Haiti sells its cotton to a war and gets an air force

President Élie Lescot went to Washington and stayed at the Shoreham hotel, and on 6 April 1942 he and Sumner Welles signed a memorandum. The United States would buy the whole Haitian cotton crop for the duration of the war, the Export-Import Bank would advance two million dollars to hold up the gourde, sisal production would rise to meet war demand, and Haiti would receive artillery, aircraft and a Coast Guard detachment. Five patrol boats took over the yard at Bizoton to hunt submarines off the coast, and the yard was rebuilt around them. American gunners sited coastal batteries at Port-au-Prince, at the Môle and at the Cap, giving the Garde its first artillery. In the summer of 1942 six Douglas O-38 aircraft arrived at Bowen Field. All six were wrecked or grounded within a year, and they began the Corps d'Aviation, made a separate unit on 9 September 1943 under Captain G. Edouard Roy, the first Haitian to fly. Roy started an airmail and transport service in June 1943 that became COHATA, the national airline.

Portugal and Belgium ran smaller economies than Britain or France, had fewer options, and held on hardest. For Antonio Salazar's government in Lisbon the colonies absorbed surplus Portuguese population, in the way Fascist Italy had imagined using Eritrea and Ethiopia, and supplied markets and raw materials on the nineteenth century pattern. Portugal exported its own authoritarian system wholesale to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, where opposition was not permitted and reform was not discussed. The Belgian Congo boomed during and after the war on copper, rubber, gold and tin sold to the Allied war effort, and on uranium that went into the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of that money reached an emerging Congolese middle class. Most of its purpose was Belgium's own recovery. Lisbon feared that any reform in its African territories would open the door to British and French interests. The powers with the least room to manoeuvre eventually left their colonies with the most violence.

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.