Haiti

  When Roumain was sentenced to three years in prison, there was an international outcry, and the African American writer Langston Hughes—who had met and befriended Roumain during a visit to Haiti in 1931—created an organization to lobby for his release. After a year in jail, during which he contracted malaria, Roumain was allowed to go free but forced to leave the country. Other PCH organizers in Haiti also found that writing articles critical of the government could land them in prison just as easily after the “Second Independence” as back when the marines had been in charge. In 1936, President Vincent decreed that “any profession of communist faith, oral or written, public or private, will be punishable by an imprisonment of six months to one year and by a fine.” In the face of such restrictions, Vincent’s opponents found other ways to criticize him. Parodying a song that listed his accomplishments, for instance, they sang instead of his failures: “Who made my skin show through my worn out pants? It’s President Vincent!” But the political repression was largely effective at silencing the country’s leftist movements.59

  When it came to the question of Haitian democracy, Vincent in fact sounded very much like the U.S. administrators he had once fought against. Arguing for strong limits on political participation, he cited the conclusions of the 1930 Forbes Commission to claim that all “thoughtful and well-intentioned” Haitians knew that most of the population simply wasn’t educated enough to choose their leaders responsibly. “Enlightened public opinion,” Vincent wrote, represented only a “thin golden fringe” decorating the “primitive clothes of our society.” In time, education could expand the basis for popular participation, but until then, too much democracy would lead to instability. “In a country like ours, where the tropical sun exasperates the temperament,” he argued, politicians often lost sight of “hard reality” and got lost instead in “vain subtleties” of liberal ideas. In Vincent’s opinion, what Haiti needed—what its circumstances and culture required—was a strong president who would override the irrationality and emotionalism all too easily expressed in parliamentary institutions, keeping the nation on track through firm and strict governance.60

  Vincent made these arguments with a very specific purpose: like any number of presidents who had preceded him in Haiti, he was determined to stay in power as long as possible. In 1935, using a tried-and-true method, he rewrote the constitution to remove the rule that limited presidents to serving one term. Although this change faced stiff congressional opposition, Vincent outmaneuvered it by using the mechanism pioneered by the United States in 1918: a popular referendum, in which Haitians were asked simultaneously to approve the new constitution and to extend Vincent’s mandate for another five-year term. The historian Claude Moïse summarizes the electoral farce: “The people said yes. Massively. With more than 99 percent. As usual.” The new constitution represented a significant expansion of presidential power. It officially made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, diminishing the military’s independence, and also placed him directly in charge of all internal security. It gave him total control over the naming of all officials in the administration. And it included an alarming symbolic stipulation, declaring that the president “personified the Nation.” Indeed, concludes Moïse, the 1935 constitution put into place an “absolute presidential monarchy,” providing the president with an assortment of tools to invalidate parliamentary opposition. Vincent was determined to work around congressional resistance to his plans for U.S. investment, such as the Standard Fruit deal, and after his reelection, the new constitution made it much easier for him to push through projects that he saw as essential for Haitian development.61

  Vincent claimed that his projects would help to alleviate rural and urban poverty, and he even delivered some speeches in Kreyòl to bolster his image as a populist. But he shared with the U.S. occupation authorities a deeply negative view of the typical Haitian peasant. “The man is ignorant, superstitious, has no needs, dissolute morals, no taste for work,” Vincent complained. He was a burden on the land, for he “wastes the earth, sterilizes it, exhausting it with his stupid planting,” and a burden on Haiti, which staggered under the load of “thousands of examples” of such men. As Vincent saw it, there was no future for the counter-plantation system that the rural population had developed and cultivated for many decades. It needed to disappear, yielding to what he considered to be more advanced forms of agriculture and ways of life.62

  The most startling illustration of Vincent’s distance from his country’s population came in 1937, when his first response to a brutal massacre of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic appeared to be one of indifference. The border region between the two countries—Péralte’s home territory—had long nourished its own culture, one that was relatively independent from the central authorities and paid little heed to the boundary separating the nations. “Although there were two sides, the people were one, united,” a Haitian later recalled. Many Haitians had settled on the Dominican side of the border, acquiring and cultivating land. By the 1930s, some had been there for several generations, and they spoke both Spanish and Kreyòl.63

  The precise placement of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had long been contested, but in 1936, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo—whose mother was Haitian, though he tended to hide this fact—traveled to Haiti to sign a treaty formally settling the boundary dispute. Newspapers and politicians hailed the moment as a triumph of diplomacy, the beginning of a new era of collaboration between the two neighbors. In a gesture of friendship, Vincent renamed one of the main streets in Port-au-Prince “Avenue Trujillo.”64

  Then, in October 1937, Trujillo took a tour of the border region and made an ominous announcement. “For some months I have travelled and traversed the border in every sense of the word,” he declared. “I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population.” On his journey, Trujillo said, he had heard complaints from Dominicans of “depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits,” and he had responded to them, “I will fix this.” “We have already begun to remedy the situation,” he announced chillingly. “Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.”65

  Over the next days, Dominican troops and civilians rounded up and killed tens of thousands of Haitians along the border. Often the assassins were extremely close to the victims: one officer apparently went into his kitchen and shot the family cook, an elderly Haitian woman. Thousands of Haitians were decapitated with machetes in the town square at Santiago. Others were cut down as they tried to escape across the border, which had been closed by Dominican troops. Decades later, a survivor, still carrying visible scars on her shoulders and neck, recalled how her entire extended family—twenty-eight people—had set out as a group early one morning to march toward Haiti and escape. At the border, however, Dominican soldiers were not letting any Haitians pass. When some tried to make a run for it, a guard began murdering the prisoners. “He killed everyone. I was the only one who was saved. They thought I was dead because they had given me a lot of machete blows. I was soaked in blood—all the blood in my heart. They killed my entire family … I was the only one to survive.”66

  There was almost no media coverage of the massacre, and Trujillo denied any personal responsibility, presenting the events as a spontaneous reaction against Haitians by local Dominicans. The official response of the Haitian government, meanwhile, was startling in its timidity. President Vincent said nothing until cabinet members pressured him to criticize Trujillo and demand an explanation for the killings. Meanwhile, the United States, concerned about the implications for regional stability, stepped in and quietly helped broker a deal between Vincent and Trujillo. The Dominican dictator agreed to pay Haiti an indemnity of $750,000—a tepid apology for a genocide. (He eventually paid only two-thirds of that, the equivalent of less than $8 million in today’s currency.) Even after the indemnity agreement was signed, sporadic massacres of Haitians continued f
or years in the southern border region between the two countries, now directed at Haitian cane workers. The Haitian government, again, did nothing.67

  Jacques Roumain, now living in France, described the events as a “massive lynching” of Haitians, their bodies “thrown to the sharks.” He accused Trujillo of ordering the attacks and Vincent of being complicit in the massacre. Though seemingly safe in exile, Roumain was once again pursued for speaking out: he was arrested and put on trial in a French court by representatives of Trujillo’s government, who accused him of “outrage against a foreign head of state.” (He was not convicted.) In Haiti itself, almost no one wrote about the massacre at the time; Trujillo and Vincent had effectively established a code of silence around the entire incident. Though the massacre was one of largest genocides to take place in the Americas during the twentieth century, there has never been any official trial or investigation of what happened. To this day, it remains a disturbing specter in both countries, largely unacknowledged and unmemorialized.68

  * * *

  Vincent’s lack of respect for Haiti’s rural population and his penchant for repressive government combined to spell trouble for the religious culture of the countryside. After the U.S. forces withdrew in 1934, the laws used by the marines to justify the persecution of Vodou were revoked. The following year, however, President Vincent passed a new decree outlawing “superstitious practices,” defined as “the ceremonies, rites, dances, and meetings in the course of which are practiced, in offering to so-called divinities, sacrifices of cattle or fowl.” The 1935 law also targeted all practices that “exploited the public by making them think that it is possible, by occult means, either to change the luck or situation of a person, or prevent something bad from happening through procedures unknown to medical science.” Those who organized or attended such ceremonies could be imprisoned for up to six months. The legislation was a stark signal that the ethnographic movement of the 1920s, despite its profound impact on Haitian literature, music, and theater, had failed to transform the way the Haitian government itself related to the country’s population.69

  Vincent’s effort to eliminate this fundamental component of Haitian culture led to a particularly absurd situation a few years later, when Élie Lescot—now serving as the Haitian ambassador to Washington—was invited to bring a troupe of dancers and drummers to the city’s Constitution Hall. (In 1939, that institution had famously refused to let the African American opera star Marian Anderson sing there because of the color of her skin, and Eleanor Roosevelt had riposted by organizing a concert for her on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead; the 1941 performance by the Haitian group would, in fact, be the first breach of the color line at the hallowed hall.) U.S. organizers planning the visit had initially pushed for an “authentic” musical group from the countryside, headed by an oungan and ready to perform traditional Vodou songs. But Lescot warned the organizers that one could not be sure of “what would happen” with such a group. If the dancers “got under the power,” he said—that is, went into possession—“we might not be able to stop them.” Instead, he proposed bringing a nascent troupe made up of young dancers drawn from prominent Port-au-Prince families, who were studying traditional dances as part of a broader folkloric education.*71

  Lescot’s approach put the dancers into a peculiar position. As they prepared for their journey to Washington, their teacher took them to a Vodou ceremony so that they could observe firsthand the performance styles that they were learning. The experience, one of the dancers later recalled, was both thrilling and frightening for someone who had long been taught to stay away from Vodou. “What adventure! What anxiety!” It was also illegal, and when the police decided to enforce the law that night, the ceremony was broken up and the young dancers were carted off to jail. Their teacher managed to get them released, but the irony of the situation was undeniable. In the process of preparing for what the Haitian state had asked them to do—perform traditional dances in the United States—the dancers had ended up breaking the state’s own laws.72

  Shortly after the performance at Constitution Hall, Lescot succeeded Vincent as the president of Haiti. Despite his promotion of the folkloric dance troupe, though, he was no more inclined than his predecessor to support the actual practice of Vodou. Indeed, in 1941, when the Catholic Church began organizing a nationwide “anti-superstition” campaign aimed at pressuring Haitians to renounce Vodou, Lescot signed an order asking “civil and military authorities to give their most complete assistance” to the church in its struggle against “fetishism and superstition.” For several months, members of the Garde d’Haïti and local officials accompanied Catholic priests on their raids, collecting ritual implements to be burned in pyres. The campaign also left permanent scars on the Haitian landscape. In many communities, ancient trees were considered holy by those who practiced Vodou, understood to be a kind of home for some of the lwa; to eliminate such sites of worship, Catholic priests ordered these trees to be chopped down.73

  The 1941 anti-Vodou campaign was part of a trilateral religious conflict that had been simmering in Haiti for several decades. The occupation years had brought to Haiti an increasing number of Protestant missionaries, who were attracting many converts. As the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux noted, some Protestant denominations, such as Pentecostals, were particularly appealing to Haitians because they found there “an atmosphere that reminded them of that of Vaudou sanctuaries.” The Protestants often saw Catholicism and Vodou as twin enemies; one Baptist missionary declared that “the Roman Catholic Church in Haiti is a bastard production of Voodooism, witchcraft, and other African heathenish cults with a gloss of Roman Catholicism.” Catholics, for their part, returned the favor, portraying the Protestants as a spiritual menace and accusing them of doing “Satan’s work” in Haiti.74

  By the 1940s, many Haitian rural communities had become battlegrounds for tremendously complex spiritual warfare involving Catholic priests, Protestant missionaries, and oungans and manbos of the Vodou religion. Still, Vodou bore the brunt of the attacks. When Métraux arrived in Haiti for a vacation in 1941, he was shocked to see “an enormous pyramid of drums and ‘superstitious objects’” taken from Vodou temples, piled in the presbytery of a church and awaiting a “solemn auto-da-fé.” The scene reminded him of stories about Spanish priests engaging in the “suppression of idolatry” during the conquest of the Americas. The French priests in twentieth-century Haiti, Métraux later wrote, would have impressed their long-dead forebears with their zeal and intensity. When he pleaded that at least some of the items should be saved for scientific or aesthetic reasons, he was told that “the honour of Haiti was at stake and all must be destroyed.”75

  Even Jacques Roumain—who, as a committed Marxist, held that religion in general was an obstacle to human progress—insisted that the anti-Vodou methods used by the Catholic Church were inhumane and ultimately counterproductive. In the long run, he argued, the attacks only ended up confirming the spiritual power of the sites and objects that the church tried to destroy. “We must, naturally, rid the Haitian masses of the mystical shackles,” Roumain wrote; but he believed that Vodou would disappear quite naturally once the ignorance and poverty that sustained it were gone. In his opinion, Haitian peasants went to the Vodou priest for healing because there were no health clinics. “What we need in Haiti,” he said, “is not an anti-superstition campaign, but an anti-misery campaign.”76

  Roumain had returned to Haiti from his European exile after Lescot assumed the presidency. He had made little headway on the political front, and the “anti-superstition” campaign made it clear that, seven years after the departure of the United States, the social and religious divisions in Haiti were as deep as ever. Still, like other activists, Roumain had faith that cultural work could open the way for societal change. He began working on a novel called Masters of the Dew, which was meant to depict and confront Haiti’s problems. The title of the book came from an ironic and wistful moniker he had heard rura
l residents use for themselves: we are masters of the dew, they said, implying that they were masters of nothing else. Roumain’s novel, published in 1944, brought together much of the experience of Haiti’s rural population from the previous years, telling the story of a man named Manuel who, returning from years as a cane worker in Cuba, tries to save a village from drought. At once tragic and hopeful, the novel (which was translated into English by Langston Hughes a few years later) is considered perhaps the greatest work of twentieth-century Haitian literature.77

  Masters of the Dew was—and remains—so powerful because it dreamed of a different future for Haiti: one in which the migrants scattered to Cuba and the Dominican Republic could come home, the water that was so badly needed could flow once again, and Haiti’s rural population would occupy the center of the story rather than being perpetually condemned to its margins. In both his political and his aesthetic work, Roumain tried to make a connection between the elite world into which he had been born and what he knew was the core and foundation of his country: the farmers and families of the countryside. But it was an uphill struggle. A decade after the departure of the United States, the political order was as closed to the majority of the population as ever. The rural population had seen its situation largely grow worse and had suffered two major assaults—the massacres along the Dominican border in 1937, and the religious persecution of 1941. The possibility of change that many had seen at the dawn of the “Second Independence” now seemed increasingly distant, even impossible.