The League invents the publicly visible Haitian woman intellectual

The editors of La Voix des Femmes were familiar names to the elite and the professional class of Port-au-Prince and the other urban centres. Outside those circles, in the League's first years, almost nobody knew who they were. The paper solved that. They used it as an instrument of publicity, printing their research, their speeches and their portraits until the organisation had a public face that could be recognised in places its members had never visited. Building a reputation this way was ordinary practice for Haitian politicians and entirely unavailable to Haitian women, because public standing had always belonged to men who held office, commanded troops or ran newspapers of their own. The League took the last route. Doing so meant establishing a category before it could be occupied: a Haitian woman whose opinions on the nation were worth printing, whose photograph belonged on a front page, and whose name a stranger in a town she had never entered might know.

The Carnival dances known in northern Haiti as ra-ra had come up from the west and the south only recently, and by 1937 they were being danced through Lent and above all on Good Friday. On that day in 1937 several bands arrived at a house in the commune of Plaisance and performed in the yard. One group had a man in a mask with horns who danced as a bull. Another was led by a cane thrower who went through his routine with the stick. Several boys stood on their heads and danced with their bodies in the air. These bands move along the road, which sets them apart from the dances held in a yard at a bal, and they were marked off from the quadrille, the polka, the waltz and the meringue that the same peasants danced at those bals. The meringue remained the favourite of the borrowed dances. Some older country dances, such as the mazinga, had already gone out of use.

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.