1930-11-18: (Sténio Vincent Elected President by the National Assembly, the First Haitian Head of State Chosen by a Functioning Legislature Since the America…
1930-11-18: (Sténio Vincent Elected President by the National Assembly, the First Haitian Head of State Chosen by a Functioning Legislature Since the Americans Had Disbanded It in 1918): On November 18, 1930, the National Assembly, functioning for the first time since it had been disbanded in 1918, selected Sténio Vincent as president of Haiti. Born on February 22, 1874, into a light-skinned mulatto family of Spanish ancestry in Port-au-Prince, Vincent was a lawyer who had been president of the Chamber of Deputies at the time of the American invasion in 1915. His first priority was to convince the United States to end the military occupation. Vincent cultivated a close relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and consistently supported American policy initiatives in Latin America. He was a firm believer in Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which promised that the United States would no longer intervene militarily in the internal affairs of its neighbors. The promise, like most American promises to Haiti, was conditional and temporary.