Haiti

  The name of the marine who snapped the photograph in 1919 is unknown, but he ended up making a lasting contribution to the artistic and political culture of Haiti. The image he produced, meant to make Haitians forget about Péralte, remains the most widely recognized depiction of the U.S. occupation, the ultimate monument to its cruelty and to the resistance it inspired.

  7

  SECOND INDEPENDENCE

  In June 1929, a resplendent new agricultural school was inaugurated in Damien, a suburb north of Port-au-Prince. It was outfitted with laboratories, a geological museum, a collection of Haitian plants, and a dairy farm where imported Jersey and Holstein cows cohabited with a few “indigenous” ones. Haitian and American teachers provided instruction in zoology, botany, agronomy, physics, chemistry, and political economy, and the students got exercise playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball. The school was the crown jewel of a decade-long effort by the United States to transform education and agriculture in Haiti, meant to demonstrate unequivocally that the occupation was a force for progress and civilization. Instead, however, it ended up doing the opposite. Within a few months, the Damien school became the launching pad for a mass student uprising, which eventually helped to do what Péralte’s Cacos could not: send the U.S. forces home.1

  The unrest began on October 31, 1929, when the first class of students at the Damien school learned that the administration was cutting back on promised merit scholarships. They went on strike, marching into Port-au-Prince, where they were soon joined by other high school and university students. The young protesters became heroes for a population fed up with the U.S. presence. Greeted by cheering crowds, they lived an adolescent dream: getting free bus rides, free restaurant meals, even free movie tickets. As a symbol of their protest, they were wore green ribbons, standing for the renewal they hoped to inspire.2

  When Haitian government employees joined the strike, the U.S. authorities declared martial law and carried out a wave of arrests. Fearing that they were losing control, several officials moved their families out of Port-au-Prince and onto boats in the harbor. Most frightening to them was the fact that the uprising was not limited to the cities: for the first time since the crushing of the Caco revolt, there were mass protests in the countryside as well. In early December, when fifteen hundred rural residents marched on Les Cayes, the tension proved too great: as the protesters entered the town, a marine detachment fired machine guns into the crowd, killing a dozen people and wounding many more.3

  It was the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation. The massacre was an international embarrassment, making it clear that the Haitian people were increasingly united across class and regional lines in their opposition to the American presence. Less than five years later, the U.S. Marines formally withdrew. At a simple ceremony in Le Cap, the stars and stripes were taken down and the Haitian flag put back up. Shortly thereafter, the bones of Charlemagne Péralte were disinterred from his cement grave, his skull identified by his mother thanks to a gold tooth. Hastily buried as a bandit in 1919, he was now given a grand state funeral, officially acknowledged as a national hero.4

  The departure of the marines represented the culmination of two decades of struggle against the occupation. It was supposed to be a new dawn for Haiti; political leaders proclaimed that 1934 was their country’s “Second Independence.” But that name highlighted the danger as well as the promise of the situation. A hundred and thirty years after Dessalines’s 1804 proclamation, Haiti was again starting from scratch in its efforts to secure a place for itself in the world. An entire generation—children when the marines arrived and adults by the time they left—had been deeply marked by the occupation. Quite a few of them had thrown themselves into the resistance movement, and they could take pride in having finally driven out the invaders. But they and their elders were also forced to think hard about how and why their country had—in clear violation of the key principles set forth by its founders—allowed itself to be taken over by foreigners. Many activists argued that kicking out the United States was only the first step to securing real independence: Haitians also had to transform themselves and their culture. They had to overcome the profound divisions that sapped their strength in the face of outside threats. They had to bridge the gap between the governing elite and the majority who remained on the margins of political life. They had to stop slavishly imitating others and embrace who they were and where they came from.

  Like the generation of 1804, though, the activists of the 1930s discovered that the legacy of foreign control was extremely difficult to escape. The U.S. occupation had profoundly changed the country, smashing the political and economic order that had emerged during the nineteenth century and deepening the poverty of the countryside. It had centralized and strengthened the government’s authority, giving the country’s leaders more power than they had ever had to control the masses and suppress dissent. Many Haitians dreamed in 1934 that their country would finally be able to move forward toward a radically different future. Instead, they found that the years of subjugation were haunting them still.

  * * *

  The antipathy that Haitian peasants felt toward the United States was rooted not only in the cruelty of the marines and the ignominy of losing national sovereignty, but also in severe economic suffering. In the early 1910s, when they were urging the State Department to invade Haiti, U.S. bankers and businessmen had argued that an occupation was crucial for making Haiti attractive to foreign investors. Half a decade later, as the country came more and more firmly under U.S. military control, those investors were duly coming in—and life in the Haitian countryside, never easy to begin with, was becoming more and more precarious.

  Among the first businesses to profit from the occupation was the Haitian-American Sugar Company, known as HASCO. Founded by Haitian and American entrepreneurs, HASCO aimed to revive large-scale sugar production in the Cul-de-Sac plain outside Port-au-Prince—an area that once had been full of sugar plantations but after independence had been taken over by small farmers who grew cane mostly for rum production in local distilleries. Before the occupation, HASCO had trouble acquiring enough land in the region, but after the American invasion, everything became easier for the company: with the support of the new regime, it simply evicted local peasants to make room. In December 1918, HASCO inaugurated its first Cul-de-Sac sugar mill. The event was touted as a sign of Haiti’s progress: President Dartiguenave, the marine brigade commander, and the archbishop of Port-au-Prince all attended, watching intently as the mill’s engineers showed off its modern machinery. “In less than half an hour,” a Haitian newspaper effused, the cane was transformed into sugar. Although it had taken a long time to get the mill up and running, the newspaper concluded, “all’s well that ends well.”5

  But things were not going so well for the farmers who lived near the sugar mill. Even those who had not lost their land directly to HASCO soon found it difficult to make ends meet: the sugar mill replaced the local distilleries and paid the farmers less for their cane. The displaced peasants had the option of working at the mill for wages, but those who accepted jobs there found the conditions and the pay deplorable. Within a few months of the mill’s opening, HASCO workers organized the first of many strikes, which brought production to a standstill. Their wages were less than they’d been promised, they complained, and they needed some form of insurance: there were frequent accidents at the mill, sometimes with fatal results. For the company, of course, low wages and low costs were precisely what was attractive about Haiti. They paid their workers no more than thirty cents a day (the equivalent of about $4 in modern currency), a wage one-fifth of that on U.S.-owned plantations in neighboring Cuba.6

  Other businesses soon followed HASCO’s lead. In 1922 the North Haytian Sugar Company acquired a hundred acres of land, and the Haytian Pineapple Company six hundred acres. A few years later, the Haitian American Development Corporation took over 14,000 acres, while the Haytian Agricultural Corporation was granted a 2,200-acr
e concession. These companies produced a range of products for export to the United States, such as sugar, fruit, and the sisal used to make twine and rope. Their presence was made possible by new laws put in place under the occupation: the 1918 constitution had for the first time allowed foreigners to acquire land in Haiti, while a series of government decrees enacted in the following years provided various legal mechanisms that could be used to take land from rural farmers. Many peasants who cultivated land under the métayage system, in which they gave half of what they produced to the landowners but retained significant autonomy regarding how and what they farmed, suddenly found that the fields they’d worked—sometimes for generations—had been sold or leased to American corporations. And even though foreign companies were able to gain control of only a small portion of land in Haiti—no more than 2 percent of the territory was in foreign hands by the 1920s—their impact was outsized. They often monopolized local resources, especially water, and brought about shifts in the local economy that left many peasants increasingly impoverished. To make matters worse, farmers soon discovered that U.S. occupation authorities were substantially more assiduous about collecting taxes than local Haitian authorities had been. During the nineteenth century, rural residents had developed intricate mechanisms for avoiding the state’s demands, but now they could no longer do so. Even as their communities were being invaded by U.S. companies, rural Haitians found themselves handing over a sizable portion of their shrinking incomes to subsidize their country’s occupation.7

  The occupation’s proponents in the United States and Haiti celebrated the arrival of foreign corporations, insisting that they would help develop the country’s economy and thus alleviate poverty. And the new plantations did bring jobs to many regions. But such employment was very poorly paid, ultimately no compensation for the loss of family land and the independence that land ownership had provided. Meanwhile, the promised expansion in the national economy never materialized. The production of coffee, long Haiti’s most dependable and profitable export, remained flat throughout the twenty-year occupation. And while HASCO remained in Haiti, most of the other new ventures failed. In many parts of the country, rural communities took on the arriving corporations in a war of attrition and succeeded in driving them away—by refusing dangerous, low-paying work, insistently demanding better conditions, and resisting expropriation of land. It is, in fact, a remarkable testament to the strength of Haiti’s counter-plantation system that while American companies successfully built plantations elsewhere in the Caribbean during this period, particularly in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, they were largely unable to do so in Haiti—even though the U.S. directly governed the country for two decades.8

  The efforts to alleviate rural poverty might have met with more success, perhaps, if the alternatives to large-scale plantation agriculture long embraced by the Haitian population been taken seriously as a foundation for agricultural development rather than simply an obstacle to it. In August 1918, the prominent Haitian intellectual Dantès Bellegarde, then serving as minister of public instruction and agriculture, proposed a sweeping set of reforms aimed at addressing the urgent problems facing rural areas. Among his ideas was creating local councils to share knowledge about more proactive ways of working the fields, and offering microcredit loans to help farmers improve their technology and agricultural techniques. He later testified bitterly, however, that the U.S. authorities were not interested in such “serious projects for agricultural organization and the education of the popular masses” and had ignored his proposals. Most U.S. officials—and many Haitian leaders, too—believed that the system of small farms had to be swept away and replaced with large plantations in order for the country to prosper.9

  Although Haiti’s farmers largely managed to stop the spread of HASCO-style foreign businesses, the U.S. occupation still contributed to the immiseration of the Haitian countryside. Life had never been easy in rural Haiti, but for generations many communities had done well for themselves by growing their own food and cultivating coffee for export. The political and military transformation brought about by the occupation broke the precarious balance that these communities had relied on. The system of regional ports was dismantled and Port-au-Prince became the dominant hub for trade, concentrating economic power in the hands of a smaller group of merchants. The crushing of the Cacos by the marines in 1918 and 1919 ended the possibility of open resistance to the invaders, while the central government—long kept at bay thanks to the power of local leaders—was greatly strengthened by the U.S. forces. The new state was no more invested in helping rural communities than the old state had been, but now it had a much greater capacity to control the country’s population.

  The damage done to the rural Haitian communities was magnified by a sustained attack on their ancestral religious practice, as the occupation forces launched a devastating campaign of persecution against Vodou. It was not the first time such attacks had taken place, of course. In the 1860s, the widely publicized trial at Bizoton had demonstrated Fabre Geffrard’s desire to rid Haiti of the religion, and in 1896 the Catholic Church—with the support of the government and many intellectuals—had tried to eliminate Vodou so that Haitians could “prove to the world that we are a civilized people.” But such campaigns, though traumatic for their victims, had had little broader impact. An 1899 government report concluded that Vodou ceremonies were on the rise, and a French merchant who lived in Haiti between 1904 and 1906 described flourishing temples patronized by local politicians.10

  Indeed, in the long run, perhaps the most harmful effect of the nineteenth-century anti-Vodou efforts was to develop what Haitian anthropologist Laënnec Hurbon describes as an “ideological wardrobe” awaiting the occupation authorities. When they arrived in the country, U.S. officials noted that Haiti’s penal code included two articles outlawing the use of poison and the casting of spells. Like the Boyer-era laws allowing for the use of corvée labor, by 1915 these were legal relics, rarely enforced. What’s more, they specifically criminalized only certain practices—the use of spiritual power for negative ends—that most practitioners of Vodou also condemned. But such distinctions were largely ignored by the U.S. authorities, who tended to see the entire complex of popular religious activity in Haiti as a kind of black magic. The old laws about poisons and spell casting were among the only ones—out of the 413 articles that made up Haiti’s penal code—to be translated and distributed to U.S. troops governing the rural districts, and the new rulers used them as the legal foundation for a wide-ranging attack on Haitian Vodou in general. Suddenly, for the majority of the population in the country, participation in the many ceremonies that made up their religion’s ritual calendar was now a crime.11

  U.S. authorities began to focus especially intently on Vodou during the Caco wars, seeing it as a key component of the insurrection. Marine reports claimed that leaders like Péralte used religion to frighten otherwise docile and contented Haitian peasants into fighting. “Probably all of the caco chiefs are Vaudoux priests and thus hold together bands which, freed from religious scruples, would abandon their purpose of brigandry,” wrote one U.S. visitor. The “elimination” of Vodou was therefore “imperative.” In the 1920s, with the Caco war coming to an end and the use of corvée labor falling out of favor, the criminalization of the religion took on a new purpose: it was a convenient way for occupation forces to secure workers. Marine Faustin Wirkus explained that when he needed to build a new police headquarters, he followed the suggestion of a Haitian judge and raided a Vodou ceremony. All those present were arrested and sentenced to up to six months of hard labor on the construction site. Such raids were widespread: Marine General Littleton Waller told the U.S. Senate in 1921 that Vodou “is against the Haitian law … but they never enforced the law. We did, and we broke up all their meetings, seized their drums, etc., and wherever a voodoo drum was heard we immediately got on the trail and captured it, and broke it up, as far as we could.” A Baptist missionary from the United States s
imilarly testified about the “joy of burning tomtoms and the whole paraphernalia” of the religion, and carrying away “donkey loads of demon-worshipped implements.” When a prominent oungan was put on trial in Haiti in 1920, the U.S. prosecutor told the marine commission charged with reviewing his case: “Gentlemen, today you have it in your power to aid in ridding humanity of one of its most dangerous and degrading elements. You have it in your power to aid in delivering the Republic of Haiti from a curse which has been on it from the time of its foundation.”12

  For Vodou adherents, service to the lwa and to family ancestors involves ongoing ritual responsibilities, and to shirk them is considered both shameful and dangerous. The U.S. occupation thus placed many Haitians before a cruel choice: they could either turn their backs on the lwa or risk harassment, prison, and hard labor. Religion had long represented a refuge in Haitian culture, a source of strength for the oppressed; but under the occupation even this realm of life became difficult to defend.

  Faced with such assaults, many in the rural communities concluded that there was no choice but to leave their ancestral lands behind. For the first time in its history, Haiti—long a magnet for immigrants from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and the Middle East—became a country of large-scale emigration. The statistics are startling. In 1912, only about two hundred Haitians had migrated to Cuba; but in 1916—the year after the occupation began—five thousand of them did so, and the numbers increased steadily after that. By 1920, there were already 70,000 Haitians in Cuba, and in that year another 30,000 emigrated there. And throughout the 1920s, about ten thousand Haitians a year left for the Dominican Republic. Yet while they went in search of freedom, the migrants who left the countryside often ended up in precisely the kind of place they and their ancestors had been seeking to escape: the plantation. In Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other neighboring Caribbean countries, the only places hiring rural refugees were large agricultural enterprises looking for field labor. And there was no escape from U.S. control, either: most of these companies were owned by American corporations.13