Ricardo Widmaier opens Haiti's first commercial radio station

Radio arrived with the marines in 1926, as jazz had, and the first commercial station followed in the middle of the decade. By 1948 seven stations operated in Port-au-Prince. In its early phase radio spread ideas through music and discussion, with Dantes Bellegarde and Felix Magloire debating weekly on the air. Wartime import shortages cut the supply of French and American records just as demand rose, so entertainment stations expanded in-studio concerts by groups such as Jazz des Jeunes, which were very popular because the country had no developed recording industry. The book argues that this infrastructure is what carried black consciousness out of the drawing rooms of the black intelligentsia to the popular classes, and that in the following decade radio would bring Haitians closer to international events and give political figures a route to the illiterate majority.

When the final contingent left Haitian soil, the association's twenty-fifth annual report recalled its own part in moving American opinion against the occupation and described itself as the leading organisation in the United States campaigning both for evacuation and for an end to American banking control of Haitian finances. Pamphile is careful about the balance sheet. The concentrated NAACP effort of the early 1920s did not end the occupation; the Harding administration instead rationalised and strengthened it, even while Harding withdrew marines from Camaguey in Cuba in 1922. What the association sustained afterwards was pressure: mass meetings, distribution of information across the United States, and appeals by staff to Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt and to individual senators. Pamphile closes by calling this work for human dignity in the first Black republic a little known part of the organisation's history.

Madeleine Sylvain's father had campaigned for Haitian sovereignty and the country had followed him. Her own campaign for women's rights drew almost no attention, and where it was noticed people treated feminism as something shipped in from Europe or North America. One critic wrote that equality between the sexes was a chimera and would never become real. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale answered in print. In October 1935 it issued the first number of La Voix des Femmes, the first newspaper in Haiti run by women with a declared purpose of covering women's political and intellectual lives. By February 1936 the editors had found their footing. The paper carried political editorials, foreign affairs, and above all historical and sociological essays about women. Its ethnographic reporting was the unusual part. Roumain and Price-Mars had written about peasant life, but nobody had yet put the daily existence of peasant women in front of a national readership. Printing those lives beside the lives of city women made the shared parts visible.

Negotiations over the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had run on and off since the 1870s, interrupted for years at a stretch, with each side suspecting the other of stalling to gain ground. In 1935 President Rafael Trujillo and President Stenio Vincent signed a treaty that was supposed to settle the question. Jean Price Mars, who served as a Haitian diplomat in Santo Domingo and wrote the history of the two states, recorded that the hopes placed in it came to nothing. What the treaty did not touch was the movement of poor Haitians into Dominican territory to look for work, driven by population and by the sugar economy, and living once across the border in a disguised form of bonded service and under open racial prejudice. Price Mars called that the exposed nerve in all future relations between the two countries.