1934: (Little Better Fitted: The Verdict on Nineteen Years, Built on Sand, and the Essential Haiti Unchanged): Once again, 131 years since 1803 yet so differ…

1934: (Little Better Fitted: The Verdict on Nineteen Years, Built on Sand, and the Essential Haiti Unchanged): Once again, 131 years since 1803 yet so differently — for history never really repeats itself — the blan left, and it is proper to ask what they left behind. Haiti before 1915 had been isolated from the surrounding world for more than a century, and thus the overriding impact of American occupation was modernization — any comparison of the Haiti of 1915 with that of 1934 would support this conclusion overwhelmingly. Yet the essential Haiti had been changed so little: in only nineteen years, little enough should have been expected. The Americans, reversing the cliché that the United States always tries to export democracy, had laid no foundations, were really not allowed to lay foundations, for Haitians to rule themselves save in the old ways. Writing bleakly to Forbes in 1930, Russell went to the heart of it: while tremendous advances had been made in the material rehabilitation of Haiti and the happiness and prosperity of the mass of the Haitian people had been decidedly increased, the Haitian people were today but little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915. By March 1934, the British minister reported that Vincent — inaugurated by the Nation in December 1930 for his love of liberty and ardent belief in self-government — was becoming more and more an admirer of the dictatorship principle and considered Haiti quite unsuited to parliamentary government. Élie Lescot, late Minister of Interior and now Haitian minister in Ciudad Trujillo, in July 1934 secretly ordered five gross of special military buttons for the uniforms of himself and personal staff, planning with the support of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo to fly into Port-au-Prince and take over the presidency. By the end of 1932, doctors of the newly Haitianized Service d’Hygiène were already diverting so many government drugs and medical supplies into private hands that pharmacists complained they might be run out of business. Leyburn, who knew his Haiti so well, said afterward that the occupation failed because the Americans never recognized the social situation in Haiti and their labors were thus in vain — to this might be added that the elite, like the Bourbons forgetting nothing and learning nothing, for their part proved unable to rise to the greatest opportunity ever vouchsafed Haiti by history. What the occupation did and tried to achieve or build — from infrastructure to creation of a noir yeomanry or a career civil service, even the Garde — turned out to be built on sand, and the few legacies that did last were indirect: a degree of modernization and cultural echoes of a prolonged and for a while dominant foreign presence.