The occupation ends in 1934 and the finances stay American

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.

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.

The last United States marines sailed from Haiti on 14 August 1934, closing nineteen years of military occupation. The Americans had built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, piped clean water into Port-au-Prince and strung telegraph line between the main towns. They had also killed more than two thousand Haitians putting down the Caco rebellion, revived forced labour through the corvée, shut the Black majority out of political life, and left the mulatto elite holding the economy more securely than they had found it. The institution that mattered most was the national guard, trained and armed by the United States. Every strongman of the next half century reached for it first. No part of the political system had been reformed, and the poverty produced by the French indemnity and a century of bad government was untouched. Two organisations founded that same year, the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale and the Haitian Communist Party, are the better measure of what came out of 1934.

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.