1935–1937: (Hardy Perennials: The Depression, the October Floods, the Banana Miracle, and the Search for Money from Hitler, Schacht, and Paris): The first tw…

1935–1937: (Hardy Perennials: The Depression, the October Floods, the Banana Miracle, and the Search for Money from Hitler, Schacht, and Paris): The first two years of the libération had not been kind either to Haiti or its president. World depression had reduced by forty percent the average annual earnings of the coffee crop, the 1935 harvest had been bad, made worse by devastating floods in October 1935 which put eight feet of water over downtown Jacmel, washed away bridges and houses throughout the Grande Anse, and drowned at least 2,000 people. Logwood exports were at a standstill, the Haitian Pineapple Company had gone to the wall, and of the American agricultural ventures begun a decade earlier only HASCO and the Dauphin Sisal Plantation at Fort Liberté still survived. The one success Vincent could show was a highly successful banana monopoly worked out in 1935 with Standard Fruit Company, from an export of 1,600 stems in 1927 reaching 1,363,176 ten years later. The government needed more money than it could raise, and the only way to get rid of American fiscal control was to pay off the 1922 bonds — Constantin Mayard, Haitian minister in Paris, was instructed to see how French bankers would like to make Haiti a loan that would refund the 1922 debt, but negotiations collapsed in scandal at the end of 1935. In 1936, turning to Hitler’s Reich, government emissaries dickered with Hjalmar Schacht for a blocked-mark loan in which German companies and engineers would take over all public works in Haiti. In December 1937, Georges Léger went to Paris for secret negotiations with the Delbos government, looking to French investment of state-controlled trust funds in Haitian bonds — in both deals, surrender of control over the newly purchased Banque Nationale was proffered as part of the package. One reason French bankers hardened their hearts was that certain clients still holding out for payment of the 1910 bonds in 1910 gold francs had prevailed on the Quai d’Orsay to tighten its screws now that the Americans had left. In March 1936, in one of the cruelest economic blows ever dealt Haiti, France abruptly denounced the commercial convention, raised duties to levels that effectively closed French markets to Haitian imports — the Havre coffee market, on which Haiti had depended since the days of Boyer, was where it hurt — and cut the Black republic adrift.