Istwa Nou

Elie Lescot was wealthy, light-skinned and at home in foreign capitals, which made the SHADA agreement a delicate thing to sell at home. The American occupation had ended in 1934 and the memory of it was fresh. A programme run with American partners and American banks, arriving in the middle of a world war, invited the suspicion that the Marines were coming back through a side door. Lescot also needed the Black peasantry either to support the scheme or to stay quiet about it, since the land the rubber required was land they lived on and farmed. So SHADA, the president, and Maurice Dartigue, his minister of agriculture, spent time and money on national goodwill campaigns and on producing newspapers that put a celebratory account of the project in front of the public. The spending is informative on its own. A project that will survive honest examination does not need a press operation assembled before the trees are in the ground.

The Axis powers had cut American access to rubber coming out of the Philippines, and in 1941 Elie Lescot agreed to make Haiti the answer. The instrument was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, known as SHADA, a joint agricultural programme with the United States. Hevea rubber trees were to be brought from the Philippines and grown in Haiti. Alongside them the scheme planted cryptostegia vines, a second source of rubber, and took lumber out of the southeast of the country. All of that required land and it required labour. Both came from the Haitian peasantry, who held the ground the trees were to occupy and who would do the clearing and the planting. The structure should be recognisable. American capital directing Haitian land and Haitian work toward an American requirement is exactly the arrangement of the occupation that had ended six years earlier. The difference in 1941 was that the instructions came through a Haitian president rather than a Marine general.

Jeanne Sylvain's first paid position was international translator for A Propos de SHADA, the newspaper of the Société Haïtienne-Américaine de Développement Agricole. The company ran on American money under American direction, and its business was clearing Haitian land to plant rubber for the war. The job took her out of Port-au-Prince and into the countryside with engineers, project managers and surveyors, recording the work of thousands of peasant farmers who had taken subsidies to grow rubber trees. She had studied social work at the University of Chicago in order to understand how communities hold together and what damage does to them. She was now employed to write up, in two languages, a project that was moving families off their plots and cutting down the trees they ate from. The training and the assignment pointed in opposite directions from the first day, and she had signed for a year.

Jeanne Sylvain liked having her own income, and at the start she thought SHADA was a sound undertaking, even while she found the work itself dull. She was in ordinary company. Peasant farmers signed on for the subsidies, town people expected employment, and a great many Haitians assumed that Élie Lescot, whose whole career had been made in diplomacy and in Washington, could convert his standing there into money and machinery for the country. That assumption is the thing to hold onto. SHADA arrived with consent. It came on the strength of a president's reputation abroad and the promise of wages, and among the people who accepted it was a feminist intellectual with a foreign degree and every reason for scepticism. Disillusion came later, and it came from watching the work go on rather than from reading anybody's argument about it.