1910–1912: (Leconte Confronts Voodoo and Crumbling Infrastructure): Not content with administrative reform, Leconte also cracked down on Voodoo, denouncing i…

1910–1912: (Leconte Confronts Voodoo and Crumbling Infrastructure): Not content with administrative reform, Leconte also cracked down on Voodoo, denouncing it as a culte grossier — a gesture that prompted British Minister Joseph Pyke to report to London that there was no doubt of the general practice of Vaudoux among the peasants, that he had himself seen within half a mile of Port-au-Prince a place of worship with temple, sacred tree, sacrificial stone, and graves, complete with daggers, skulls, pots of blood and feathers, and a priest in daily attendance. The conditions Leconte was trying to ameliorate had been well described as of late 1910 by John Laroche, soon to become the new president’s Minister of Public Works and already his son-in-law: streets that became quagmires when it rained, broken-down roads that killed off the movement of goods, bridges shaking with decrepitude that when they collapsed cut all communication between country and towns, jails full of holes inviting escape, iron markets rusting away for lack of maintenance, telegraph service at best mediocre with wires that had had more than fifteen years’ steady use, rudimentary water supply even in Port-au-Prince with broken mains, public buildings needing restoration, and army posts that looked like abandoned shanties. Streets and roads were repaired, permitting Haiti’s first automobiles to chug about Port-au-Prince with wonder. Telegraph wires were restrung and new lines constructed, and telephone service attained such a peak during Leconte’s presidency that Furniss, on one of his mounted tours into the back country, was able in July 1912 to call Port-au-Prince long-distance from Grand Gosier via Saltrou and Jacmel. Read through the decolonial lens, Laroche’s inventory of ruin was not the description of a nation that had failed to develop but of a nation whose resources had been systematically extracted — by the French indemnity, by the German and French loan sharks, by the successive conflagrations and civil wars that each revolution’s victors inherited from the last — leaving behind an infrastructure whose decay was the material sedimentation of two centuries of external plunder and internal factional warfare.