1849–1855: (Cimmerian Darkness: The Great Powers, the Blockade, and the Fiscal Pillage): Anticipating that Soulouque would not abandon his determination to r…

1849–1855: (Cimmerian Darkness: The Great Powers, the Blockade, and the Fiscal Pillage): Anticipating that Soulouque would not abandon his determination to reunify Hispaniola, Dominican President Buenaventura Báez launched a series of naval raids against the south of Haiti in November 1849, commanded by a drunken French naval officer named Fagalde, (14) burning Anse-à-Pître, bombarding Saltrou and Dame Marie — yet such harassment only goaded the obstinate Soulouque into renewed war, and in June 1850, 10,000 Haitian soldiers again invaded the Partie de l’Est, though the invasion wound down into inconclusive forays along the ill-defined frontier. Soulouque’s dilemma regarding Santo Domingo was real: if he invaded, the great powers would intervene; if he failed to intervene, foreign interests — most likely American — would establish a hostile slaveocracy in the East, and the consequences in 1850 were predictable as Britain, France, and the United States told Soulouque he could not pursue hostilities and “encouraged” Haiti to grant a truce to Báez. To support the imperial magnificence — and to underwrite the fiscal pillage conducted by all officials from the emperor down — printing presses spewed money at a rate of 15,000 to 20,000 gourdes a day, more than $28 million in paper during the whole thirteen years according to historian Anténor Firmin, while the dollar exchange rate for the gourde soared from 4 to 16 in two years. When France sent Admiral Duquesne in 1853 threatening to bombard Port-au-Prince to restart indemnity payments, Soulouque fiercely rejoined: “Je repousserai la force par la force” — and Duquesne let the matter rest, for as American agent Robert Walsh wrote Secretary of State Daniel Webster, the Haitian government was a despotism of the most ignorant, corrupt description, its treasury bankrupt and its population immersed in what he called “Cimmerian darkness.” The language of Walsh’s dispatch — with its casual association of Blackness, ignorance, and despotism — performs precisely the colonial epistemic operation that Fanon anatomized: the conflation of political dysfunction with racial essence, such that the structural impossibilities facing the world’s first Black republic are transmuted into evidence of inherent Black incapacity, erasing the external forces — the crushing indemnity, the naval blockades, the diplomatic quarantine — that produced the very conditions being described.