Carl Brouard calls the marines' departure a victory for the black race

On 4 March 1935 the poet Carl Brouard published a piece he called Hommage in the journal L'Assaut, celebrating the return of national sovereignty. The marines had left the previous August. Brouard read their departure as a victory won by the black race, which is a particular way of describing an evacuation negotiated between two governments. The framing mattered more than the accuracy. A generation of writers who came of age under occupation was working out what the end of it meant, and the terms they settled on in 1935 hardened into political doctrine within a decade. L'Assaut belonged to the milieu around the Griots, young intellectuals who took the cultural nationalism of Price-Mars and gave it a racial theory. Brouard was one of them. The line running from a tribute in a small literary journal to the noiriste state built by François Duvalier is short, and it starts with pieces like this one, written in the first flush of a sovereignty nobody had yet had to govern with.

At a rally in Trafalgar Square James, as chairman of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, declared that the Ethiopian crisis had produced a union of sentiment among black people in Africa, America, the West Indies and everywhere else, and that its cause was theirs to defend by every means available. Hogsbjerg shows the Haitian material feeding directly into the campaign. James argued that Toussaint had beaten European armies through a ruthless guerrilla war fought from the mountains and that the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 had been won in a comparable way, by scorched earth and retreat into high ground before falling on a cut-off Italian column. He urged an Ethiopian audience to destroy their country rather than hand it over. The committee even considered raising an international brigade in Britain.

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.

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.