As part of growing protests over U.S. occupation begun in 1915, and National City Bank’s control, marines fired into a crown of demonstrators on December 6, 1929…the Les Cayes massacre.

‘Haiti in Revolt Against U.S. Imperialism’ from The Militant. Vol. 2 No. 20. December 14, 1929.

5 Killed, 20 Wounded by U. S. Marines in First Encounter

Despite the strict censorship on all “seditious messages” from Haiti, the news arrives as this issue goes to press that five Haitians were massacred by American Marines who also wounded a score of others in machine gun fire against a protesting mass of peasants at Aux Cayes. Rumors are afoot of American airplane bombings, and ambuscades by Marines in which other Haitian peasants–who are unarmed for the most part–were slaughtered. The past record of American imperialist brutality in Haiti, where over 3,000 natives have been killed by Marines since the U.S. intervened in the affairs of the little island, is sufficient indication that no blood will be spared to strangle any anti-imperialist protest movement. Hoover will not be deterred by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Haitians are opposed to American control and to the puppet president, Borno, who is a paid agent of the National City Bank of New York.

Haiti, where the massacre has just taken place, is under the control of the State Department of the U.S., the secretary of which, Henry L. Stimson, recently sent a note to the Soviet Union demanding that it “make peace with China”!

Forty-eight hours after Hoover smugly announced to Congress his intention to send an “investigating” committee to Haiti with the aim of withdrawing the Marines from the island as soon as possible, five hundred Marines sailed from Norfolk to reinforce the 70 marines that make up the brigade and officers of the American controlled National Guard in Haiti

The dispatch of additional troops arose out of the declaration of martial law by Colonel Richard Cutts, brigade commander of the U.S. Marine Corps in Haiti, following upon a strike of students who were soon joined by numerous government employees and Customs House Clerks.

Hoover the Peace Lover

The lack of even a moment’s hesitation to send the Marines to Haiti to shoot down the oppressed people there, gives the lie direct to all the “pacific” intentions and claims made for themselves by Hoover and his secretary of State, Stimson, with the Kellogg Pact thrown in.

The American Marines are being sent to Haiti for the protection of the financial and military interests of the American bankers and business and not to “improve” the country and establish “order”. Hoover and Stimson are as much the office boys of the American imperialists as all the presidents and sectaries of state since the days of the notorious Philander Knox.

The record of American imperialist intervention in Haiti, committed under guise of the usual lofty sentiments of Yankee hypocrisy, is one of the blackest in the books. For over a century, from 1804 to 1915, when the U.S. forced it to sign a treaty enslaving itself to Wall Street, Haiti was an independent republic. Its internal disturbances were never of a kind to be mentioned in the same breath as a gang riot in New York or Chicago.

In 1847, and again in 1891, the United States attempted to negotiate for control of the harbors of Samana Bay and Mole St. Nicholas, for the declared purpose of using them for naval bases. Both times, the U.S. was unsuccessful.

Enter: the Nat’l City Bank

Under state secretary Knox in 1911 and under the “pacifist” Bryan a few years later, arrangements were made for American banks to take over the French shares in the National Bank of the Haitian Republic, and in 1917, the National City Bank, turn ed the trick, and took possession of the financial heart of the republic.

Numerous times during 1914 and 1915, the State Department, acting for Wall Street, proposed to take over the customs control of Haiti. Towards Christmas 1914, a contingent of American Marines landed in Port au Prince, and in broad daylight broke into the vaults of the National Bank, seized $500,000 and carried it off forcibly to New York for deposit with the National City Bank! All the protests against this high-handed piracy were unavailing; the State Department did not even deign to give an explanation. A few years later, Roger L. Farnham, vice-president of the National City Bank, later testified before a Senate Committee, that the Marine raid was arranged jointly between the State Department and the National City Bank!

In July 1915, while the U.S. was trying to ram its domination down the throat of Haiti, a revolution broke out. Without any justification, an American warship landed Marines who immediately took control. Admiral Caperton installed himself as the actual head of the government until a Wall Street tool, Dartiguenave, was foisted upon the country as president at the point of Marine bayonets, even as President Borno is today.

The resistance of Haiti was nevertheless not eliminated. The U.S. then seized the ten main ports of Haiti and their customs houses, collected all customs dues, and established what amounted to a military dictatorship over the country A treaty was finally jammed through which robbed Haiti of the faintest semblance of sovereignty. Still under the apostle of brotherhood and peace, President Wilson, an agreement was arranged naming the National City Bank as the financial overseer of the country.

The military subjection of Haiti then began in full force. The barbaric corvee, or forced road work, was revived, and virtual slave raids conducted by the Marines to help “improve the country”. Marine atrocities, rivalling the alleged ones of the “Huns” during the war, became the order of the day. In a few years of its domination, James Weldon Johnson reports, more than 3,0000 unarmed Haitians were done to death by the American Marines. And the Haitian population is only 3,000,000.

Since that time there is hardly a phase of financial, political, military or industrial life of the country that has not been put into a water-tight compartment with an American watch-dog at the door, The U.S. does not propose, under any circumstances, to forsake its control voluntarily. The naval bases of Haiti are of immense strategic importance for the control of the Panama Canal–as a weapon against Great Britain. This is particularly true since the latter has declared only as late as November 25, through the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, that there has been “no decision to close the minor naval base at Bermuda and Jamaica and there is no intention of taking such a decision.” A glance at the map shows that Jamaica lies in an almost direct line between American-controlled Cuba and Haiti, and the Panama Canal.

The dispatch of a new force of Marines to put down the strikes and the resentment–which is country-wide–of the Haitians, gives the measure of the essence of Hoover’s Quaker brotherly love and strivings for peace It indicates the deliberate fraudulence of the claims of the Kellogg “peace” pact to halt war, because it is a murderous war that American imperialism is carrying on against the Haitian people

A protest against the military intervention by every workers organization will encourage the Haitian workers, peasants and students to continue and sharpen their battle to rid the country of the Wall Street oppression. Make the Marines get out of Haiti! Help to bear the iron heel of the National City Bank, and its political agent Hoover off the neck of Haiti.

The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1929/v2n20-mil-1929-gray.pdf