The Cacos come back and this time they aim at the railroad

Antoine Simon's army had gone through the North in February, burning villages and stripping gardens. It withdrew, and on 8 May 1911 revolt broke out again in every district the troops had crossed. The insurgents were Cacos, peasant fighters of the northern mountains who hired themselves to whichever general could pay. This time they chose their targets. They burned the sawmill and the construction camps of the National Railroad, fired into the houses of railway employees, and shouted against James P. McDonald, the American who held the concession. The company had handed its dynamite, powder and blasting caps to government troops, which placed it on one side of the fight. Foreign observers filed the Cacos under banditry. Bandits do not single out the physical plant of a foreign concession from everything else available to burn. The men who lit those camps knew who was laying track across their land and on whose account.

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.

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.