Lescot takes the army, the legislature and the constitution

Elie Lescot's inauguration ran ten thousand gourdes over budget because the war had put up the price of French champagne. He was born in 1883 at St.-Louis-du-Nord into a respected Capois family; his grandfather had been magistrat communal of the Cap for life. The American Armour had marked him as a future president as early as 1934, noting that from Trujillo's point of view he was the perfect choice, a son of the North where the Christophe tradition of discipline held. Lescot governed to that description. On 6 June 1941 he took the title of Commander-in-Chief, putting the Garde Presidentielle and the capital's police under his own hand and leaving the chief of staff paperwork. Through that summer his government raided ounfo and smashed the drums and sacred objects inside them. In October he abolished the prefectures for six regional delegues holding sole local authority. Haiti declared war on Japan on 8 December, then on the European Axis, and on Christmas Eve on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In January 1942 the legislature voted him extraordinary powers for the duration. On 23 February he suspended the constitution and told the Garde that saboteurs were to be tried, condemned and shot.

The war produced demands for independence, and it also produced stronger colonial states. For Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium the African territories mattered more after 1945 than they had before, and interventionist policy was pushed with new energy. Laissez-faire economics had governed until the early 1930s, the depression brought state management in its place, and the war settled the argument in favour of intervention. Africa's contribution to European recovery was judged essential, which meant European governments running colonial economies directly. In the British territories this is called the second colonial occupation, running from about 1945 into the early 1950s. The postwar lines were drawn accordingly. African nationalism became a serious force at the precise moment colonial administrations became most determined to invest in, develop and defend what they held. In many places colonial rule had lasted little more than two generations. The empires assembled in the 1890s were meant to last considerably longer than they did, and by the 1950s London and Paris had worked out that economic influence could outlive political administration.

The Import-Export Bank of the United States put seven million dollars into SHADA. The money cleared land, paid farmers to work it, and hired administrators to run crop development, production and export. More than ninety thousand Haitians and Americans were employed on the programme. It went wrong from the beginning, and the reason was that the agricultural ambition had been drawn up without much attention to the ground it was to be carried out on. Cultivation takes years that a wartime shortage does not allow. A drought ran through 1943 and 1944. The cryptostegia vine failed to take root in areas the plan depended on. A fire went through one of the SHADA sites. What seven million dollars bought was a demonstration that Philippine agriculture does not transfer to Caribbean soil on demand, and a wide stretch of Haitian countryside stripped of what had been growing on it, which stayed stripped after the programme closed.

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.