A road up the mountain turns Kenscoff into a summer resort

Kenscoff is a commune of about a hundred square miles in the mountains south west of Port-au-Prince, with roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the 1950s. Its main settlement is the bourg, called the buk in peasant speech, a word traced to mbuka, meaning village in the Kikongo of the Lower Congo, where a large part of the ancestors of the settlers came from. A motor road from Port-au-Prince opened in 1932, putting the bourg forty five minutes from the capital by car. In 1934 it was made the administrative centre of a commune. Because the summer temperature there sits between fifty two and seventy nine degrees, families from the capital began taking houses. Visitors saw crowded hotels, cars, villas and gardens and called it a small town. The peasant owners had sold only the strips along the road. From the first rains in the middle of September the holidaymakers left, and for the next nine months they were gone.

In 1932 Louis Diaquoi announced the formation of a group he called the Griots, after the West African keepers of oral history. Its purpose was to rehabilitate African values in Haitian national life and to work out what the group called the country's collective personality. Its most quoted instruction to Haitians was to stop trying to be ridiculous little whites and to accept the inheritance they actually had. Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier were among its members. The setting matters. The American occupation was in its seventeenth year and had governed Haiti on the premise that its people required supervision, and the Haitian elite had spent a century presenting itself to Europe as French in everything except address. The Griots answered both at once. Diaquoi made the argument as a cultural one. Within a generation Duvalier had converted it into a claim about who was entitled to hold power in Haiti, and he held that power for fourteen years.

Heinl asks what the Americans left when they went, and answers that the visible changes were real and the political ones were absent. Haiti in 1915 had been cut off from the world for a century. Haiti in 1934 had roads, hospitals, a functioning treasury and a modern army. Underneath that, the occupation had built no way for Haitians to govern themselves except the old ways. High Commissioner John Russell wrote to Forbes in 1930 that material rehabilitation had advanced enormously and that the Haitian people were little better fitted for self government than they had been in 1915. In March 1934 the British minister wrote that Vincent, inaugurated for his love of liberty, had become an admirer of dictatorship and thought Haiti unsuited to parliamentary government. Élie Lescot, then Haitian minister in Ciudad Trujillo, ordered five gross of military buttons in July 1934 while planning to fly in and seize the presidency with Trujillo's backing. Doctors in the newly Haitian health service were already selling government medicine privately.

Comparison with 1804 was unavoidable and it did not hold. The Haiti of 1804 was ruined and shunned. The Haiti of 1934 was solvent, built up and treated politely by its neighbours, and it had defeated nobody, since the occupiers went home undefeated. Power this time sat with the light skinned elite. Several questions were left standing. The national bank was owned in New York, which no nationalist could tolerate indefinitely. The Garde had a Black commandant, mostly light skinned officers and overwhelmingly Black rank and file, plus a new presidential guard whose commander told Calixte that requests to the president should come through him first. The departing occupation took away a payroll of seven hundred thousand dollars, a tenth of the national budget, and the country's only brewery shut down and spent the next forty years making ice. In November Rafael Trujillo arrived on a state visit with officers carrying submachine guns and offered Vincent the use of his navy.