Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois

Author:Laurent Dubois [Dubois, Laurent]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2012-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

7

SECOND INDEPENDENCE

In June 1929, a resplendent new agricultural school was inaugurated in Damien, a suburb north of Port-au-Prince. It was outfitted with laboratories, a geological museum, a collection of Haitian plants, and a dairy farm where imported Jersey and Holstein cows cohabited with a few “indigenous” ones. Haitian and American teachers provided instruction in zoology, botany, agronomy, physics, chemistry, and political economy, and the students got exercise playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball. The school was the crown jewel of a decade-long effort by the United States to transform education and agriculture in Haiti, meant to demonstrate unequivocally that the occupation was a force for progress and civilization. Instead, however, it ended up doing the opposite. Within a few months, the Damien school became the launching pad for a mass student uprising, which eventually helped to do what Péralte’s Cacos could not: send the U.S. forces home.1

The unrest began on October 31, 1929, when the first class of students at the Damien school learned that the administration was cutting back on promised merit scholarships. They went on strike, marching into Port-au-Prince, where they were soon joined by other high school and university students. The young protesters became heroes for a population fed up with the U.S. presence. Greeted by cheering crowds, they lived an adolescent dream: getting free bus rides, free restaurant meals, even free movie tickets. As a symbol of their protest, they were wore green ribbons, standing for the renewal they hoped to inspire.2

When Haitian government employees joined the strike, the U.S. authorities declared martial law and carried out a wave of arrests. Fearing that they were losing control, several officials moved their families out of Port-au-Prince and onto boats in the harbor. Most frightening to them was the fact that the uprising was not limited to the cities: for the first time since the crushing of the Caco revolt, there were mass protests in the countryside as well. In early December, when fifteen hundred rural residents marched on Les Cayes, the tension proved too great: as the protesters entered the town, a marine detachment fired machine guns into the crowd, killing a dozen people and wounding many more.3

It was the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation. The massacre was an international embarrassment, making it clear that the Haitian people were increasingly united across class and regional lines in their opposition to the American presence. Less than five years later, the U.S. Marines formally withdrew. At a simple ceremony in Le Cap, the stars and stripes were taken down and the Haitian flag put back up. Shortly thereafter, the bones of Charlemagne Péralte were disinterred from his cement grave, his skull identified by his mother thanks to a gold tooth. Hastily buried as a bandit in 1919, he was now given a grand state funeral, officially acknowledged as a national hero.4

The departure of the marines represented the culmination of two decades of struggle against the occupation. It was supposed to be a new dawn for Haiti; political leaders proclaimed that 1934 was their country’s “Second Independence.

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