Istwa Nou

The United States took over the Puerto Plata customs house in July 1904 and installed a customs receivership across the whole Dominican Republic early in 1905. Roosevelt's message to Congress set out the principle: a country that behaved with reasonable efficiency and decency had nothing to fear, while chronic wrongdoing or helplessness might oblige some civilised nation to act, and in this hemisphere the Monroe Doctrine could require the United States to exercise an international police power. Ludwell Montague later summed up what Haiti should have concluded, that reform from inside is the only defence against reform imposed from outside. A few Haitians read Roosevelt closely and saw where the sentence pointed. Most were at Gonaives, where a quarter of a million people passed through four gateways named for Louverture, Dessalines, Petion and Nord Alexis to celebrate a hundred years of independence. Rosalvo Bobo, a mulatto physician from the Cap, said the country should instead cover itself in a funeral cloth and consider how it had spent the century.