Haiti marks 130 years of independence under a foreign flag

The book opens on the contradiction. New Year's Day carries great weight in a country born from a slave revolt, yet on this one the American flag flew over the central square in the capital, a visual reminder that the first sovereign nation in the Caribbean was still occupied. Vincent called the coming year the year of Haiti's second independence in his state of the nation address. The argument the book builds on this scene is that the end of the struggle for desoccupation was the beginning of a longer ideological and political conflict, one that ran through the revolution of 1946 and ended in 1957 with the Duvalier dictatorship. The same day is recorded in a photograph of Vincent, foreign minister Elie Lescot and the Garde d'Haiti high command celebrating together.

Speaking in Nelson on the subject of the Negro, James condemned the British Empire for the racism it fostered not only in the colonies but in the metropolis itself, stressed the achievements of African civilisation, and was reported as saying that there would one day be a tremendous revolt in Africa. Hogsbjerg places the lecture at the point where two commitments converge. James had returned to Britain earlier that year having concluded that European civilisation was doomed, had made an independent study of Marxism and decided to become an organised revolutionary, and his new militant Pan-Africanism developed alongside that. The editor treats the combination as the political engine of the play, which he says is panoramic in its treatment of the revolution and spreads eleven scenes across three acts. Hogsbjerg adds that the same year saw the first play written and directed by a Jamaican woman staged in London, changing what a British theatre audience might expect.

In 1934 a young Haitian doctor writing under the name Abderrahman published a page of complaint and defiance. He described what it was to come from the class of youth the elite dismissed as misbegotten, rejected with mistrust and contempt for having emerged out of the lower depths of the real Haiti, pushed back among the homeless and the hungry, worn down daily by poverty and by the arrogance of people newly arrived at money. The writer was François Duvalier. Heinl treats the passage as the key to everything that came after, and it is hard to argue with him. Twenty three years separate it from Duvalier's presidency. The doctrine that grew out of it holds that the light skinned elite had forfeited the right to govern by existing, its offence being its presence ahead of any particular act of misrule. Private humiliation had been converted into political theology. A reader in 1934 would have called it the cry of an angry young man.

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.