1946–1949: (The Left Under Estimé: The Communist-Dominated FTH, Duvalier and the Chauffeurs-Guides, the Forced Bonds, and the Peasants Who Quit Work and Ate …

1946–1949: (The Left Under Estimé: The Communist-Dominated FTH, Duvalier and the Chauffeurs-Guides, the Forced Bonds, and the Peasants Who Quit Work and Ate Mangoes): While Estimé was fending off Trujillo from the right, his regime was simultaneously being penetrated from the left by forces that had overthrown Lescot and expected to profit thereby. No serious assertion that Estimé was a communist could be supported, yet the emergence of a self-conscious, often Marxist left was a new phenomenon in Haitian politics. Trade unions and the Ministry of Labor were showpieces of Estimé’s program, but the movement was initially all but captured by Fignolé, who was after all a practicing unionist at HASCO. By hastily pumping up a government-fostered central labor movement — the Fédération des Travailleurs Haïtiens — Estimé contrived to outflank Fignolé, but the FTH was communist-dominated and its leader Edris Saint-Amand was a top signer of the national Communist Party manifesto of March 1947. Estimé also employed known leftists as ministers or advisers — Dr. Rigaud at Commerce, Hibbert as rector, Jean Brierre at Tourism — and while the government outlawed the Communist Party in 1948, the Cuban-supported Popular Socialist Party remained unhindered. Meanwhile a new, non-communist union, the Fédération des Chauffeurs-Guides, was emerging as a powerful government supporter — Dr. Duvalier, secretary general of Fignolé’s MOP, was now Minister of Labor under Estimé and already forging ties with the Chauffeurs-Guides. By 1949, with a year to go in office, Estimé’s days were numbered: American development loans concentrated in his own Artibonite did nothing for other regions, Standard Fruit’s revenue contribution had been destroyed, and in March 1949 the government required every worker to invest fifteen percent of his pay in three percent bonds maturing in 1959 — the peasants simply quit work and ate mangoes. Faced with discontent on left and right and menaced externally by Trujillo with the Caribbean’s largest army, Estimé kept Haiti under state of siege throughout 1949 while working to prolong himself in office.