A quarter of a million pilgrims bathe under the waterfalls at Sodo

At the falls of Sodo, far from the capital, Phyllis Galembo counted a crowd she puts at a quarter of a million Haitian pilgrims come to bathe in water held to be magical. Her photographs of the gathering are dated 15 July 1997. The pilgrims were shedding their ritual clothes in honour of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, who in this country is also Ezili Danto, the mother and warrior spirit. Under the falling water, priests and priestesses worked through the crowd with brooms, cleansing the faithful in rites that carried people into states of ecstasy. The scale is the thing to hold onto. A quarter of a million people at one site on one day, in a country of some seven million at the time, is not a survival or a remnant. It is the ordinary religious life of a nation, conducted at a waterfall because the spirits live in the water.

In 1998 the National Coalition for Haitian Rights helped secure passage of a bill allowing forty thousand people who had fled the Haitian military coup of 1991 to apply for permanent residence in the United States. The organisation had been founded in New York in 1982 as the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees by Michael Hooper, a white American immigration lawyer, and had been a plaintiff in the court cases seeking constitutional protection for Haitians in detention. By 1998 it ran offices in New York and Port-au-Prince, held clinics to help immigrants naturalise, and joined coalitions with other migrant groups to move legislation. In Haiti it pressed for the prosecution of people who had committed abuses under the military government, which made it enough of a presence in Haitian politics that in 1999 the head of its Port-au-Prince office survived an assassination attempt.

Average daily calorie intake in Haiti stood at 1869 in 1997, about eighty percent of the standard recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and below the figures estimated for the 1960s, which were 2140 in 1962 and 2000 in 1966. Life expectancy at birth was a little under fifty four years in 1998, an improvement on the figure below forty eight in 1970, and the gain came from sharp reductions in infant and under five mortality. The share of fifteen year olds who would die before reaching sixty rose for both sexes in the late 1990s and was the highest in the Western Hemisphere, at 340 per thousand for women and 432 for men. There were 0.2 physicians per thousand people in 1995, up from 0.1 in 1990, a figure that had been flat since the early 1970s and was barely above the level reported in 1952.

In the Dominican presidential election of May 1996 Jose Francisco Pena Gomez took almost 46 percent of the vote. Fifty percent was needed to win outright, so a runoff against Leonel Fernandez was set for June. Balaguer was not a candidate this time and the campaign was less openly dirty than the one two years earlier, though Fernandez's party had already claimed that many registered voters were in fact Haitian nationals. Two weeks before the second round Balaguer announced that his party would unselfishly support Fernandez in order to keep the Dominican nation out of hands that were not truly Dominican. The combined vote of the two parties gave Fernandez 51.25 percent. Direct appeals to whiteness make little sense in a country where most candidates have some black African ancestry and where voters are themselves mostly of mixed descent. What both campaigns worked with instead was the implicit cue, in which a candidate's dark skin was made to stand for foreign origin.