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.

In 1944 the Haitian rubber project cut its workforce from more than ninety thousand people to four thousand. Jeanne Sylvain, who had predicted the collapse in her letters two months earlier, lost her own job within three months. So did tens of thousands of peasant farmers, a great many of whom had already been moved off land they had worked, on the understanding that the scheme would pay them better than the land had. Whatever economic gains the project had produced went with it, and a half built recovery ended with more Haitians out of work than had been out of work before it started. Elie Lescot had staked his standing at home and in Washington on SHADA. Its failure, and the clumsy way the failure was managed, sharpened the case against him and shortened the road to the upheaval of 1946. Roughly eighty six thousand households lost their income by administrative decision, from a venture that had been sold as prosperity.

The Haitian peasantry was never one class, and the end of SHADA did not fall on everyone alike. A few households came out roughly even. Many did not. Those who had signed plots over to the company lost the land, and they lost something less obvious as well. To plant the rubber vine, the project had uprooted and felled the food bearing trees and plants standing on those small holdings. A fruit tree in a Haitian yard was not decoration. It was the buffer against a poor harvest or a jump in the price of imported flour, and it produced without being bought. Women handled the daily provisioning and the weekly market accounts, so the loss of the provision grounds reached them first. Once the trees were gone a family had no way to absorb a price shock except by selling labour or sending someone away to earn. The company closed in 1944. The ground it cleared stayed cleared.

The Haitian sociologist Alex Dupuy describes the economic model that followed the American occupation of 1915 to 1934 as one that set off a process of proletarianization. Large export monocrops and mining concessions broke up the small scale farming that had allowed Haitian families to hold their own against a growing state and a strong merchant class. SHADA was that model at full size. For the households it displaced the damage was financial, and it also changed what they were. A family with ground stood as landed people with a position in the district. A family without it had labour to sell and nothing else. For young women the consequence was specific. With no plot to work, a daughter was sent to Port-au-Prince or another town to bring in cash through small jobs and domestic service. Urban populations swelled with such arrivals. A girl serving in an elite household in the capital stood at the far end of a line that began when a company cleared her family's trees.

The young Haitian women who reached the towns after being displaced from the countryside went into other people's houses to work. What they found there was low pay, long days, and no boundary between the job and the employer's household, which in practice meant sexual violence from employers with no recourse available to the worker. The volume of coerced and forced movement in these years was never counted and its effects ran well past the households involved. The Haitian psychologists Guerda Nicolas and Casta Guillaume have argued that tearing women away from land and from home space may have done physical and psychological damage beyond measuring. SHADA was a commercial venture with a wartime justification and a foreign balance sheet. What it did to the Haitian countryside reads like the record of a natural disaster: the social and environmental fabric of whole districts taken apart, and most of the people carried off in the wreckage were women and girls.