Istwa Nou

Jacques Roumain and Therese Hudicourt's nephew, the lawyer Max Hudicourt, had helped launch La Revue Indigene in 1927. Their cofounder Normil Sylvain, brother of Madeleine Sylvain, died in 1929, and the movement he helped start went on without him. By 1933 its position was secure in argument and empty in practice: it had shown that Haitian culture, language and religion were worth study, and it had produced no programme anyone could act on. Roumain and Hudicourt went looking for one in Marxism. What they came back with moved the discussion off colour and onto money, and proposed rebuilding the country by restoring the productive capacity of the people who did its work. Sthenio Vincent, president after the marines left, treated this as an attack on his own nationalism and answered with surveillance, raids and prison. The two men were arrested in 1932 and jailed in 1933 for spreading communist propaganda and plotting against the occupying government. Vincent had watched the Americans govern for fifteen years, and he had learned the method.

By the end of March 1934 the new League had officers and a written programme and lacked only government authorisation. Its leaders filed the petition expecting approval within days. They had reason to. Many members moved in the same circles as Sténio Vincent, and the Garoute family had entertained the Vincents at their home in Jérémie. Vincent had been elected four years before the occupation ended, a founding member of the Union Patriotique with real nationalist credentials and, as the historian Matthew Smith has shown, wide popular appeal early on. The pressure of the American marines was part of what held that appeal together. As it lifted, Vincent grew afraid of losing his standing as the man who had delivered the country from the United States, and the American military backing that had propped up his authority went home with the troops. Old friendships stopped protecting anyone. He used executive power to watch and break up organisations, unions and gatherings, religious ones included. What worried him most was the younger nationalists turning toward Marxism.

Jacques Roumain and Hudicourt finished three months in prison in the same weeks that Sylvain, Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt filed their petition for authorisation. Vincent knew the names and the families behind them. He had visited the Garoute house and seen the books and newspapers kept there, some of it Marxist. Whatever weighed with him, a labour department run by women or the proposed changes to family life, the petition read as the leading edge of something more radical, and his government refused it. The League dissolved in April 1934. Sylvain later gave two reasons for the collapse. The government objected to the agenda itself: secondary schools for girls, economic independence for married women, equal pay for equal work, the vote, a women's labour department, and the closing of brothels. The second reason was internal. Most members were cautious and had no wish to be on the wrong side of the palace, while a small group would have fought anything. Arrest was a live risk, for the women and for the men in their families.