Educated women appoint themselves the judges of beauty

Comhaire-Sylvain wanted the artistic energy she had found in Haitian girls brought under supervision. Her recommendation was social gatherings arranged and watched by adults, at which young people would be shown plays, art exhibitions and educational films. She then told the members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale plainly what their part in this was. The women of the nation who had been to school were to teach the class that had not, and to show them what constitutes beauty. That sentence sets the league up as a court of taste. Beauty is treated as a settled question, known to women with a French education and unknown to everyone else, and the transfer runs one way only. A year earlier the same writer had been in Kenscoff arguing that a woman who never saw a classroom held knowledge worth recording. Both arguments ran in the same newspaper.

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.

In October 1939 Les Griots ran a series under the title Considerations on our historical origins. The articles built out what its writers called the black legend, in which the light skinned elite of Haiti appears as a group whose loyalties lie abroad and whose presence in the country amounts to a kind of occupation. On that reading, the mulatto families who had held the presidency, the ministries and the trading houses were foreign in their tastes, foreign in their schooling and foreign in their interests, and the history of Haiti since independence was a history of their betrayals. The account had material behind it. Colour and property had lined up in Haiti for a century and a half, and those families had spent the American occupation doing business with the occupier. Turning that record into an inherited trait converted a political grievance into a permanent one.

SHADA removed peasants from their land by force. Houses were pulled down and fruit trees decades old were cut at the base. By 1943 the company had cleared 47,177 acres. At its greatest extent it held over 100,000 hectares of Haitian ground, which is close to the reach of the plantation system the revolution had destroyed nearly a hundred and forty years earlier. Rubber now stood where cane had stood. The land was worked for export under foreign direction, the people on it drew wages for labouring on fields they had owned, and the logic was the one their ancestors had fought a thirteen year war to break. What had changed was the empire giving the orders and the crop it wanted. Depletion ran through the soil first and then through the people living on it, since a family stripped of its trees and its plot has nothing left to draw down except itself.