A wartime rubber scheme takes 150,000 hectares and exports no rubber

With the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia lost to Japan, an American company operating in Haiti as the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole set out to grow cryptostegia, a vine that yields rubber. An American loan of five million dollars was obtained and 150,000 hectares were placed at the company's disposal, taken from local peasants. No rubber was ever exported, because the growing conditions turned out to be unsuitable, and the venture ended as a major loss. It was the only development project launched in Haiti before the end of the Second World War, and it failed. The next attempt was a Unesco project in the Marbial valley near Jacmel aimed at basic education and literacy in an isolated community, which also failed, on corruption, incompetence, lack of funds, and the choice of a place too cut off to reach. Debt repayment to American bondholders had absorbed the money that might have funded either.

After the war colonial governments went into crop production themselves. State marketing boards in British West Africa fixed prices to prevent a repeat of the 1930s collapse, and substantial public money was made available for colonial development for the first time. African growers saw the arrangement clearly enough. They were paid a small share of what their crops fetched, and the surpluses piled up in good years went into large capital projects instead of back to the farmers who had produced them. Capital-intensive schemes favoured machinery and settler experts over African smallholders. The groundnut scheme in Tanganyika laid out plantations on North American prairie lines. The ground was too dry, the soil too thin, the machinery no match for the climate, and it cost British taxpayers millions. French investment in Niger River dams for cotton failed similarly, as farmers there grew sugar and rice for local sale. Officials also compelled farmers to dig erosion trenches, rotate crops and cull cattle. These measures politicised the countryside and handed nationalist leaders a constituency.

The Comite Executif Militaire that replaced Lescot had three members: Colonel Franck Lavaud of Jeremie, Major Antoine Levelt of the Artibonite, and Major Paul Magloire, who commanded the presidential guard. Lavaud and Levelt were mulatres, Magloire was noir. They dissolved the legislature Lescot had assembled and made Sylvio Cator, the Olympic long jumper and owner of the Cafe Savoy, mayor of Port-au-Prince. Crowds attacked elite shops, including the Bata store, and the committee offered power to the supreme court, which declined it. Parties appeared by the dozen. Strikes hit SHADA, Plantation Dauphin, the wharf and the HASCO sugar mill, where a former mathematics teacher named Daniel Fignole could move the working districts of the capital with a sentence. Fignole's party was the Mouvement Ouvriers Paysans, and its secretary general was a silent country doctor, Francois Duvalier, who had published political tracts a decade earlier under the name Abderrahman. Legislative elections on 12 May put communists into the Senate and defeated Fignole. The liberal constitution of 1932 was revived on 12 August and the presidential vote set for the 16th.

Eight months before the constitutional assembly, students in Port-au-Prince organised a week of protests against President Elie Lescot, who governed with United States support. They described themselves as continuing a fight for sovereignty begun in the nineteenth century, and they had been reading the Marxism, socialism and cultural nationalism circulating in Haiti after the occupation and the world war. The protests ended in a military overthrow of the president. Haitians called that week the Revolution of 1946. In August an assembly met to rewrite the terms of government and elected Dumarsais Estime. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale were part of January. Formed in 1935 by educated and financially comfortable women, the organisation brought its members and its students into the streets of the capital with everyone else, demanding representation in the state being rebuilt. Lescot had privately supported their claims. The nine months between his fall and the assembly produced a run of alliances for women activists, some genuine and some tactical.