Istwa Nou

Louis Borno's opponents began plotting as soon as he entered the National Palace, and he enlarged their ranks himself each time he reshuffled the cabinet and the Conseil d'Etat. Through 1924 the capital's elite passed rumours of makandalism, meaning organised poisoning of mulatto families by Black Haitians, alongside talk that the marines might leave Haiti as they were leaving Santo Domingo. When Borno toured the south in 1925, Antoine Pierre-Paul and other opponents at Les Cayes tried to hang the town in black, sent word to the peasantry that the visit was cancelled, and stove in the drums of people preparing to dance for him. Before the 1926 election a leading manbo, Madame Lespasse, announced that if the council returned Borno then one member would fall dead in the palace and the president would follow. Russell noted that her informant was the mistress of a rival candidate. Borno then dismissed eighteen of the twenty one councillors, and the new body re-elected him nineteen votes to nothing.

In 1922 the National City Bank floated sixteen million dollars of Haitian bonds at 96.50. The French loans, worth 21.4 million dollars in 1915 francs, were refunded for 6.04 million, which left the government ten million in working capital and unwound seven years of financial deadlock. The national railway came off the state's back. Its absentee president and later receiver, Roger Farnham, went on drawing twenty five thousand dollars a year from a company earning eighty five thousand, while the New York firm of Sullivan and Cromwell held a twenty thousand dollar retainer. The economist Paul Douglas concluded that Haitian peasants were paying for an expensive luxury. The larger finding was emptiness. United States geological surveys turned up bauxite at Miragoane, marginal copper and little else. Agriculture was the only resource, and plantation agriculture needed land titles that did not exist. Peasants resisted the cadastral survey, and in 1926, after Marine aviators had photographed the country from the air, the building holding the negatives burned down.