Istwa Nou

By 1929 the public works department of the occupation, run by a handful of United States Navy civil engineers and paid for out of Haitian revenue alone, had built and was maintaining more than a thousand miles of all weather road, 210 major bridges, and airfields at Port-au-Prince, Gonaives, Les Cayes, Jacmel, Cap Haitien, Port-de-Paix, Hinche, Jeremie and Saint Marc. In 1920 the whole coast had four kerosene lighthouses. Nine years later it had fifteen automatic acetylene lights, fifty four buoys, ten harbour lights, and concrete docks in place of rotten timber wharves at five ports. The capital got the first automatic telephone exchange in any city in Latin America, then 1,250 miles of long lines joining twenty six exchanges. Haiti's first radio station opened in 1926. Ten towns had running water, sixty four villages had clean wells, and eighty two miles of irrigation canal were cut in the Artibonite. The British minister Edwards surveyed all of it in 1929 and reported that America had done little for Haiti beyond keeping the peace.