1925 to 1929 · Haitianspan
A Zurich engineering student writes home and lights a fuse
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In 1925 a young man of the Haitian elite studying engineering at Zurich sent the Union Patriotique a letter asking to be enrolled. He was a grandson of the former president Tancrede Auguste and his name was Jacques Roumain. He returned to Haiti in 1927 and threw himself into the intellectual resistance, launching the literary magazine La Revue Indigene. When that folded in 1928 he founded a plainer paper, Le Petit Impartial, which called itself an organ of the masses and spoke for a student body he had created, the Ligue de la Jeunesse Patriote Haitienne. No American and few Haitians knew that the Communist Party had recruited him in France. His constituency was a generation of elite students whose inherited pride in French culture and inherited contempt for both American materialism and Black Haitian life had been ground down by fourteen years of occupation. When members of the Ligue defaced the statue of Dessalines in 1929, a Garde officer reported that these young people were against everything, Dessalines included.
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