Istwa Nou

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.

Jeanne Sylvain signed on for one year of what she took to be easy work, and she did not yet know what was going wrong in the fields. The duties were clerical. She read the daily and weekly papers closely, cut out everything that mentioned SHADA, and translated any article or note that carried weight. Doing that for months taught her what the newspaper was for. Part of her work was to pass over the inefficiencies and produce a picture of a productive enterprise, for Haitian readers and for the American partners paying the bills. Once she translated a long humorous piece and tried to place it. Her supervisor, the United States agronomist Thomas A. Fennell, struck it out and told her it fell outside the scope of the paper. A Haitian woman was being edited by an American man on the question of what could be printed about American work on Haitian land.

By March 1944 most people watching SHADA in Haiti had concluded that the rubber scheme would not work, whatever President Elie Lescot said about it on his tours at home and abroad. The crop was cryptostegia, a vine planted for the latex in it. Jeanne Sylvain, working inside the company's own newspaper, reported that the plant was behaving unpredictably and gave a reason: nobody had yet established what care a young cryptostegia needed, and the project was demanding too much of it. Three years in, the men running a plantation scheme had not learned to grow their own crop. Sylvain's sharper observation concerned the arithmetic underneath. The venture had been built around the returns its American backers expected, and those returns had been fixed without reference to what Haitian soil, rainfall and labour could actually deliver. Her sentence about asking too much of a young plant would have served just as well for the workers the project was using up.