Haitian revenue buys a thousand miles of all weather road

By 1929 the public works department of the occupation, run by a handful of United States Navy civil engineers and paid for out of Haitian revenue alone, had built and was maintaining more than a thousand miles of all weather road, 210 major bridges, and airfields at Port-au-Prince, Gonaives, Les Cayes, Jacmel, Cap Haitien, Port-de-Paix, Hinche, Jeremie and Saint Marc. In 1920 the whole coast had four kerosene lighthouses. Nine years later it had fifteen automatic acetylene lights, fifty four buoys, ten harbour lights, and concrete docks in place of rotten timber wharves at five ports. The capital got the first automatic telephone exchange in any city in Latin America, then 1,250 miles of long lines joining twenty six exchanges. Haiti's first radio station opened in 1926. Ten towns had running water, sixty four villages had clean wells, and eighty two miles of irrigation canal were cut in the Artibonite. The British minister Edwards surveyed all of it in 1929 and reported that America had done little for Haiti beyond keeping the peace.

Beginning on 19 November 1929 Hoover summoned the heads of the banks, railroads, manufacturing industries and utilities to the White House, and for nearly two weeks they came out of daily meetings repeating that the economy was sound. On 5 December he reported the results to four hundred business leaders. The Federal Reserve had eased credit through open market purchases and a lower discount rate and was refusing to discount for banks making stock market call loans. The industrialists had agreed to hold wage rates where they were, on his argument that the first shock should fall on profits. Railway and utility executives had agreed to expand building and maintenance, and he had wired governors and mayors to speed up road and public building work. No president had previously believed that the federal government carried a responsibility in a slump. Hoover believed it and said so.

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel appeared in the crown of a royal palm at Ville Bonheur, and the miracles that followed made the place a national pilgrimage. It grew after the Dominican Republic closed its frontier to the Haitians who used to cross every year to the grotto of Higuey. Because the waterfall of Saut d'Eau stood nearby, the spirits of vodou claimed the site as well. Candles and food offerings were laid at the foot of the palms beside the candles of Christian penitence, and possession trances ran through the crowd alongside the liturgical singing. The church first doubted the apparitions, then denied them, then acted. One priest set fire to the trunks of several palms and was cursed by the crowd; he is said to have lost his reason soon after. His successor called in the secular arm and had every palm cut down, and was later struck with stiffness in both legs. The pilgrims read both events as vengeance.