Les paysans haitiens et l'occupation américaine d'Haiti (1915-1930)

We have recently taken another look at Kethly Millet's study of the US Occupation of Haiti and the peasantry. Millet's brief book examines the impact of the Occupation on the Haitian peasant. The peasantry, however, were not an undifferentiated mass of smallholder farmers. Some were landless, others were squatters on state-owned land, more were sharecroppers, a few were grand proprietors and medium-scale owners, and then there were the speculators who benefited from their relationship with, for example, exporters of coffee to move peasant-produced crops. Naturally, the impact of the US Occupation on the peasantry varied by region and by the social status of the peasant involved. In some regions, such as Plaisance, 15% of the peasantry were landless (according to Simpson and Dartigue). Furthermore, some areas of rural Haiti had already been impacted by foreign agro-industrial enterprise like Freres Simmonds and Plantation d'Haiti. 

The major impact of the US Occupation appears to have been an intensification of this process, despite the meager investments (compared to Cuba). HASCO, Compagnie Nationale de Chemin de Fer, road construction using corvee labor, a sisal plantation, a cotton plantation in Artibonite, bananas, and new taxes furthered the development of a rural proletariat while creating conditions that enlarged the scale of Haitian emigration to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Wages for this burgeoning rural laboring class were 25 to 30 cents (US dollars) for 12 hour day and 10 cents for women and children, which were lower than wages one could have earned abroad. According to Millet, the imposition of taxes in September 1928 on local distillers also weakened the position of local guildive production. HASCO, which enjoyed a sugar monopoly, as well as other US companies rerouted water sources which negatively impacted small farmers.

So, hurt by taxes on small-scale distillers, rising unemployment, increased prices for basic subsistence and food in the late 1920s, and loss of land or resources,  Millet's explanation for the conditions leading to 1929 and the massacre at Marchaterre seems adequate. Of course, we know what happened after 1929, as the bad press of the incident spread internationally and steps were made to finally end the Occupation by 1934. But what, if anything, was the legacy of this period? The caco resistance was brutally crushed, and the poorly armed peasants could not unseat the Marines. Despite some gains in infrastructure, funded by the Haitians and with their own labor, the peasantry appear to have experienced mainly immiseration, emigration and top-down reforms that did little to fundamentally alter the economy or aid peasant agriculture.