Five shots outside the Cafe Rex end Calixte's command

Major Armand was conspiring against the president he served. With the interior minister Frederic Duvigneaud and a Captain Merceron, he planned to have Vincent and Colonel Calixte killed, after which Duvigneaud would take the presidency and Armand the Garde. In late November 1937 Calixte learned he was to be shot on the Petionville road going home, and arrested the men waiting for him. Vincent dropped Duvigneaud from the cabinet and told Armand not to be foolish. On the evening of 12 December, while Armand and Merceron were drinking rum outside the Cafe Rex at the top of the Champ de Mars, a taxi slowed alongside them, someone fired, and both officers went down wounded. The car, plate P-3031, was found abandoned. Its passengers were five junior officers of the Garde led by Lieutenant Bonicias Perard, who was Calixte's nephew. Port-au-Prince had a kouri the next day, shutters going up along the Grand'Rue. On 9 January 1938 Vincent shipped Calixte to Nice as Inspector of Consulates.

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.

In October 1937 Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered his army to kill the Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. Thousands died within days. They were farm workers, cane cutters and their families, many of them born on Dominican soil, some from households that had crossed the frontier generations earlier, when the line existed mostly on paper. Hispaniola holds two countries and one landmass, and movement between them had always been ordinary. Trujillo made that movement a capital matter and settled it with machetes. What the killing produced, past the dead themselves, was a permanent condition. Every question the two states have put to each other since 1937 is asked across that ground: labour migration, citizenship for children born to Haitian parents, deportation, the status of the border itself. The massacre did not close and become history. It became the terms.

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.