The Caribbean: Showing Them the Way Home

By the hundreds, Haitian boat people in search of asylum in the U.S. were delivered by Coast Guard cutters back to Port-au-Prince. Each was fingerprinted and photographed by local immigration officers. Just routine procedure, police assured scores of foreign journalists. But the swiftness with which the returnees melted into the population suggested that these Haitians were more than a little skeptical -- perhaps with good cause.

Three days after his repatriation from the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, a youth who identified himself only as Marcelin spoke briefly with TIME. He said that last Monday, within...