Aristide's government in exile convenes the Miami business conference

On 22 July 1993, three weeks after Governors Island, Aristide's government in exile organised the Haiti Government and Business Partnership Conference in Miami. Most of the roughly two hundred participants were members of the Haitian haute bourgeoisie, alongside foreign businesspeople with Haitian interests and United States officials. Dupuy makes this the hinge of his argument about the taming of the prophet. The mechanism was conditional restoration. Returning to office required the assent of the government that would carry him back and of the class that had financed his overthrow, and the price was a public commitment to a private-sector-led model. As Prime Minister Malval put it before the planned October return, the president had learned that the world was not divided cleanly between good and ugly, bourgeoisie on one side and masses on the other.

On 24 May 1992 George Bush signed the order known as the Kennebunkport Order, which told the Coast Guard to carry Haitians found on the high seas straight back to Haiti without any screening at all. People who wanted asylum were told to apply at the American consular office in Port-au-Prince, inside the country they were trying to leave, and to be interviewed there by American immigration officers. Guantanamo Bay was overcrowded, attempts to place refugees on other Caribbean islands and in Central America had failed, and an election was months away. Bill Clinton called the policy cruel during the campaign and kept it once elected. After American troops returned Aristide to office in 1994 most of the Haitians at Guantanamo were sent home, the last of them in November 1995. The Cubans held there were admitted to the United States.

The only fairly complete surviving run of Les Affiches Americaines, the newspaper of the French colony that became Haiti, sits in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In 1993 the University of Florida had that run put on microfilm. The film was later scanned by the Law Library Microform Consortium, now LLMC Digital, and afterwards by the Digital Library of the Caribbean, which put the pages online. The newspaper ran from 1766 to 1791 and carried the notices owners placed for enslaved people who had left them. Those notices hold physical descriptions, African origins, language skills and social contacts recorded nowhere else in the colonial archive. While the single run lay in one reading room in Paris, the historians able to use it were the ones who could pay to travel there, and Haitian scholars working in Haiti were the least able to reach it. Two rounds of copying, first onto film and then into a database, changed who could open the source.

In 1992 UNESCO began a project on the routes of the slave trade, on the argument that hiding a history of that size blocks any reconciliation built on top of it. Ceremonies and monuments followed in Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast. In Ouidah it produced a festival of Vodun arts, and dozens of artists from Africa and the diaspora were commissioned to make sculptures. Their work now lines the road running from the town down to the beach where captives were loaded into canoes. One stop is a memorial said to stand over the common grave of people who died before embarkation. Another is the Tree of Return, where guides say the departing were made to circle three times so their spirits would come home, and another the Tree of Forgetting, which was supposed to strip their memories. Robin Law finds no trace of either tree in any record before the 1990s.