L'Artibonite calls Petion weak and gives Christophe the credit

On 15 May 1909 the paper L'Artibonite attacked the record of Alexandre Petion, calling him weak and incapable, and set his rival Henry Christophe above him for administrative strength. The two men had split the country in 1807. Petion ran a republic in the south and west and broke up the great estates, handing land first to his soldiers and then to ordinary cultivators, which made a nation of small farmers and left the treasury thin. Christophe ran a kingdom in the north, kept the plantations whole, drove the population to work them under military discipline, built the Citadelle and the palace at Sans-Souci, and left a full treasury and a hated system. Christophe shot himself in 1820 and the country reunified on Petion's model. Haitians have argued about that choice ever since, and they argue about it hardest when the state is broke. In 1909 it was broke, foreign banks were circling the customs houses, and a provincial newspaper reached back for the king who had made the ports pay.

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.

Nineteenth century Haitian governments borrowed abroad in 1825, 1874, 1875 and 1896. The first of those was an indemnity France forced on the country. The rest were floated for purposes that had in common a private benefit to the ruling clique and a heavy cost to the state, since none could be placed except at a steep discount, and they were accompanied by domestic loans on similar terms. The practice continued into the new century. In 1910 a further foreign loan, the last before the American occupation, was floated at a discount of thirty eight percent. Between 1912 and 1914 six domestic loans finished off whatever creditworthiness remained. That record shaped the economic policy of the occupation administration, which put the interests of the American bondholders who held the consolidated debt ahead of everything else. The external debt was halved between 1924 and 1930 and paid off entirely in 1947.

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.