The last marines leave, and the machinery they built stays behind

The killings at Aux Cayes forced Hoover to act. He appointed a commission under Forbes to review the situation and another under Moton of Tuskegee to review education, and the Forbes commissioners reported intense feeling almost everywhere against the American presence and warned that grave disorder would follow unless Haitians got a legislature that could elect a president. Within months there was a new president, Stenio Vincent, elected in November 1930 after a brief provisional government under Eugene Roy. The commission recommended withdrawal, and four years of negotiation followed until the last marines left on 15 August 1934. Direct American supervision of the economy continued through 1942. Renda's closing judgement is that by crushing peasant rebellion and building the machinery of centralised control in Port-au-Prince, the occupation removed the safeguards against entrenched despotism and helped lay the ground for the Duvaliers. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda holds the occupation responsible for creating the centralised apparatus that made the Duvalier dictatorships possible.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

The United States formally ended its military occupation of Haiti and withdrew its forces on 14 August 1934, nineteen years after the marines landed. The soldiers left. The financial administration did not. Washington kept control of Haitian customs collection and debt service for years afterwards through a fiscal representative, which meant the instrument that had brought the marines in the first place remained in American hands once they were gone. Sténio Vincent, who had spent his career campaigning against the occupation and had been chosen president by the first working legislature since 1918, proclaimed himself the second liberator of Haiti. The title invited a comparison with Jean Jacques Dessalines and did not survive one. Vincent governed for another seven years, arranged the extension of his own term, and grew steadily more attached to rule by decree. Haiti got its army, its flag and its ceremonies back in 1934, and the ledger stayed in a foreign office.

In March 1932 the Paris journal La Revue du Monde Noir carried an article by Georges Hardy on what Black artists across the world had contributed. The journal was short lived and it mattered out of all proportion to its run. It appeared in French and English, which let Haitian writers, African American writers and Africans living in Paris read one another without a translator standing in between. That readership is what an article of this kind served. It presented a body of Black artistic achievement as a single subject rather than as a set of local curiosities, and it fed a sense of racial pride among an international group of intellectuals who had until then been working inside separate national conversations. For Haitians, whose country was under American military occupation, the journal supplied evidence that their own indigenist argument belonged to something larger. Ideas that later hardened into political movements were circulating first as literary criticism.