1934: (Nothing Stands Still: The Questions That Faced the Second Independence — The Garde, the Banque, Trujillo, and the $700,000 Payroll): Comparisons with …

1934: (Nothing Stands Still: The Questions That Faced the Second Independence — The Garde, the Banque, Trujillo, and the $700,000 Payroll): Comparisons with 1804 were irresistible, yet the differences were even more striking. In 1804 Haiti was wrecked and ravaged; in 1934 the country was modernized, solvent, and thriving with a national infrastructure surpassing anything in its history. In 1804 Haiti was disdained and ostracized; that of 1934 was an object of solicitude and good wishes — on the other hand, Haitians had not defeated or massacred anyone or swept any foreign armies into the sea, for the conquerors had departed unconquered. This hegemony, unlike that of 1804, was mulâtre, not noir. Yet nothing stood still and the millennium had not dawned simply because the blan were gone. There was the Banque, owned in New York, and no Haitian nationalist could enjoy the idea of a national bank and treasury owned abroad. There was the Garde, seven-eighths of its NCOs and privates noir, its officers mainly mulâtre under a noir commandant — would this new-model armed force stay out of politics, and what were the implications of the new Garde Présidentielle commanded by a Vincent favorite who had already cautioned Colonel Calixte that when he wished anything for the Garde from the president he should see Armand first? Could parliamentary government work? What was the commercial future in a world depression — the departing occupation had taken with it a $700,000 payroll, equal to ten percent of the national budget, and the first casualty of the Marines’ departure was that Brasserie La Couronne, Haiti’s only brewery, shut down and operated for the next forty years only as an ice plant. And what were to be relations with the Dominican Republic, whose chief of state was already manifesting heavy-handed friendliness — not content with sending a large delegation to the désoccupation celebrations, Trujillo followed up with a state visit in November, described by Armour as a picturesque figure surrounded by Dominican officers openly carrying Thompson submachine guns, followed around the dance floor by his officers with hands pointedly resting on an ominous bulge in their hip pockets, the whole thing a comic opera of the very first class. Trujillo engaged in frank talk with Vincent, offering his two-gunboat navy at Vincent’s disposal to prevent arms smuggling into the North, where the mulâtre president from the West was regarded with reservations.