Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

A street in Port au Prince

The unfinished presidential palace of Haiti, on New Year’s Day, 1920

The backwardness and poverty of Haiti are largely due to the constant menace of these roving outlaws. Travel has often entirely disappeared from many a trail; more than one fertile region has been left wholly uncultivated and virtually uninhabited because of marauding bands of cacos. Cattle, once plentiful throughout the republic, have almost wholly disappeared, thanks to the fact that their flesh furnishes the chief means of livelihood and their hides the one sure source of income for the bandits. The depredations of the cacos have cost the Black Republic most of its wealth and the greater share of its worldly troubles.

Some two years after American occupation cacoism took on a new life. In perfect frankness it must be admitted that this was partly the fault of the Americans. Next to the cleaning up of Port au Prince the most important job on hand was the building of roads. If Haiti is to take her place even at the tail end of civilization, she must become self-supporting—in other words, able to pay her foreign debts, both public and commercial. The prosperity of French days, when the island exported large quantities of coffee, sugar, and cotton, has as completely disappeared under the anarchy of the blacks as have the old plantations. What little the country might still export, consisting mainly of coffee, could not get down to tide-water for lack of highways, those which the French built having been wholly overgrown by the militant jungle.

In their eagerness to furnish the country with this first obvious step to advancement the forces of occupation resurrected an old French law called the corvée. We still have something of the sort in many of our own rural districts—the requirement that every citizen shall work a certain number of days a year on the roads. But there is a wide difference between the public-spirited Americans and the wild black men into which the mass of Haitians has degenerated. Neither they nor their ancestors for several generations have seen the need of roads, at least anything more than trails wide enough along which to chase their donkeys. But they probably would have endured the resurrected corvée had it been applied in strict legality, a few days’ labor in their own locality, instead of being carried out with too energetic a hand. When they were driven from their huts at the point of a gendarme rifle, transported, on their own bare feet, to distant parts of the country, and forced to labor for weeks under armed guards, it is natural that they should have concluded that these new-coming foreigners with white skins were planning to reduce them again to the slavery they had thrown off more than a century before. The result was that a certain percentage of the forced laborers caught up any weapon at hand and took to the hills as cacos. If they have any definite policy, it is to imitate their forefathers and drive the white men from the island. One chief announced the program of killing off the American men and carrying their women off to the hills. The mass of Haitians believe that the world’s supply of white men is very limited; it is beyond their conception that there are many fold more of them where these came from. Their ancestors drove out the French, and they not only did not come back, but the blacks were never subjected to any punishment—at least any their simple minds could recognize as such—for their revolt. Why could not a new Toussaint l’Ouverture accomplish the feat over again?

Our mistake in the matter has been corrected. The American officer who countenanced, if he did not sanction, these high-handed methods has gone to new honors on other fields of battle; the young district commanders whose absolute power led them to apply too sternly their orders to build roads have returned to the ranks, and the corvée has been abolished. But the scattered revolt persists, and in the opinion of all but a few temperamentally optimistic residents, either Haitian or American, is due to continue for some time to come. That forced labor was not the cause of cacoism, for it is in the Haitian blood to turn caco; but it made a fertile field of ignorant, disgruntled negroes from which the bandit leaders were able to harvest most of their followers, and it gave added strength to the chief argument of the rascally leaders—the assertion that the Americans had come to take possession of Haiti and reëstablish slavery. To this day even the foreign companies which have no trouble in recruiting labor for other purposes cannot hire the workmen needed to build their roads. The thick-skulled native countrymen see in that particular task the direct route to becoming slaves.

For more than two years courageous young Americans have been chasing cacos among the hills of central and northern Haiti, with no other ulterior motive than to give the Black Republic the internal peace it has long lacked and sadly needed. All of them are members of our Marine Corps, though many of them are in addition officers of the Gendarmerie of Haiti, with increased rank and pay. Take care not to confuse these two divisions of pacifiers, for the gendarmerie has a strong esprit de corps, and a just pride in its own achievements, in spite of being still marines at heart. For a long time the native gendarmes, of whom twenty-five hundred, officered by marine enlisted men, have been recruited by our forces of occupation, were efficient against the bandits only when personally led by Americans. Merely to shout the word “Caco!” has long been sufficient to stampede a Haitian gathering of any size. Bit by bit, however, the gendarmes have been taught by practical demonstration that they are better men than the cacos, and the immediate job of hunting down the bandits is gradually being turned over to these native soldiers. American supervision, nevertheless, for years to come will certainly be necessary to eventual success.

Though the world has heard little of it, our caco-hunters have performed feats that compare with anything done by their fellows in France. In fact, their work has often required more sustained courage and individual initiative, and has brought with it greater hardships. In the trenches at their worst the warrior had the support and the sense of companionship of his comrades and a more or less certain commissary at the rear; if his opponents were sometimes brutal, they clung to some of the rules of civilized warfare. In Haiti many a young American gendarme officer has set forth on an expedition of long duration through the mountainous wilderness, often wholly alone, except for three or four native gendarmes, cousins to the cacos themselves, sleeping on the bare ground when he dared to sleep at all, subsisting on the scanty products of the jungle, his life entirely dependent on his own wits, and his nerves always taut with the knowledge that to be wounded or captured means savage torture and mutilation, to be followed by certain death. Bit by bit the native gendarmes have been trained to fight the cacos unassisted, and three or four of them have now reached commissioned rank; but the best of them still require the moral support of a white leader, and the energetic American youths scattered through the “brush” of Haiti have the future peace of the country in their keeping.