Aristide trades the sanctions for a promise and a date

The two delegations came to Governors Island in New York harbour on 27 June 1993 and never sat in the same room. Dante Caputo carried proposals between them for three days. What emerged had Aristide name a prime minister, the sanctions lifted, the army and police reformed under a United Nations force, amnesty for the men who had staged the coup, and Aristide back in Haiti by 30 October 1993. The sanctions were the only pressure he held, and he surrendered them in exchange for undertakings to be honoured later by people who had broken every undertaking before. Cedras went home to a cheering crowd that expected fuel and imports. For prime minister Aristide named Robert Malval, a printer and publisher from the elite, who accepted in August and said he would serve only until 15 December. On 11 September macoutes walked into a memorial mass at Sacre-Coeur, took Antoine Izmery out at gunpoint and shot him in the street.

In November 1991 roughly three hundred and ten Haitian men, women and children were held on the grounds of the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They lived in huts with tin roofs inside barbed wire, guarded by marines with automatic weapons, using portable toilets that were rarely cleaned, among rats and vermin. They tied plastic rubbish bags to the walls to keep the rain out and hung sheets for privacy. They could leave only under military escort and could be sent to the brig without a hearing for breaking camp rules. Soldiers in full riot gear swept the sleeping quarters before dawn. Judge Johnson described these conditions in his opinion in the Haitian Centers Council case. The camp, known as Camp Bulkeley, ran from 1991 to 1993, and every person in it had tested positive for HIV. It was the only detention camp anywhere built for refugees with that virus.

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.