A New Orleans firm gets every banana in Haiti, and loses them in eleven years

In 1935 the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company of New Orleans was given exclusive rights to buy and export bananas anywhere in Haiti. Exports rose substantially through the rest of the decade and the momentum held until 1947, bringing a measure of prosperity to the Haitian countryside. In the mid 1940s the company and the Haitian government fell out. In 1946 President Dumarsais Estime ended the monopoly concession and Standard Fruit left. Banana concessions were then distributed to a number of small and unserious companies, which in a couple of years ruined the reputation of Haitian bananas on the world market. Exports were cut in half by 1948 and declined steadily until bananas disappeared from the countryside as an export product altogether. It is one instance of a pattern. Export crops in Haiti rose and fell on decisions taken by a handful of people, and the peasants growing them absorbed the result.

The American withdrawal in 1934 opened room for a wave of new associations, and on 3 March that year the Ligue feminine d'action sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince, the first feminist organisation in Haiti. Within days a nervous government forbade it to operate, judging its programme subversive and overambitious. Ten women sat on the steering committee. Madeleine Sylvain and Alice Garoute were the best known. Beside them were Fernande Bellegarde and Olga Gordon, Therese Hudicourt and Marie Corvington, Alice Teligny-Mathon and Esther Dartigue, Georgette Justin and Maud Turian. They redrafted the programme until it reduced to a single mild point, the physical, economic and social improvement of the Haitian woman, and got their permission. Branches followed at Port-de-Paix in February 1935, Saint-Marc in September 1935, Les Cayes in October 1936, Jacmel in 1937, then Petionville, Leogane, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The League ran evening classes for women workers in poor districts, a cooperative savings fund, libraries and a workers' centre, and petitioned for equal pay for equal work.

Mustafa Kemal allowed a second party, the Liberal party of Fethi Okyar, to be founded in 1930. It drew unexpected popular support and was dissolved in November of the same year, largely because the Republican party hierarchy convinced Kemal that religious reaction was coming. Travelling for three months afterwards, Kemal found that the discontent in the countryside came from economic stagnation and from party members taking the profitable positions for themselves. The failure of that experiment coincided with the world economic crisis of 1929, which struck Turkey through its agricultural exports, and with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe. A reform movement that had been aimed since 1839 against autocracy, and that had treated the western parliamentary order as its goal, turned instead to strong measures and quick results. The opposition went back to the countryside to wait, and waited until 1946.

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.