Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises by Chantalle F. Verna

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises by Chantalle F. Verna Millery Polyné Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises. by Chantalle F. Verna. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 234 pp. ISBN 0813585163. $99.95 hardcover, $29.95 paper. In Chantalle F. Verna's meaningful new book Haiti and the Uses of America, she presents the critical question that many urban elite Haitians of the 1930s and 1940s considered: "What place, if any, was there for foreign and … U.S. involvement in Haitian affairs?" (23). Washington's presence in the republic, specifically during World War I and the interwar period, in the form of military violence, discriminatory practices, and financial intervention, was deliberate and substantial. However, to frame Haitian responses to foreign aggression as simply unyielding or rebellious, as some scholars have done, remains insufficient. According to Verna, inter-American policy and programming that was largely facilitated and funded by Washington produced a complex set of agendas among urban elites regarding US international interests. Additionally, Haitian intellectuals' and government officials' recognition of the state's role in the development of nineteenth-century Pan-Americanism opened up a space for elite reassessment of the meaning and impact of political and economic cooperation in the Americas. Haitian decision-makers and social reformers sought to nurture ties with powerful foreign individuals and institutions, particularly in North America, for varied reasons, including "campaigns to secure political power, initiatives to educate individuals on the island, attempts to bolster the local economy, or efforts to contribute to contemporary international debates" (22). These intellectual, sociocultural, and political collaborations proved strategic, in order to advance Haitian progress and/or individual benefit. They also reveal the tragedy of North American imperial dominance a century after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Verna is not necessarily interested in the genre or tools of tragedy per se, but one reads in her monograph how the liberal projects of inter-American cooperation gave early to mid-century development and democratic ambition a "romantic" history of thwarting coloniality and dependence and thus defining a more humane and prosperous future.1 The reality of nineteenth-century post-independence economic and political marginality and the US Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) produced a Hegelian tragedy, an imperial "collision" of military coercion, rapacious speculation, and land acquisition. At the same time, this tragic encounter allowed for and "prompt[ed]" Haitian sociopolitical contemplation on how to better "engage politically" and test the limitations and weaknesses of "the collision between receding [End Page 150] and emergent worlds."2 Inadvertently Verna reveals the complex layers of tragedy, opening up a new reading of Haiti–US relations during the pivotal moment of the US Occupation and the transitional period in Haiti of the 1930s and 1940s, a time that that "infused tremendous hope and expectation" (xii). Although the book's primary focus is the post-Occupation period, its initial chapters take a wide historical view of Haitian attempts to establish political, cultural, and economic connections within the Americas during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Verna highlights the important hemispheric engagements, emerging ideologies, and transatlantic challenges—from antiblackness to territorial security—that prompted Haitian statesmen and revolutionaries like Solon Ménos, Haiti's foreign minister to the United States (1911–1918); Henri Christophe; and Alexandre Pétion to seek pragmatic alliances and "good relations" with regional and transatlantic neighbors (21, 24, 26). In an effort to protect Haitian sovereignty and procure important assets for individual elites, the establishment of regional networks—and ideally reciprocal connections—was vital. At the same time, the corrosive culture of coloniality and antiblackness, components of the tragedy, sharpened critiques of foreign intervention by noted Haitians. Hannibal Price, a nineteenth-century Haitian diplomat, asserted that Haitian progress had been "retarded and compromised by the … revolutions and disturbances ceaselessly stirred up by foreign merchants or by bankers" (qtd. 38). Verna assures the reader that the air of cooperation and attempts at infrastructural development that permeated elite inter-American discourse certainly encountered castigation by key Haitian figures who saw such efforts as overseas aggression. Haitian workers, intellectuals, and government officials, along with many Caribbean and Latin American...