Istwa Nou

Navassa is a waterless limestone rock between Haiti and Jamaica that American companies had begun mining for guano under a United States statute claiming unoccupied guano islands. Haiti held that the island was Haitian. In internal correspondence, the Haitian foreign secretary Ethéart told the minister Preston what the government would not say in public: Haiti had never occupied Navassa in any official way. He argued that the emptiness left the claim intact and explained it as the result of internal troubles and of the plain inability of successive governments to keep a garrison or any establishment on a barren rock offshore. The explanation was true and it was fatal. Washington's position was that sovereignty over such places follows actual occupation, and here was Haiti's own foreign office, in writing, conceding the one fact that mattered. A state too disordered to post ten men on an island loses the island, and the rule was written by the country that wanted it.