1961 to 1963 · Haitianspan
The marine mission refuses to train the militia and the alliance breaks
›Read the full entryClose
The American military mission in Haiti would not train or equip the militia, and when militia commanders were hurriedly given army commissions and put forward for American courses the mission chief rejected every one of them. Duvalier cancelled all pending American training for his officers. The mission commander described his own position as putting blood into one arm of a failing patient while a second doctor worked a suction pump on the other. Dean Rusk later wrote that the administration saw Haiti as a political and social cesspool and an open invitation to a Cuban style revolution, and that having tried persuasion, money, pressure and everything short of landing troops, they found the president extraordinarily resistant. A Senate investigation in 1975 revealed that the CIA had armed and supported attempts to remove him. From the re election of May 1961 until his own death, John F Kennedy kept the American ambassador out of Port-au-Prince. Washington began closing the aid programme in August 1962, and by January 1963 a mission of seventy people was down to eight.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.