A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation

Shortly after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, in his capacity as the chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), introduced several transitional justice mechanisms that set the course for how Iraqis would confront the legacy of past crimes for years to come. In developing these mechanisms, Bremer consulted with a select group of Iraqi exiles that had returned to Iraq or were still living abroad. However, he failed to solicit the opinions and attitudes of the Iraqi people as a whole. He also failed to consult many of the governmental and nongovernmental entities that could pass on to the CPA and future Iraqi governments the lessons learned and best practices gleaned from transitional justice processes in other countries. As a result, many of the mechanisms introduced by Bremer either backfired or were hopelessly flawed.

Shortly after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, in his capacity as the chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), introduced several transitional justice mechanisms that set the course for how Iraqis would confront the legacy of past crimes for years to come. In developing these mechanisms, Bremer consulted with a select group of Iraqi exiles that had returned to Iraq or were still living abroad. However, he failed to solicit the opinions and attitudes of the Iraqi people as a whole. He also failed to consult many of the governmental and nongovernmental entities that could pass on to the CPA and future Iraqi governments the "lessons learned" and "best practices" gleaned from transitional justice processes in other countries. As a result, many of the mechanisms introduced by Bremer either backfired or were hopelessly flawed.

Sectarian conflict is a commonly understood concept that has largely shaped US foreign policy approach to the region throughout the modern Middle East. As a result of the conflict between Shia and Sunni militias in Iraq and the nature of Iraqi politics since 2003, many experts have accepted sectarianism as an enduring phenomenon in Iraq and use it as a foundation to understand Iraqi society. This paper problematizes the accepted narrative regarding the relevance of sectarian identity and demonstrates the fallacy of approaching Iraq through an exclusively “sectarian lens” in future foreign policy. This paper begins by exploring the role of the Iraqi intellectuals in the twentieth century and how political ideologies influenced and replaced traditional forms of identity. The paper then examines the common themes used by mid-twentieth century Iraqi literati to promote national unity and a sense of Iraqi identity that championed the nation’s heterogeneity. The paper then surveys the Iraqi literary response to the 2003 invasion in order to explain how some of the most popular Iraqi writers represent sectarianism in their works. The literary response to the US invasion and occupation provides a counter-narrative to western viewpoints and reveals the reality of the war from the Iraqi perspective. After considering works by Ahmed Saadawi, Hassan Blasim, and Sinan Antoon we find a conspicuous lack of emphasis on sectarianism as an essential element of identity in Iraqi society. To the contrary, most authors criticize sectarian ideologies with satire and contempt. The rise of sectarianism is often treated as an inorganic intrusion of divisive politics from foreign intervention, an antiquated past, or fringe elements of society. These contemporary authors show that sectarianism does not define Iraqis’ concepts of identity, but has instead torn the social fabric of Iraq through the oversimplification of complex notions of identity into a binary classification system. The paper concludes with a discussion on how experts and policy makers would be better informed about social undercurrents through the consideration of Iraqi literati and intellectuals who rarely serve in political offices, but are often more in touch with and representative of the people.

Reviewed by: Ua Mau Ke Ea, Sovereignty Endures: An Overview of the Political and Legal History of the Hawaiian Islands by David Keanu Sai Kūhiō Vogeler Ua Mau Ke Ea, Sovereignty Endures: An Overview of the Political and Legal History of the Hawaiian Islands, by David Keanu Sai. Honolulu: Pū'ā Foundation, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4507-8237-1; 156 pages, photographs, notes, glossary, references, index. Paper, US$35.00. David Keanu Sai's recent Ua Mau Ke Ea: Sovereignty Endures argues that the United States has been illegally occupying Hawai'i since 1898. Sai contends that, though the United States has treated Hawai'i as the fiftieth state, the Hawaiian Islands, having been recognized as an independent state in 1843 by Britain and France and by a host of other countries thereafter, never had a ratified treaty merging this island nation with the United States. The first text for high school and college students to address Hawai'i's legal status under US occupation, Ua Mau Ke Ea, with its accompanying CD of documents and a documentary directed by Kau'i Sai-Dudoit, offers a trove of information regarding the US occupation of Hawai'i and asks students to reexamine the colonization rubric as it has been applied to Hawai'i, affirming that despite the United States' illegal occupation, Hawai'i's sovereignty endures. With an implicit awareness that young minds are key to ending the US occupation, Sai's work demonstrates how Hawaiian history has shifted in recent years toward more precise discourse on the US occupation. In the past decade, the discourse has evolved from Noenoe Silva's Aloha Betrayed (2004), which described Hawai'i as a "(neo) colonial state" under "continued occupation . . . by the United States" (2004, 9), to Tom Coffman's revised edition of Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai'i (2009), which acknowledged "a growing body of historical work by a new generation of Native Hawaiian scholars" writing about the US occupation of Hawai'i (2009, xvi). Sai is the latest in this academic and popular trend, one of the emerging Native Hawaiian voices contributing to this shift from "colonization" and "annexation" to "occupation" as the legal and political term to describe Hawai'i. Sai distinguishes colonization from occupation under international law, noting, "Colonization/decolonization is a matter that concerns the internal laws of the colonizing State and presumes the colony is not sovereign, while occupation/de-occupation is a matter of international law relating to already existing sovereign States" (115). Although Hawai'i has been occupied for over a century, Sai [End Page 210] contends that the United States has treated these islands as colonized territory and that this "colonial treatment is evidence of the violation" of international law (117). While Sai's discussion of colonization and occupation is significant, Ua Mau Ke Ea centers on the United States' actions toward the Hawaiian Islands in the 1890s. Unfortunately, Sai's argument, with its focus on the Lili'uokalani Assignment and the Agreement of Restitution, ventures into legal theory that contradicts some aspects of the book's overarching claims about the United States' illegal occupation. Written under duress, the Lili'uokalani Assignment was signed on 17 January 1893, hours after a band of conspirators had declared themselves the Provisional Government, and one day after 162 US sailors disembarked from the uss Boston and occupied Honolulu, Hawai'i's capital. In this assignment, Queen Lili'uokalani wrote, "to avoid collision of armed forces, and perhaps loss of life, I do this under protest, and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian islands" (73-74). Because this document yielded authority to the US government, Sai describes this as an assignment of executive power. The second part of Sai's argument about Hawai'i's enduring sovereignty rests in his contention that the 18 December 1893 Agreement of Restitution, which held the weight of a treaty, was never fully enacted. Sai notes, "The...

Madeline Otis Campbell’s Interpreters of Occupation provides an intimate account of the United States’ gendered and imperialist practices in the Middle East. Her narrative revolves around the experiences of ten mostly young, university-educated, English-speaking Iraqi women and men hired as interpreters for the US occupation forces. As violence escalated in Iraq, interpreters’ role as conduits of US power in the region put their lives in danger, leading them to seek asylum in the United States. It is through Campbell’s temporary contract working for the US refugee admissions program that she first meets her interlocutors. Deploying a multisited methodology, initially traveling to Iraq to meet asylum claimants and then maintaining contact with them once they resettled in New England, Campbell traces their processes of subjectivation and resubjectivation across several boundaries—first inside and outside US bases in Iraq and then between the state borders of the United States and Iraq. Exploring how interpreters negotiate a compromising set of positions—as both Iraqi nationals and employees of the US army—Campbell thinks of the interpreters’ subjectivities as sites where the configuration of their “gendered agency” (cf. Mahler and Pessar 2001, 200) can be observed. In her analysis, Iraqi interpreters’ labor of translation also constitutes an exercise in subject formation (61) that emerges out of the encounter between the interpellations of US power structures and their strategic renderings of Iraqi culture.One of the book’s greatest strengths is its success at describing the convergences between US imperial feminist traditions and the dominant gendered models of a “war generation” (27–36) of Iraqis preoccupied with male protection of women. The first chapter succinctly and effectively describes the generational contingency and fluidity of dominant Iraqi gendered roles through time, as well as their coconstitution with larger colonial, nationalist, and imperialist projects in the region. The chapters that follow depict Iraqi interpreters’ reckoning with the mistranslation of these fluid and historically situated gendered social relations into rigid and orientalist representations of Iraqi gender roles, both under US occupation (chaps. 3 and 4) and within the United States’ employment, legal, and bureaucratic practices (chaps. 5 and 6).Even though the narrative engages with more male than female interlocutors (three women and seven men), Interpreters of Occupation provides close consideration of the contrasting experiences of Iraqi male and female interpreters. Illuminating how the patriarchal logics of US imperialism permeate Iraqi women’s lives, the third chapter provides a nuanced description of the double bind that Iraqi female interpreters face while working on US military bases. Specifically, Campbell shows how Iraqi women employed by US occupation forces are caught between either assuming the role of “liberated women”—a subject position ironically inhabited by becoming agreeable or indifferent to male harassment—or adopting the subject position of “a good Iraqi girl”: actively rejecting undesired sexual advancements yet risking becoming ostracized, even demonized, as a potential threat to security. Then, focusing on the experience of male interpreters, chapter 4 argues that the “hyperpatriarchy” (37) of a postoccupation Iraq allows for a sense of fraternity between American and Iraqi men that enables male interpreters to forge “cultural forms of belonging” (173–77) within and between Iraq and the United States that are inaccessible to their female counterparts. Moreover, in describing men’s reckoning with their inability to live up to a masculine “responsibility to protect” (114–55), especially vis-à-vis the families they left behind in Iraq, the author exposes the internal contradictions of this hyperpatriarchy, as experienced by interpreters in navigating the material conditions of their transnational becoming.The author presents the fact that Iraqi female interpreters tend to consider their residence in the United States more permanent than male interpreters consider theirs as evidence against a common assumption in migration and transnational gender studies that women are generally more tied to “home” than men (203). However, departing from a perspective that understands the links between “women” and “home” as performative rather than constitutive, Campbell’s interlocutors’ stories could also be seen to confirm this familiar observation. Anecdotes of Iraqi female interpreters’ inability to forge a sense of cultural belonging in the United States, as opposed to their male counterparts’ capacity to occupy the identity of “hyphenated Americans” (208), along with men’s preoccupation with female interpreters’ exercise of their sexuality as a marker of Iraq’s reputation (89–92) bespeak strong associations between “woman,” “home,” “nation,” and “tradition” in this transnational context. The fact that female interpreters find it harder to imagine returning to Iraq could be seen as a testament to the higher scrutiny to which these symbolic associations subject women.This book’s rich ethnographic material raises tantalizing questions beyond the scope of its argumentative arc. For instance, Campbell observes suspicion and social dispersion among her interlocutors that would seem to signal contemporary expressions of divisive colonial practices in the region. Overall, her emphasis on the subject formation of the interpreters—although successful in allowing for the continuous destabilization of gendered dichotomies and stagnant ideas of culture—forecloses an interpretative strategy that would reveal something more general about the spatial structuring and restructuring of imperial power in the contemporary Middle East through the gendered management of social relations across different boundaries.The author’s visibility throughout the ethnographic description is a salutary methodological choice and the description of her role “as a checkpoint of sorts” (4) is cogent, even if the implications of this observation could have been carried farther, perhaps enabling a metalevel discussion regarding the practice of social science itself. There is a striking resemblance between the lifeworld of the Iraqi interpreters of the US occupation described by Campbell and that of the ethnographic researcher who, more often than not, is engaged in efforts of translation and, indeed, of interpretation between the languages and “cultures” of social groups with asymmetrical power. In this sense, Interpreters of Occupation invites stimulating conversations regarding our own uncomfortable—if potentially productive—positioning as researchers, often situated betwixt and between larger imperial enterprises.This book is a great resource for graduate and undergraduate courses on refugees, gender, migration, and transnationalism, with valuable insights for scholars investigating contemporary modes of international intervention and gendered imperialist practices in the Middle East more broadly.

During the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, Haiti’s Fourth Estate, the Haitian press, stood in solidarity with ordinary Haitians and became a fixed feature of the resistance in Haiti to foreign occupation for nineteen years. The alliance featured conservative publications like Le Matin , traditional commercial papers like Le Nouvelliste , and radical antioccupation ones like Haïti-Intégrale and La Presse . Despite their differing political persuasions, owners of the dozens of newspapers in Haiti challenged the Haitian state and the United States for the loss of Haitian sovereignty, and many went to jail for it. In 2015, an alliance between Haiti’s leading media organizations, the ANMH and AMIH, has emerged in the face of a new US-led interference, this time in the country’s reconstruction. The threat to the country’s sovereignty by the international aid community has come at a time when political and economic institutions remain weak. Haiti’s press stands out as an institution willing to hold an open debate about Haiti’s recovery and development. This role is significant given the country’s fledgling democracy and persistent socioeconomic crises brought on by two decades of political upheavals and natural disasters culminating with the 2010 earthquake. The narrative in Haitian newsrooms and radio programs on the ground echoes the narratives of 1915. The strategies employed by Haiti’s alliance of media organizations today, both mainstream and alternative, harkens back to the solidarity on display between Haiti’s radical and conservative press when Haiti faced occupation in 1915. The censorship and repression of the Haitian press is evident today, but when faced with an external threat to national self-determination, Haiti’s media continues to act as an advocate for the Haitian people.

“The Spirit of Don Papa Lives on in Us All”: Fanaticism and the US Occupation of the Philippines Jeffrey Wheatley It is a strange feeling for a historian of American religion to come face to face with a person they study. In this case, the face belongs to Papa Isio, a Filipino insurgent who lived on the island of Negros Occidental in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Papa Isio marshaled elements of Catholic and indigenous Filipino religion in his quest for political power and resistance to the Spanish and US occupations of the Philippines. He claimed for himself a number of impressive titles, including Son of God and the rightful Catholic pontiff. As such, he promised to usher in a new era of political and spiritual independence for the archipelago. When I came across his face recently, he had a new title. He is now “Don Papa” of Don Papa Rum. The rum’s branding, featuring an artistic rendering of him, emphasizes how Papa Isio embodies Negros Occidental and its rich sugarcane, now available to consumers across the world in its distilled form. The Bleeding Heart Rum Company, quoting the International Wines and Spirits Record, has recently touted the rum as the “fastest-growing super premium rum brand in the United States.”1 “The spirit of Don Papa lives on in us all,” [End Page 102] the bottle tells us. What this “spirit” entails, however, has been historically contentious. Whereas Papa Isio is now marketed as a desirable, familiar commodity, he was once, from the perspective of many US Americans and some Filipino officials, a dangerous fanatic. This essay explores representations of Papa Isio’s religio-political commitments. It does so by examining depictions of Papa Isio as a fanatic in US media, scholarship, and governmental reports. It concludes by returning to the Papa Isio portrayed on Don Papa Rum. The amelioration of Papa Isio in the form of a Filipino-produced and globally available commodity provides suggestions on how to—and how not to—think about religious fanatics. This essay serves as a short reflection on a challenge in my broader research, which examines the politics of the concept of fanaticism in American religious history. How might we study fanaticism in a way that goes beyond the dichotomy of fanatics as, on the one hand, religiously delusional and mindlessly violent and, on the other hand, more sanitized interpretations that strip them of their more radical and enchanted religious beliefs and rituals? Many US Americans in the early twentieth century viewed Papa Isio’s “spirit” as more threatening than Don Papa Rum’s quirky, prideful artistic representation of him suggests. He was, instead, a subversive fanatic who threatened the US occupation. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists, military officials, and the US public all took an interest in religiously-inspired rebels like Papa Isio. American media investigated the sources of fanatics’ authority, their rituals, and their material objects. Rarely providing simple, neutral description, these texts exoticized those so-called fanatics and sought, ultimately, to find ways to better control and even eliminate them. His “spirit” or, more precisely, his claim to have spiritual powers, was a source of consternation for US Americans. Eventually imprisoned after surrendering, Papa Isio died in a colonial prison. Dionisio Magbuela, as Papa Isio was known at the time, was a laborer early in his life. He was forced to move multiple times and frequently came into conflict with wealthier landowners. By the late 1890s, he had become a political, religious, and military authority figure on the island. Dionisio was operating within the indigenous tradition of babaylanism on the island. Babaylans were shaman-like religious authority figures, with ritual expertise, prophetic powers, and special authority. Babaylans were traditionally women. In the 1890s, babaylans were increasingly men who embraced more traditional expectations of masculinity. This shift in religious authority was perhaps because Filipinos were increasingly utilizing the powers of babaylanism for [End Page 103] war against occupiers.2 Magbuela began to go by “Papa” Isio to signal that he was the rightful Pope of the Philippines. At that point, he began to incorporate many of the ceremonies and powers attributed to the traditional Roman Catholic...

In 1931, US writer Langston Hughes set sail for Haiti, the “land of blue sea and green hills,” in order – as he recalls in his 1956 memoir I Wonder as I Wander – “to get away from my troubles.” Seeking shelter from the US race problem in what he imagined would be the welcoming arms of the strong, proud, black republic, Hughes received instead a shocking, firsthand glimpse at Haiti’s constitutional contradiction: that the Haitian nation, “congealed around notions of liberty from slavery,” was launched in an opposite direction from the Haitian state, which had “inherited the social and economic institutions from colonial times,” and thus “required a regimented labor force.” The Haiti that welcomed Hughes in April 1931, fifteen years into the US Occupation, was indeed “a new world, a darker world,” but one in which “the white shadows” had encroached, transforming Haiti “into a sort of military dictatorship, backed by American guns.” It had become “a fruit tree for Wall street, a mango for the Occupation, coffee for foreign cups, and poverty for its own black workers and peasants.” All of the labor that kept Haiti alive and the foreign traders rich, lamented Hughes, was done by “the people without shoes.” This essay examines the rhetoric of national identification in twentieth-century Haiti – through the complex literary lens of US writers of the African diaspora, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, whose own labors to present how “the people without shoes” had worked to prop up Haiti’s economy for centuries, often fluctuated between biting political commentary aimed at the political elite, gentle depictions celebrating local peasant customs, and (strategic) apologies for the US Occupation – all revelatory of a desire to build a space of transatlantic, postnational sense of kinship; a narrative homeland for the exiled and the nationless people on either side of its borders, forging parallels between all New World architects-turned-outsiders in their own homelands.

This study examines the US occupation policy for Shinto shrines in postwar Japan and Korea, where the Japanese colonial government and settlers left more than 1000 shrines. For this reason, how to deal with the local shrines was a common policy concern in the two occupied countries placed under the same command of General Douglas MacArthur, appointed as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). By tracing Shinto policy in the two occupied zones, this chapter shows that there was a stark contrast between the two policies. In Japan, SCAP aimed at disestablishing Shinto as a state religion, but preserved shrines as religious sites. In Korea, the US occupation forces did not regard Shinto as a religion and ordered all shrines to be closed and confiscated the property despite the SCAP’s concern that abolishing shrines could violate the freedom of religion. This chapter argues that this policy difference eventually led to the formation of different church–state relations in postwar South Korea and Japan.

The US occupation of Haiti (1915–34) had a tremendous impact on the evolution of the Haitian military. It was a point of demarcation between the past and the present as the marines almost completely destroyed the old army and gave birth to a new military structure. In other words, the US occupation transformed the Haitian military from a fragmented institution into a professional organization, from disjointed regional army units into a centralized bureaucracy, and from a ‘director’ into a ‘mediator’ role in Haitian politics. For some politicians, the transformation was a dream come true. In the nineteenth century the army served as the government, and this constituted a problem or, more precisely, an obstacle for the establishment of democracy in Haiti. Countless politicians were hoping to see an end to the pre-eminence of the military in governmental affairs. It was argued that the army could be constrained only by way of reorganizing the institution and redefining its strictly military mission. Previous attempts at reorganization were sectoral and did not lead to the total transformation of the entire institution. The failure to reorganize the army was due to the shortsightedness of many politicians and their unwillingness to come to a consensus. Some of them were too dependent on the institution for their political careers and opportunities.KeywordsCivil SocietyDominican RepublicCentral PlateauMarine CorpsMilitary AcademyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The US military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924—lacking any basis in international law, without even the façade of a puppet government as in neighbouring Haiti, and initially undertaken when the world (including the State Department) was distracted by the war in Europe—has understandably been of keen interest to historians because the US authorities' promotion of governmental centralization over the hitherto predominant forces of regionalism, and of a strong military institution as a means to overcome perceived chronic political instability, is deemed to have paved the way for the long dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930–61). Apart from general country histories, most works treat separately the period prior to 1916, which witnessed ever more flagrant US infringements of Dominican sovereignty—traditionally categorized under the rubric of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’—and the actual years of marine occupation; Bruce Calder's The impact of intervention: the Dominican Republic during the US occupation of 1916–1924 (University of Texas Press, 1984) and Alan McPherson's comparative study, The invaded: how Latin Americans and their allies fought and ended US occupations (Oxford University Press, 2014), for instance, both launch precipitously into the period of US occupation, offering too little by way of historical background. Ellen Tillman's book, by contrast, spans the temporal divide: three chapters are dedicated to the years of growing US impositions, while four chapters deal more comprehensively with the different phases of the military government. The book is also notable for the author's prodigious research in US and Dominican archives, in particular the records of the US-imposed Customs Receivership, the US Marine Corps, and the US military administration (lodged in Santo Domingo); indeed, most of the references in the copious endnotes refer to archival sources. This has enabled her to provide a greater degree of pertinent detail on the subject than has been so far available in the secondary literature.

This study provides an overview of the incidents of April 3 and October 19 and their impact on the U.S. fortification of Okinawa. During World War II, the Japanese militarized Okinawa and Jeju, while U.S. forces invaded Okinawa. Although they didn’t invade Jeju, the presence of Japanese troops and the geographical location delayed the arrival of U.S. troops, while the People's Committee gained great power. Even in the left-leaning Suncheon area, residents became increasingly dissatisfied with the US occupation, which inherited the police system of the Japanese occupation and favored the pro-Japanese right. Meanwhile, the United States initially considered a long-term presence of U.S. troops with the primary goal of preventing Soviet domination of South Korea. However, some military personnel in the US government considered the occupation as a burden and raised the idea of troop withdrawal. In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly resolved the withdrawal of occupation forces after general elections and establishment of new government. Under these circumstances, the April 3 Incident occurred against the backlash against the US occupation, and the October 19 Incident, which occurred to reject the suppression of Jeju, considered as “communist riots” and were subject to suppression. While these events delayed the withdrawal of US troops, the United States, which wanted to balance power in East Asia, decided to militarize Okinawa and hold it for a long time. With the end of the US occupation in Korea, military personnel with experience in Korea became involved in the military government of Okinawa.

Historians of Cuba have been prolific in documenting changes in the late nineteenth century and in the years around the 1959 Cuban Revolution, with the early republic—the years following the US occupation of 1898–1902—relegated, with a few exceptions, to a footnote of intellectual stagnation. But in The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana, Daniel A. Rodríguez shows how during this time Cuba was in fact at the forefront of medical and social advancements, alongside some of the most advanced democracies.This story of the Cuban-driven modernization of medicine and public health begins with a view into the lives of those who had been relocated by the Spanish to the concentration camps outside Cuba's large cities during the Cuban War of Independence. Rodríguez brings us details of the lives of reconcentrados that show how their struggles to survive in spaces without health infrastructure, away from their homes and sources of income, helped shape the postwar reconstruction of a nation around public health. This book makes clear that it was not only the US and Cuban sanitarians and policymakers whose actions and interests influenced how the nation conceptualized national health. By placing the recipients of policy at the beginning of the story, Rodríguez centers living conditions, nutrition and food security, and the individual health of the poorest—that is, social determinants of health—as the core shaping principles in the modernization of public health and the establishment of health as a right in Cuba.By looking at the actions of physicians and sanitarians, health officials, and caretakers in the second half of the 1800s—when bacteriology and its related medical advancements had started to rapidly change the ability to provide health to mostly urban populations—and setting the political and military events to the story's background, Rodríguez shows that it was Cubans who had articulated a vision for a nation that included health rights. During the US occupation of the island from 1898 to 1902, Cuban physicians were active in working with and sometimes against US health authorities to secure those rights for Cubans, responding first to the needs of their own. The centrality to Cuban nationalism of the right to health, Rodríguez shows, had been articulated before the wars of independence and shaped medicine and politics. War and US intervention are therefore only part of a larger story. Cuban physicians operated within the constraints of the US occupation government's priorities (mainly protecting commerce and preventing another outbreak of yellow fever) but also pushed back to address the health threats to the Cuban population, in particular the conditions that made diseases like tuberculosis and enteritis the biggest killers of Cubans. The country's physicians had, after all, been articulating a medical nationalism for decades. In a careful dance between authority and ability, those who participated with US authorities in sanitation were able to incorporate nationalist goals in the public health institutions that they established. Rodríguez teases out Cuban physicians' individual motivations and roles in government through the first decades of the twentieth century until the years around when the Platt Amendment was abrogated. He shows us the individuals who shaped policy as well as those whose lives were changed by these actions. All of this comes together very effectively, as the work describes chapter by chapter how specific public health issues in the early twentieth century—reconcentrados, yellow fever, plague, infant mortality, tuberculosis, professionalization of nursing, hospitals—all are part of a larger quest toward shaping a Cuban medical modernity. And the book is beautifully written, using an impressive array of sources. Each chapter begins with a vignette, the details of which take the reader to a very specific sensation, whether to envision what Cubans saw, smelled, read, or felt.The Right to Live in Health is an important contribution to the history of Cuba and the history of medicine and public health. For historians of Cuba it provides a view of Habaneros—we learn about aspects of the lives and health of people from various races, immigrant groups, social classes, gender, and age in a persuasive, thorough, and well-researched argument. Rodríguez also shows us how medical professionals, charity and beneficence organizations, politicians, and ordinary citizens pushed and influenced the shaping of a Cuban nation where health was to be a right, a nation that could be a model to others in the time of global health. Although at times perhaps veering too much into a story of Cuban exceptionalism, Rodríguez, by highlighting the Cuban story of social medicine, demonstrates that Cubans were in real conversation with the advances in twentieth-century social medicine in other parts of the world.

Of the many legacies of the first US occupation of Haiti, migration has been paramount in shaping economic development and cultural transformation. In giving rise to mass migration among the peasantry, the US occupation instituted migration as a livelihood option for Haitians. The large majority of Haitian migrants went to Cuba. Since Haitian men traditionally harvested sugar and, accordingly, were recruited to work on Cuban sugar plantations owned by US companies, the composition of the migration was primarily male. Given the high proportion of men, Haitian migration to Cuba during the occupation has largely been interpreted through a male perspective. Studies have generally focused on the conditions of laborers, presented as exclusively male, on sugar estates. The attention given to male labor migrants has framed the study of the movement of Haitian women to Cuba. When Haitian women have been considered, their mobility has been defined in relation to Haitian men, stripping Haitian women of their agency. In this paper, I argue for a reinterpretation of Haitian migration to Cuba that considers the mobility of Haitian women independently of Haitian men, based on the descriptions of two Haitian women who migrated unaccompanied to the Bahamas. In presenting their stories, I draw on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas during the late 1990s to call into question the historical depiction of Haitian women in Cuba. I discuss the hardships unaccompanied Haitian women faced in the Bahamas and propose that these difficulties would have been similar for Haitian women who migrated independently to Cuba. Given the scale of the migration and the role of foreign interests and investments in its direction, the migration of Haitian peasants to Cuba during the US occupation of Haiti established precedents that were repeated in later movements across the Caribbean, including the Bahamas. Understanding the conditions under which Haitian women migrated to Cuba, therefore, is critical for interpreting subsequent migrations of Haitian women in the region.

This article explores the ways in which what I am calling the “schizophrenic writing” of Haitian author Frankétienne constitutes an aesthetic response to the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). I argue that the US occupation of Haiti is symptomatic of a shift in the symbolic order from which the Haitian subject is once again excluded as “other.” In H’éros-chimères , Franketienne’s personal trauma—his conception during the rape of his mother—merges with the traumatic structure of Haitian history—from slavery to dictatorships and natural catastrophes. Readable as a bodily inscription and as a textual repetition, the “original” wound(s) initiate(s) Frankétienne’s nonrepresentational writing, which questions Western ideologies by occupying the uninhabitable site of the real. The argument is twofold: first, I address some general questions about the specificity of the US occupation compared to other phenomena such as colonization, military deployment, economic exploitation, and even humanitarian intervention. Second, I investigate the notion of Frankétienne’s schizophrenic writing, which I posit as an attempt to occupy the real . If colonization and subsequent interventions in Haiti confiscated the domain of the symbolic—typically reserved for Western subjects—then occupying the real may become a political gesture of resistance that reveals the unexpected consequences of what was at the time conceived as a “generous intervention.”