Stenio Vincent counts how much of Haiti belongs to foreigners

In 1908 Stenio Vincent complained that a large part of Haiti's cultural and economic life had passed under foreign control. He meant the merchants. Syrian and Lebanese traders held much of the retail business in the towns, German houses dominated the import trade and had married into Haitian families to get around the constitutional ban on foreign land ownership, and American capital was moving into banking and railways. Haiti had written that ban into its founding documents precisely to prevent this, on the reasoning that a country which lets foreigners own it will be governed by them soon enough. The reasoning was sound and the ban did not hold, because a state with no capital of its own and a treasury full of printed paper cannot supply what commerce needs. Vincent was in his thirties when he wrote it. He became president in 1930, held the office through the last years of the American occupation, and negotiated the marines out of the country.

Between 1913 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Haitians crossed to Cuba to cut sugar cane. The wars fought in Cuba from 1895 onward had held the island's own supply of labour low, so when the sugar industry began expanding the planters imported workers, most of them from Haiti. Haiti had people and was running short of ground. Arable land per head was falling by the end of the nineteenth century, and Haitians moved readily when offered higher wages. Living conditions in the Cuban cane districts were hard, and the movement continued anyway. The depression stopped it. Prices for primary products fell, and Cuban population growth had by then rebuilt the domestic labour force to a level at which the Haitians were judged unnecessary. Repatriation began soon after. Those who stayed grew old in Cuba, and by the early 1980s the survivors were elderly men who had arrived as young cutters.

Early in 1908 Antenor Firmin landed secretly at Gonaives with fifty six followers brought from Kingston and St Thomas, among them Jean Jumeau, meaning to raise a revolution against President Nord Alexis. They had the example of Boyer Bazelais and the Liberal exiles, who had shaken Salomon's government from the same coast in 1883. The plan collapsed within days for want of weapons, ammunition and local support. Jumeau was captured and shot. Firmin went to ground with a Cuban who had made his home in Haiti during the 1890s and who backed the movement, and afterwards took refuge in the French consulate at Gonaives. Alcius Charmant, one of the party, went back to Kingston and published a letter accusing Firmin of sending men to die undefended on the strength of promised arms that were never there. Alexis answered the landing with summary executions of suspected sympathisers, and the New York papers ran headlines about a massacre feared in Haiti.

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.