Istwa Nou

Henry Furniss, the American minister and the first black American to hold both a medical degree and a doctorate, rode over more than three quarters of Haiti and wrote a confidential report on it. He found the peasantry friendly, uninterested in politics, wanting to farm and to stay clear of the army, since serving meant going hungry because the money voted for rations never reached the ranks. They had no appetite for revolution of their own. Their officers marched them into one, and once the burning and the looting started the men caught the fever and kept going until somebody stopped them. Above them intrigue ran without pause, and a man in favour one day, sending rivals to prison or exile, could be the victim of the next man's plot. Meanwhile Nord Alexis, in his eighties and knowing only the methods of his own long life, was following the American election. His minister in Washington wrote that Taft would not tolerate more civil wars nearby, citing Cuba and Panama. The old man carried the letter about, showing it to his generals.