A girl in Jeremie called the Marines boiled lobsters

Ghislaine Charlier was eight years old when she first took notice of the men she and her sister called boiled lobsters. They had come ashore at Jérémie in 1915, pink and raw, and the Caribbean sun had baked them a burnt red by the time she registered them. The girls laughed at them in the street. Eighty two years later she still laughed telling it. The lobsters were American Marines, officials, businessmen and their families. Her aunt Claira ran a small import and export business on the port at Jérémie, where Haitians were barred from the docks after five in the afternoon. Claira never married. She kept company with men and refused all of them access to her money, because losing the money meant losing her freedom and her niece's too, since Claira's income supplemented her brother's. It was from ports like that one that Woodrow Wilson ordered officers off ships already lying at Port-au-Prince to take the capital on 28 July 1915. Washington called it the Caribbean front of a European war.

United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915, hours after a crowd had killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The last of them left in 1934. Washington gave two reasons, the collapse of order in the capital and the strategic value of the Windward Passage in the second year of the European war. Nobody met the landing party at the waterfront with a rifle. Parts of the capital received the marines with relief. Syrian traders whose shops had been looted in every recent revolution wanted troops in the streets. Members of the mulatto elite, who had just buried relatives killed in the prison yard, feared what Bobo and his Caco army would do if he reached the palace, and preferred American marines to him. That preference was stated in private and almost never in public, because saying it aloud was dangerous. Nineteen years of foreign administration began on an afternoon when the Haitians best placed to object had their own reasons for silence.

Hurbon dates the first modern wave of Haitian rural exodus to the years spanning the American occupation, which he gives as 1915 to 1934. Thousands of peasants expropriated by the occupier and subjected to the corvée left to cut cane on American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The mechanism matters to his larger argument: the migration was produced by a political act, land seizure backed by forced labour, and not by a simple shortage of work. He uses this to attack the purely economic reading of Haitian emigration that dominated the literature, including Mats Lundahl's conclusion that mass migration is above all a result of poverty. If the first wave was political, Hurbon argues, then the far larger wave of his own day, driven by Duvalierist terror reaching deep into the countryside, must also be read politically. Where this account departs from the standard one: Hurbon rejects the economic explanation of Haitian migration advanced by Mats Lundahl and by common sense, insisting that political terror is the primary cause even for illiterate peasants and workers whom observers refuse to credit with political motives.

Davilmar Theodore, short of money and short of allies, could not refuse Vilbrun Guillaume the post of military delegate for the north and northwest. Cap Haitien was full of unpaid Cacos drifting back from the capital and attaching themselves to the Zamorist faction, now led by Bussy Zamor and by Charlemagne Peralte, Charles Zamor's brother in law. On 15 January 1915 Guillaume called the leading citizens of the Cap together, announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, and told them a Caco army was approaching and the government had given him nothing to stop it with. The morning paper reported that the Capois had unanimously entrusted their fate to him. The Caco general Metellus appeared the same day at Barriere-Bouteille with a thousand men and several cannon. He paraded them in front of the cathedral, went inside, marched around the town and looted nothing. On the nineteenth his guns fired a seventeen gun salute, and Guillaume declared himself head of the executive power.