Haiti

  The country’s upper classes, Price-Mars argued, had spent two centuries turning away from what really made them who they were: their African heritage, their slave revolution, their rural culture, their religion. All the “authentically indigenous” features of Haitian society were treated with suspicion by the elites, for whom the term “African” had become a “humiliating affront.” “The most distinguished man” in Haiti, Price-Mars teased, “much prefers that one find him to bear some resemblance to an Eskimo” rather than “remind him of his Guinean or Sudanese ancestry.” Everything, Price-Mars complained, was upside down: instead of glorifying their ancestors, members of the light-skinned elite took pride in the fact that they were descended from “bastard” relationships between French masters and their slaves, from “the anonymous shame of chance encounters.” Poignantly summing up, he wrote that “as we gradually forced ourselves to believe that we were ‘colored’ Frenchmen, we forgot we were simply Haitians.”45

  Price-Mars’s eloquent argument and his riveting lectures at the prestigious Lycée Pétion shaped an entire generation of young intellectuals, who agreed that Haiti’s lack of cultural independence had paved the way for its loss of political independence. It was dangerous, as Price-Mars put it, for a society to sink into the “ruts of dull and slavish imitation” of other cultures, for that made it seem as if it had made no contribution to human progress—which was a pretext for “nations impatient for territorial expansion, ambitious for hegemony, to erase the society from the map of the world.” In failing to acknowledge its own religion and language, traditions and beliefs, Haiti had opened the door to foreign occupation. The lesson was clear: if it wanted to secure independence, Haiti needed to look to its own culture as the necessary foundation of true sovereignty.46

  * * *

  In February 1930, an official delegation arrived from the United States to investigate conditions in Haiti. Created by President Roosevelt in response to the 1929 student strike and the massacre of protesters at Les Cayes, the commission had a diverse membership: it was led by the banker William Cameron Forbes, a strong advocate of U.S. imperialism, but also included liberal critics of the occupation. Haitian activists knew that this was a crucial opportunity to demonstrate unequivocally that the country wanted to be free from U.S. rule. They filled the streets of Port-au-Prince with protesters holding Haitian flags, mobilized witnesses to testify about the abusive behavior of the marines, and gathered in churches to pray for an end to the occupation. The opposition parties presented the Forbes Commission with a detailed plan for disentangling the two countries, beginning with free elections and the reestablishment of constitutional rights, followed by the withdrawal of U.S. military forces. When they returned to Washington, the Forbes Commission praised many aspects of the occupation, but they also criticized the racism of some U.S. officials and the controversial overemphasis on vocational education. They agreed with the opposition that the only way forward was for the United States to hold a truly open presidential contest and to finally allow legislative elections, which had been deferred for the preceding twelve years. But to the disappointment of many in Haiti, the commission concluded by recommending a slow withdrawal over the course of several years. The country, they believed, was not yet ready for complete control of its own financial and military institutions.47

  A few months later, Haitians went to the polls for the first free elections since the beginning of the occupation. Though the balloting was organized by the American regime, U.S. officials were under strict orders to make no statements about the candidates, and the marines were kept in their barracks on election day. Energized by the years of opposition activism and by rules allowing for universal manhood suffrage, a record number of Haitians—some three hundred thousand—cast their votes, packing the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies with anti-U.S. activists. Joseph Jolibois, back from his years of traveling across Latin America on behalf of the cause, became the speaker of the Chamber. As the country’s president, Haitians elected Sténio Vincent—the former interior minister who had resigned from Dartiguenave’s government to protest its submission to U.S. bankers, and who was now a leading member of L’Union Patriotique.48

  Throughout the 1920s, the Haitian opposition had worked to create an alternative public sphere in the absence of parliamentary democracy. Now they had the parliament back, along with a president who had played a crucial part in the movement against the U.S. presence on the island. Nevertheless, many activists found that progress toward full independence was frustratingly slow. The United States spent four years on a gradual “Haitianization” of the country’s institutions, meanwhile maintaining strong control over all financial matters and ruling the countryside through their troops as they had done for the previous decade. The Americans also used these four years to negotiate agreements with the Haitian government that would allow them to maintain a significant level of control even after the formal withdrawal of the marines.

  Many antioccupation activists were dismayed to find President Vincent offering enthusiastic support to these agreements. Though he was still committed to ending direct foreign control, Vincent had also become convinced that it was in Haiti’s best interest for the United States to maintain a very strong role in the country. He even proposed that a small number of marines should remain in Haiti to provide training and security—a suggestion that infuriated many senators and deputies, who successfully pushed through plans for a full military withdrawal. He also wanted to continue direct U.S. involvement in budgetary and fiscal matters. This, too, angered many representatives, but Vincent outflanked the opposition by waiting until a legislative holiday, then signing a deal with the United States that gave Washington a “fiscal representative” within the Haitian government. The job title sounded innocent enough, but the representative was granted remarkably wide powers: controlling customs collection, inspecting the tax collection system, and approving any changes to tariffs and taxes. The U.S. fiscal representative could also set limits on Haitian government spending, and the officer would remain in place as long as Haiti was still paying off the 1922 loan it had contracted with the United States. Even after the marines departed in 1934, then, the Haitian government still contained a powerful U.S. official. The fiscal representative remained there until 1941, and the Banque Nationale d’Haïti would remain under U.S. supervision until 1947.49

  In 1932, Vincent and the Haitian Congress rewrote Haiti’s constitution to replace the one that had been foisted on the country in 1918. The new constitution, though, maintained the crucial change from that year: granting foreigners the right to own property in Haiti. Eager for investment from the north, Vincent also—despite strenuous opposition from some Haitian congressmen—negotiated an agreement with the powerful U.S.-based Standard Fruit Company that gave them a monopoly on the export of bananas from Haiti. The deal was meant to create an alternative to Haiti’s traditional coffee crop, developing a new and profitable export.50

  In time, the arrangement did succeed in improving the economy in the west of Haiti, with independent small farmers growing the bananas and selling them to Standard Fruit for shipment to the United States. Still, many young activists from the “generation of occupation” were furious at their government’s eagerness to concede so much to the Americans. Inspired by Marxist ideas, some of them pressed for a different model of development, one that would avoid foreign investment and control and focus on attacking the massive economic inequalities within Haitian society. Vincent and the United States saw such arguments as dangerous and seditious, however. In 1933, while the marines were still in the country, they worked with Vincent on a campaign targeting leftist leaders, the goal of which was officially described as the “suppression of Bolshevist activities.” That same year, in the wake of protests, Vincent declared a “state of siege” in the western part of Haiti, and his interior minister, Élie Lescot, ordered several opposition newspapers shut down. Joseph Jolibois, who had emerged as the most prominent critic of Vincent’s co
zy relationship with the United States, was arrested and imprisoned. He would remain behind bars for the rest of his life, dying in prison in 1936.51

  Even before the “Second Independence” was formalized in 1934 with the departure of the U.S. marines, Vincent and his supporters had thus mortgaged away much of what was possible. They argued their position on pragmatic grounds, insisting that there was really no choice but to work with the United States—now Haiti’s most important trading partner and clearly the most powerful player in the Caribbean region. In the process, however, they also locked themselves into a relationship with a country whose vision of Haiti would remain profoundly limited and deeply skewed.

  Unlike Haitians, citizens of the United States had the privilege of largely overlooking—and in time forgetting—the huge impact their country had had on their neighbor to the south. After the Senate investigations of 1920–21, there was never a broad and public exploration of the occupation. Indeed, there has never been any widespread reckoning of what the United States did in Haiti during those twenty years, and today few people are even aware that the occupation ever occurred. Instead, the most successful writings produced in the United States about the occupation were largely self-congratulatory about its impact, and they portrayed American soldiers and officials as being forced into brutal actions by the backward habits of the Haitian population. These works refined and disseminated a set of tropes about Haiti—stereotypes of naïve and fatalistic peasants, manipulative religious leaders, and a secret world of dark sorcery—that have remained startlingly powerful to this day. The combination of silence about the political and economic impact of the occupation on the one hand, and a great deal of noise about the supposed nature of Haiti and its culture on the other, was in itself a devastating consequence of the U.S. invasion of the country.

  The most influential work in the genre was William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island. Seabrook had traveled to Haiti eager to see Vodou ceremonies, but at least at first he had no luck: no one was willing to risk imprisonment to satisfy the curiosity of a foreign visitor. In his book, he claims to have eventually gained access to the secrets of the religion by apprenticing with a manbo, though it seems that he actually got much of his information from marine reports about their raids on temples. His vivid, exoticized depiction of Vodou helped make the book a commercial success and an influential work among many intellectuals, including participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Seabrook’s bestseller was followed in 1931 by The White King of La Gonave by the marine Faustin Wirkus, who had served a lengthy tour of duty in Haiti starting in 1916. Wirkus claimed that the local population of the small island of La Gonâve, where he was stationed, had made him their king. Seabrook effused that Wirkus had lived every man’s dream: “Every boy ever born, if he is any good, wants, among other things, to be king of a tropical island.” The story was, of course, more complicated than that: when Wirkus was the governing marine officer at La Gonâve, local Haitian groups had worked with him—they had no choice—and probably included him in some of their social rituals. This hardly meant that they saw him either as their king or their god. The American readers’ expectations, however, were already relatively settled, and the story of Haiti’s own long-standing forms of local political and social organization was not part of them. Nor was there much room in these books for soul-searching about the worthiness of occupation itself. When Marine Captain John Houston Craige drafted his memoir, he was at first quite critical of what he had experienced. Before publication, though, he decided that such a work “would knock me out of the Marine Corps because it was brutally frank about political matters,” and he rewrote it completely into “a local color book.” In his tellingly titled Black Bagdad and its sequel Cannibal Cousins, Craige’s time in Haiti comes across as a humorous romp through a strange and exotic society.52

  The wave of American occupation-era memoirs was also responsible for sending an unending stream of zombies traipsing through U.S. popular culture. The 1934 film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, even advertised itself as a kind of documentary, “based upon personal observations in Haiti by American writers and research workers.” The movie helped spawn an entire genre, which fixed Haiti in many minds as a place of dark ritual and wandering undead, animated by an unending soundtrack of threatening drumming.53

  By making zombies into generic horror-film monsters, such representations obscured the fact that in Haitian folklore, the zonbi is a powerful symbol with a specific, haunting point of reference. It is a person devoid of all agency, under the complete control of a master: that is, a slave. Sometimes the term is used as an insult—to this day, independent farmers in Haiti might call wage workers zonbi, insisting that to sell your labor is to sell your freedom. Tales about zonbi often reflect fears of an individual or collective loss of control. When the HASCO sugar mill opened in 1918, for instance, a rumor circulated that some of the workers there were zonbi. One of the middlemen hired by the company to bring in a gang of field laborers, the story went, had arrived with a group of particularly ragged, dazed, and silent workers whom he had zombified so that he could steal their wages. William Seabrook heard the story and featured it in his book, commenting that it was strange that HASCO—“a modern big business” that looked like “a chunk of Hoboken”—would be connected with “sorcery or superstition.” It wasn’t really strange at all, though: telling stories about zonbi workers at HASCO was probably a way for the local community to articulate the feelings evoked by the reappearance of the plantation in their midst. Indeed, it is the American zombie clichés that have functioned as a kind of intellectual sorcery. They took a religion developed in order to survive and resist slavery—one that had served as central pillar in the counter-plantation system at the core of the Haitian struggle to secure autonomy and dignity—and transformed it into nothing more than a sign of barbarism, further proof that the country would never progress unless it was guided and controlled by foreign whites.54

  * * *

  A decade before the occupation, Anténor Firmin had predicted that the United States would be the crucial force shaping Haiti’s destiny in the twentieth century. The only question, as he saw it, was whether his country would find a way to work productively with their neighbor to the north, or whether it would be swallowed up by the United States altogether. At the dawn of the Second Independence, Vincent and many other Haitian leaders, reviewing the harsh lessons of the previous decades, found themselves agreeing with Firmin’s analysis. Accordingly, they sought to maintain a relationship with the United States, though they pushed for one based on cooperation rather than domination. In so doing they seized on the increasingly popular doctrine of Pan-Americanism, which envisioned connections between different countries in the Western Hemisphere based on mutual interest and respect for sovereignty. In Washington, U.S. politicians and statesmen were also seeking to develop a new approach to the Caribbean and Latin America, one with fewer guns and battleships and more free trade and cultural exchange.55

  For many of Haiti’s leftist activists, however, the happy talk about Pan-Americanism was just a smoke screen for continued U.S. dominance. What they wanted instead was a profound reorientation of Haitian politics. A key figure in this movement was Jacques Roumain, who was born into a wealthy Port-au-Prince family, grew up studying in Switzerland, and had come back to Haiti in 1925 to fight the “hated Yankee.” During the 1920s Port-au-Prince cultural renaissance, he had published vigorous articles attacking the occupation and promoting the literary style that came to be known as indigénisme, which sought to fulfill Jean Price-Mars’s call for writing rooted in Haiti’s rural culture. Now, with the marines having finally withdrawn in 1934, he founded the Parti Communiste Haïtien, attacking “the excess of the Haitian bourgeoisie and the bourgeois politicians, valets of imperialism and cruel exploiters of the workers and peasants.”56

  The fundamental issue in Haiti, Roumain argued, was one of class: most of the country’s population was excluded from political partici
pation and prevented from improving their lot. For generations, Haitian politicians had managed to deflect real challenges to this social structure by focusing instead on issues of color, cultivating conflicts between “blacks” and “mulattoes” and encouraging their followers to believe that getting blacks into power was the answer. But, Roumain insisted, the real problem was that elites of all colors were maintaining the masses in subjection and poverty. The argument was summed up in the motto of the PCH: “Color is nothing, class is everything.”57

  Roumain’s movement faced tremendous challenges. Even the remarkably widespread antioccupation protests had largely replicated the country’s social divisions, with urban intellectuals and students rarely collaborating directly with rural farmers. But young activists, energized by the artistic and ethnographic celebrations of rural culture, believed that they could overcome the existing divisions, reaching out to the countryside in order to produce real social change in Haiti. They found, however, that they had little room and little time to maneuver. Vincent’s government, using the police network set up by the U.S. occupation, quickly and effectively worked to crush the nascent communist party. Roumain was soon arrested and accused of trying to get weapons for an armed uprising from a Haitian communist living in New York. As proof, the police produced letters in which Roumain requested “materials” from his correspondent—though in fact he was requesting pamphlets about the Scottsboro case.58