Gunboats, Marines and Bonds: The Ugly US Occupation of Haiti 1915-34

The historical tie between debt and gunboat diplomacy is ugly, rooted in imperialist and racist encounters with western powers. Few examples better illustrate the point than Haiti. In the first decades of the 20th century, Haiti was still repaying the enormous debt imposed by France as a condition of recognizing the new Haitian state nearly a century earlier. Then the U.S. marines arrived. Laurent Dubois (University of Virginia) is a leading historian on Haitian colonial history and joins us to talk about the U.S. incursions into Haiti, beginning in 1914 when the marines spirited away the country's gold reserves in the dead of night for “safekeeping.” In the course of occupying Haiti, and effectively putting the country into receivership, the U.S. engineered still more lending, designed both to protect U.S. commercial interests and to reduce the influence of European investors.

Producer: Leanna Doty