28 July 1915 · Haitian
The marines land, and stay nineteen years
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American marines landed at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915 and did not leave until 1934. Robert Rotberg wrote that the decision was no sudden or capricious response to Haitian political and financial destitution, and that it is more surprising the Americans waited as long as they did. That is right and it is only half the ledger. This was not simple dollar diplomacy either, because American business in Haiti at the time was thin. The drivers were the German commercial community, the Môle Saint-Nicolas harbor, the wartime Caribbean, and the customs receipts already pledged to foreign creditors under the arrangements traced back to 1825. The occupation built roads and a constabulary, rewrote the constitution to permit foreign land ownership, and reinstituted the corvée, which is forced labor. It also produced Charlemagne Péralte and the Cacos, and it produced the noiriste intellectual reaction that arrives in the palace in 1957.
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