Haiti

  The problem for Firmin, however, was that the military structures in the country remained a major part of the political landscape. The officers who served as local governors still had tremendous influence in their districts, and they were concerned that Firmin’s anticorruption initiatives and other political reforms might upend their stable role as power holders. As the campaign progressed, an elderly general named Nord Alexis began to mobilize the military to oppose Firmin. Alexis had been a fixture of political and military life in the north for decades: in 1867, he had led an insurrection against Salnave, and a seventeen-year-old Firmin had been among the armed citizens who repelled one of his attacks on Le Cap. Now the two men came into conflict again.73

  Alexis mobilized his followers by declaring that Firmin was an elitist intellectual who would hand Haiti over to the whites. Firmin’s supporters, meanwhile, accused Alexis of trafficking in registration cards and finding other ways to manipulate the election—a weighty charge, since the military commanders in Haitian towns were in charge of overseeing the election process there. These suspicions appear to have been well-founded. In June 1902, for example, Alexis sent a letter to one of the commanders in the north of Haiti. Enclosed in the letter, Alexis wrote, were “the names of some citizens that I have chosen to be elected as deputies” in the commander’s area, and he hoped the commander would “do everything you can to have them elected.” A generous reading of the message might see it as simply an endorsement of certain candidates. It’s pretty clear, however, that Alexis was actually telling the military commander to make sure that these delegates ended up being chosen, legally or not.74

  As the election approached, the political tensions boiled over into violence. In Le Cap, soldiers attacked a group of people waiting to register to vote in a neighborhood whose population largely supported Firmin. One man was killed and three seriously injured, while the town police stood by and did nothing. Then, on June 28, the day of the election itself, soldiers supporting Alexis came out in force, occupying the streets in Le Cap and frightening the population away from polling stations. Firmin’s partisans decided to respond in kind, arming themselves and attacking the soldiers. Soon, in Le Cap and other parts of the country, a new civil war was under way.75

  Firmin, who had always been committed to using only democratic and constitutional means, now found himself in a role he had always sought to avoid: that of a general. And in a military conflict, Alexis had the upper hand. Firmin was soon forced to flee Le Cap, and his house was looted. Jewels and furniture were taken, the building stripped down to its doorknobs and tiles, and the thing that Firmin probably treasured the most—his library—was ripped apart and scattered.76

  Despite Alexis’s efforts, Firmin actually won the majority of the votes in many places, and he garnered a significant majority in the electoral assembly. But once the fighting began, the vote counts no longer mattered. Haiti’s next president would be chosen in the same way that the country’s leaders had so often been determined: on the battlefields. As Alexis gathered his troops in Le Cap and other ports, Firmin blockaded those towns thanks to his control of an impressive warship named the Crête-à-Pierrot, after the fort where Dessalines had famously resisted a siege by the French in 1802. The ship was commanded by Hammerton Killick, one of Firmin’s loyal supporters. In early September 1902, however, after the Crête-à-Pierrot stopped a German ship carrying a large shipment of weapons and ammunition to Le Cap, Alexis called on the German government to help him seize what he called a “pirate ship.” A German warship pursued the Crête-à-Pierrot, and Killick, realizing his ship couldn’t escape, ordered his sailors to evacuate and then blew it up—along with himself—to prevent the vessel from being captured by the enemy. The act was heroic, but it also largely ended Firmin’s campaign. Alexis assumed the presidency in December, and Firmin ended up in exile in St. Thomas, without his books and with many regrets.77

  The democratic political movement that Firmin and others had sought to build in Haiti was defeated, the new politics overtaken, once again, by the old. In 1908, after a few years in St. Thomas—and after the publication of his book praising the United States as a model and potential ally for Haiti—Firmin sought support from the United States for another attempt at wresting Haiti’s presidency from Alexis. His requests were rebuffed. In fact, the ship carrying the weapons that Firmin’s partisans were planning to use was intercepted by the United States, and in the end the new pro-Firmin movement was crushed before it got off the ground. Firmin spent the rest of his days in exile and died in St. Thomas in 1911.78

  * * *

  Throughout his life, Firmin had attacked European prejudice and defended his country’s sovereignty from U.S. bullying. He had also thrown himself into several attempts to transform the political system in Haiti. But like an earlier generation of reformers, he was compelled to turn to military force, unable to circumvent the deeply rooted political practices of the country. Instead of bringing about a new political configuration, his efforts became just another piece of the ever-worsening crisis of the Haitian state.

  Firmin knew that if Haiti could not end the cycle of political violence, the cost could be quite high. In 1904, the U.S. president had issued what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the long-standing Monroe Doctrine. While reiterating that the United States would not accept European intervention in the Americas, Theodore Roosevelt added that the United States itself might sometimes need to intervene if a country was incapable of guaranteeing its own political stability and was therefore vulnerable to foreign occupation. It was an interesting and cynical twist: the danger of foreign occupation might require foreign occupation. What it meant, worried Firmin, was that if Haiti were to fall prey to a “demeaning and incurable inner sickness” that made it weak and unstable, then “Uncle Sam would reach out his long arms, to prevent us from choosing the hands of another.” A French journalist, Firmin noted, had recently forecast that Haiti would be annexed by the United States. “It is ineluctable and certain,” the journalist had intoned, “that a few hundred thousand half-barbarian individuals, living in a land that could feed several million, have no right to resist its development by people more civilized than they are.” The situation was summed up more ruefully in 1907 by a young Haitian intellectual named Dantès Bellegarde, who quipped—repeating a famous phrase attributed to Mexican president Porfirio Díaz about his own country—that “God is too far, and the United States is too close.”79

  Firmin tried to take solace in the idea that any effort to take over Haiti would inevitably fail. “There is no doubt that Haiti is ready to fight, to the last breath of the last citizen, to conserve its independence,” he wrote. The history of the Haitian Revolution was “still there, still very fresh in our memories, nobly inspiring” and even “seductive,” calling out to Haitians to relive it if necessary. Firmin imagined a doctor examining a Haitian confronted with a threat to national independence: he would hear, in his heart, a “fire that suddenly alights to either save everything or destroy everything.” In the face of a common threat from outside, Firmin predicted, all the divisions and individual “egoism” in Haitian society would disappear: “We will resist still, the elderly showing the young how beautiful it is to bury oneself in the ruins of the nation rather than to survive its ruin.” Haitians did not have to succumb to “unenlightened and sickly suspicion” about the designs of foreigners, but rather could feel confident that in the face of any threat, they would always find salvation in their capacity for “heroic fury.”80

  In his last days, however, Firmin sounded less certain. All he knew for sure was that, in one way or another, Haiti’s unstable situation would not last. “After my death,” he wrote with a mix of foreboding and hope, “one of two things will happen: either Haiti will fall under foreign control, or it will resolutely adopt the principles in the name of which I have always struggled … No people can live indefinitely under tyranny, injustice, ignorance, and misery.”81

  6

 
OCCUPATION

  In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in the harbor of Port-au-Prince and a detachment of U.S. marines disembarked. They proceeded to carry out what can only be described as an international armed robbery. Entering the Banque Nationale d’Haïti, they removed from the vaults $500,000 worth of gold belonging to the Haitian government—the equivalent of $11 million today. Then, in broad daylight, they took the gold back to the harbor, loaded it onto their gunboat, and shipped it to New York. Louis Borno, the Haitian minister of foreign relations, denounced the seizure as a “criminal act,” but no one—neither bank employees, state officials, nor Haitian soldiers and policemen—dared step in to stop it.1

  The official justification for the raid was that the seized gold might be required to cover Haiti’s debts to U.S. bankers. The Haitian government indeed owed large sums of money to banks in many countries, including the United States. In 1883 Haiti had at last paid off the “double debt” contracted with France in 1825—both the indemnity levied in return for recognition and all the loans it took out in order to cover that indemnity—but it had taken out many other loans in the intervening years. The Haitian government, however, had been assiduous in making all its debt payments as required. In fact, they were so committed to paying off their loans that they found themselves with little money to do anything else: by the 1914–15 budget year, a staggering 80 percent of all the money coming in through customs and taxes was being immediately spent on debt service. Given the situation, Haiti had little choice but to keep taking out yet more loans just to keep functioning. As this cycle continued, it was increasingly easy for foreign bankers to claim that there was a danger they would eventually not be repaid. That was the ultimate message of the Machias incident: the Haitian government, the United States had concluded, could no longer be trusted with its own money.2

  The raid was the culmination of a process that, over the previous years, had placed Americans firmly in charge of Haiti’s national bank. In 1909, at the urging of the State Department, two U.S. banks had purchased a majority stake in the institution from the French, and they soon established complete control over its operations. Roger Farnham, the vice president of the National City Bank in New York, took on the additional title of vice president for the Banque Nationale, and the French tricolor that had flown in front of the bank since its founding was soon replaced with the Stars and Stripes. In a way, the marines who landed in December 1914 simply carried out a transfer between the two institutions that Farnham managed.3

  The shift in power came as the United States increasingly established itself as Haiti’s main trading partner. In 1870, 46 percent of Haiti’s imports came from France, and just under 40 percent from the United States. By 1905, however, France accounted for only about 10 percent and the United States for 71 percent of all the country’s imports. As a French diplomat noted, many Haitians were alarmed by the change, seeing the Americans not just as foreign whites but as “those whites who had the most outrageous scorn for black people.” These opponents of U.S. power urged the country to forge trade alliances instead with smaller European nations. (“What Haitians find seductive about Belgium,” a Haitian official explained to a French minister in 1910, “is that they don’t have an armed navy.”) But most Haitians understood what Anténor Firmin had argued in his writings: the ultimate question was not whether Americans would dominate trade in the region—that, after a time, became a certainty—but how deeply the United States would come to control Haiti itself.4

  The United States, for its part, was eager to solidify its grip on the Caribbean nation. Indeed, with Farnham in control, the Banque Nationale was at the center of a rather cynical plan: to bring on a financial emergency so that the United States would be called on to resolve it. A few months before the USS Machias carried out its raid, the U.S. ambassador in Haiti told the State Department that the Banque Nationale was considering ending all advances of funds to the Haitian government. When “confronted by such a crisis,” he explained, Haiti would have no recourse but to “ask for the assistance of the United States in adjusting its financial tangle and American supervision of the customs houses would result.” The United States had already taken over direct supervision of customs collection in the Dominican Republic, and on several occasions over the course of 1914 it proposed a similar arrangement to the Haitians. Under such an agreement, the entire financial system of Haiti would be directly in the hands of the United States, which would collect the government’s receipts, pay off its debts, and oversee the entire budget.5

  Haitian leaders, unsurprisingly, were not eager to sign off on such a blatant surrender of sovereignty. But they knew that thanks to its control of the bank, the United States was in a strong position to pressure the Haitian government to do its will. Solon Menos, the Haitian ambassador in Washington, D.C., warned his friend Louis Borno in early 1915 that “through a system of progressive strangulation” the United States aimed to force Haiti’s government to “reach out for the chains.” Any misstep, Menos wrote, would be used as a pretext by the United States to intervene. American troops had already taken the government’s reserves from the Banque Nationale; it wouldn’t take much for another detachment of marines to assume control of the customs houses.6

  A few weeks later, Menos again wrote to Borno from Washington. He was alarmed by a small but telling detail about his interactions with the State Department: the U.S. officials were getting increasingly jovial and jokey with him. They mentioned the political violence in the country with what Menos felt was a certain undisguised glee. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan informed him one day that rebels had taken the town of St. Marc and suggested once again that it was time for Haiti to accept the need for U.S. control. Menos understood what was happening, but he saw no way out. Neither did Borno. Indeed, like all of Haiti’s political class, Borno would soon find himself part of a nation under occupation, its government taking orders from the United States Marines.7

  * * *

  The U.S. tradesmen who did business in Haiti throughout the nineteenth century were never as connected with Haitian communities as the merchants from Germany and other European countries, who often married into Haitian families to circumvent constitutional limitations on foreign ownership of property. But during the early years of the twentieth century, several U.S. companies did manage to make inroads into Haiti by gaining government contracts for agricultural and infrastructure projects. American corporations participated in the expansion of the wharf in Port-au-Prince and helped to establish the country’s first electric company. Most important, they became involved with Haiti’s nascent railroads.

  In 1905, Haitian businessmen had created the Compagnie Nationale des Chemins de Fer d’Haïti—the National Railroad Company—with the goal of building a railway between Port-au-Prince and Le Cap. They hoped that the railroad line would integrate the agricultural regions of the country’s north, northwest, and west, particularly the Artibonite Valley. The project ran out of money, however, and in 1910 a U.S. investor named James P. MacDonald acquired the company. Desperate to get the railroad constructed with foreign capital, the Haitian government granted him a series of major concessions. For fifty years, MacDonald was to have exclusive control of a twelve-mile-wide swath of land on either side of the railway line, where he proposed to create banana plantations. He also secured a monopoly on all future banana exports from the country. From the perspective of the Haitian government, the deal seemed like a remarkable opportunity to develop a new export, allowing Haiti to take advantage of the boom in banana consumption that was under way in North America.8

  For the rural residents who lived in the region, however, the plan represented something very different: a profound threat to their carefully sustained and cherished autonomy. Generations of families and individuals had built their lives on the land granted to MacDonald, growing high-quality coffee, cultivating livestock, and harvesting acajou and other woods for export. Now, the same rich soil that made agriculture so prod
uctive in the area attracted the attention of foreign investors. MacDonald’s project aimed to replace the local way of life with a new version of an old but still vividly remembered system: monoculture plantation production for export. There would be bananas rather than sugar, and wage workers instead of slaves, but the overall effect remained the same: if the plan succeeded, many Haitians would be transformed from independent farmers into field laborers toiling for a foreign master.9

  The dispossession process began in earnest in 1911. Many peasants in the valley could not show legal title to the land on which they lived and were easily expelled. But even those who had titles were often dispossessed by the authorities who supported MacDonald’s project. People were ejected from their homes without compensation, and their houses were razed or burned. Land prices in the region spiraled upward, so buying new land was nearly impossible for those who had lost theirs. Soon, desperate farmers began fighting back. With cries of “Down with MacDonald!” and “Down with the railroad!” they attacked the buildings of the U.S. company, destroying sawmills and lumberyards, smashing tools, and trying to intimidate Haitian workers into abandoning the construction sites.10

  Popular anger created both a challenge and an opportunity for regional leaders. The situation could easily have led to intraregional conflicts between those deprived of land and those who still had it. Instead, however, local elites were largely able to channel the anger of the dispossessed into uprisings against the central authorities in Port-au-Prince. Military and political leaders in the north of the country declared that the poverty in the region was the result of its oppression by those in charge of the Haitian state, who were bowing too easily to U.S. influence. Gathering armies of followers anxious about losing land to outsiders, officers with presidential ambitions promised that once in power they would stop the dispossessions. Fueled by the peasants’ fury and fears, the insurrections sweeping across Haiti grew in frequency and intensity. Rural armies became a constant presence in the countryside, foraging for food and looting properties. In some areas, rival bands burned houses in towns that had supported their enemies. As the unrest spread, the farmers in the afflicted regions paid the steepest price: many lost homes and crops to passing armies, women became victims of rape by marauding soldiers, and men were strong-armed into fighting and never returned.11