Thirty three Haitians drown off a Florida beach

In October 1981 a boat carrying Haitians broke up off Hillsboro Beach, near Fort Lauderdale, and thirty three people died. Television carried pictures of black bodies washing onto Florida sand. The Reagan administration was already caught in a comparison it could not win, granting political asylum to Cubans who arrived by sea while jailing Haitians who arrived the same way, when both groups were leaving dictatorships. Its answer was to go on incarcerating the Haitians. The crisis had been building since 28 November 1980, when the Duvalier government arrested opposition leaders and expelled them, sending a fresh set of exiles to New York and more people onto boats. Haitian organisations in New York of every political stripe used the drownings and the jailings, the left to show the hypocrisy of American policy and the right to show its contradictions.