Istwa Nou

When Japan took Southeast Asia the United States lost its rubber and its hemp, and Haiti was told its moment had come. SHADA, a joint agricultural company, was created in late 1941 on a five million dollar Export-Import Bank loan guaranteed by the Haitian state, and in November 1942 Washington added seven million more. Twelve million dollars was many times what the Americans had spent on Haitian agriculture across nineteen years of military occupation. The American agronomist Thomas Fennell overruled Haitian specialists such as Georges Héraux and pushed ahead. Bulldozers took huts, coffee bushes, cashew, avocado and banana trees, and even the ounfò where Vodou is served. Roughly a million fruit-bearing trees and shrubs went down. By 1943 the work covered more than 100,000 acres, over five percent of the best land in the country, and employed 92,000 peasants at day wages on ground they had owned. Five tons of rubber came out of it. Work stopped in May 1944, leaving nearly 40,000 families displaced, the land ruined and Haiti five million dollars deeper in debt.

In October 1943 Élie Lescot toured Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York and Havana, and stayed at the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt called him a very old friend and talked about turning the Môle into a free port. Edward Stettinius put American spending on Haiti between 1938 and 1946 at forty million dollars. On 19 April 1944 the National Assembly rewrote the constitution: no elections until peace had been signed with every enemy power down to Bulgaria, the presidential term lengthened from five years to seven, and Lescot continued in office until 15 May 1951. His decrees began to open with the royal plural, Nous, Élie Lescot. In his address of 15 May 1945 he said his people were naive and poor, that they wanted the Four Freedoms Roosevelt had proclaimed, and that they would receive them once they had learned how to use them. A plot in the Garde was broken up in July, and seven enlisted men were shot at Fort Dimanche.