protest over detention, deportation and refugee status, and the language ruling registered the political weight those years had accumulated.