1935 to 1937 · Haitianspan
Floods drown two thousand, coffee falls forty percent, bananas go up
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The first two years of liberation went badly. World depression had cut average annual coffee earnings by forty percent, the 1935 harvest was poor, and floods in October put eight feet of water through downtown Jacmel, carried away bridges and houses across the Grande Anse and drowned at least two thousand people. Logwood exports stopped. The Haitian Pineapple Company failed. Of the American farming ventures started ten years before, two were left standing: HASCO, and the sisal estate at Fort Liberté called Dauphin. Vincent's one success was a banana monopoly agreed with Standard Fruit in 1935; exports rose from 1,600 stems in 1927 to 1,363,176 ten years later. Shedding American fiscal control meant retiring the 1922 bonds, and there was no money. Constantin Mayard sounded out French bankers and the talks ended in scandal at the close of 1935. In 1936 emissaries bargained with Hjalmar Schacht over a blocked-mark loan that would have handed German firms Haiti's public works. In March 1936 France denounced the commercial convention and shut the Havre coffee market.
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