The British minister judged Guantánamo of little use to the Americans

On 20 January 1914 Stephen Leech, the British minister at Port-au-Prince, reported that the naval station at Guantánamo Bay was of little service to the United States. His point was about what would follow. If the Cuban base was inadequate, the American navy would keep hunting for a better anchorage in the region, and the harbour it had wanted since the 1880s was the Môle Saint-Nicolas at the northwest tip of Haiti, commanding the Windward Passage. Frederick Douglass had been sent to ask for it in 1891 and was refused. Every Haitian government afterwards was asked in its turn, and by 1914 the American demand had shifted from a lease to a guarantee that no other power would ever be given it. Leech was writing for a Foreign Office that wanted to know how far the Americans meant to go in the Caribbean. His answer amounted to further than they had gone so far.

On 28 November 1917 Trinidad and Tobago enacted the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance. It made it an offence to hold, join or attend a meeting of the Shouters anywhere in the colony, indoors or in the open, at any hour, and an offence to put up a building where they met. Owners and managers of land had to report any such house or gathering to the nearest constabulary station or be charged themselves. Police could enter premises without a warrant on suspicion and take the names of everyone present. The penalty ran to fifty pounds. A magistrate decided who counted as a Shouter and his ruling was final, wording chosen because a banned group might rename itself. Introducing the bill on 16 November, the Attorney General complained of noise and indecency and said the text came from a St Vincent law. The police manual listed white headcloths, candles, bells and chalk marks on the floor as evidence. Prosecutions were brought in the court at Toco.

The United States Marine Corps landed in Haiti in 1915 and stayed nineteen years. President Wilson appears to have feared growing German influence, with Mole Saint Nicolas sitting opposite Guantanamo. American investment in the country was small at the time. Just before the landing, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a crowd and his torn limbs carried through the streets of the capital. It took four years to pacify the country, which required putting down the rising led by Charlemagne Peralte. The Americans then did in Haiti what they had done in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and created a modern constabulary combining army and police under Marine supervision, the Gendarmerie d'Haiti. It became the Forces Armees d'Haiti and from the late 1930s decided how long any sitting president would remain. Elections and plebiscites held up to 1929 were all controlled by the Marines.

At Versailles in 1919 the victorious Allies divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Britain and France split Togo and Cameroon. Britain took Tanganyika. Belgium took Rwanda and Burundi. South Africa was given German South West Africa to administer. The rhetoric of the 1880s was no longer usable, so the treaty said these territories would be administered on behalf of the new League of Nations, held in trust, with the administering power preparing them for eventual self-government and protecting the interests of the people who lived there. The Mandate system had no means of enforcing anything, since the two most powerful members of the League were the two largest colonial empires, but the secretariat did send inspection teams and ask for reports. The principle it established was guardianship: that some peoples were less developed and required managing until they reached political maturity. That idea outlived the League by a century. Its vocabulary is still audible in the language of development and capacity building used about countries under foreign supervision, Haiti among them in the same decade.