1938, December 18 – 1941, May 15: (Vincent Restores Dictatorship: The Cayes Speech, the Hitlerian Tone, Lescot on Trujillo’s Payroll, and Haiti’s Fourth Cons…

1938, December 18 – 1941, May 15: (Vincent Restores Dictatorship: The Cayes Speech, the Hitlerian Tone, Lescot on Trujillo’s Payroll, and Haiti’s Fourth Constitutional Transfer of Power): In a speech at Les Cayes whose tone and highlights were essentially Hitlerian, as Mayer reported, Vincent on December 18, 1938, announced an end to plebiscitary selection of presidents, told the people their mentality was too arrested for democracy, flayed the elite as tourists in their own country, and said Toussaint’s system of forced agricultural labor was perfectly valid for twentieth-century Haiti — extolling Toussaint’s diplomacy as subtle, fluctuating, and shady. During virtually the entire administration of its self-proclaimed Second Liberator, Haiti had been under constitutional state of siege, the press was tightly controlled, mail censorship and interception were commonplace, the secret-police fund had quintupled, free speech and public assembly had been abolished, and the regime was thoroughly corrupt — Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after désoccupation they had succeeded in reestablishing as venal a public administration as one could find anywhere. Vincent, Mayer privately wrote Welles, was really a xenophobe who loathed the United States with an enduring passion, eulogizing Toussaint’s strategy of pretending to be friendly with les blan but only to drop this mask at the proper moment and destroy them. The Haitian minister in Washington, Élie Lescot, had since 1938 been intimating to Welles his increasing divergence from Vincent while hinting at bargains whereby he would succeed to the presidency — besides sweetening American connections, Lescot was even more closely connected with the Dominican Republic, in fact on Trujillo’s payroll, and was El Benefactor’s handpicked nominee for the Palais National. On January 28, 1941, both houses of the legislature spontaneously passed resolutions calling on Vincent for another five years, but the sands of time had run out — Washington could still cast the deciding vote, and in late March the American legation frowned, and on April 5 Vincent pleaded ill health and said he did not wish to be considered. The voting was done on little scraps of paper put into two urns — one ballot was blank, another contained a vote for Vincent, and all remaining fifty-six were for Lescot, his name inscribed in various forms, sometimes with appropriate sentiments and in one case a short poem. On May 15, 1941 — Haiti’s fourth peaceful and constitutional transfer of power since 1915 — Élie Lescot succeeded Sténio Vincent.