Haiti rewrites its constitution for every man who takes the palace

On 3 February 1910 J.B. Dorsainvil published an article in L'Impartial on the development of the Haitian constitution, arguing that the habit of rewriting the fundamental law showed a failure to build institutions that could outlast a president. The record supported him. Since 1801 Haiti had produced constitution after constitution, each drafted to fit the man who had just taken the palace and discarded by the man who took it from him. Some created empires, one created a kingdom, several created presidencies for life, and the republican ones were suspended whenever they became inconvenient. Dorsainvil was writing under Antoine Simon, a general who could not read, in the year his government mortgaged the railway and the customs houses to foreign banks. A constitution works when losing is survivable. In Haiti losing meant exile, prison or the cemetery, so every group that reached power wrote the rules again to keep it, and the document changed while the practice stayed where it was.

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.

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.

Long before he took office, Stenio Vincent served as a Haitian delegate to the international exposition at Brussels and published a survey of the republic with a Belgian publisher, covering its history, resources, climate, agriculture, customs, ethnography, religion and current politics. St. Hubert treats the book and the posting as the origin of a strategy. Born at Gonaives in 1874, with a law degree in 1892 and a post at the Haitian legation in Paris under Hyppolite by 1896, Vincent came to see international expositions as instruments of national argument, taking the example of Brazil as a model. Elected two decades later, he would send more delegations to world's fairs than any Haitian head of state since Salomon, participating in three during the nineteen thirties. St. Hubert reads that early posting as the seed of a lifelong strategy.