1883–1887: (Salomon and the Great Powers: La Tortue, Môle St.

1883–1887: (Salomon and the Great Powers: La Tortue, Môle St. Nicolas, and the Windward Passage): Between 1883 and 1887, Salomon played out a three-cornered diplomatic game simultaneously involving France, Britain, and the United States — the background being France’s attempt to dig a Panama canal, which would transform the Caribbean’s Atlantic gateway, the Windward Passage, into what Alfred Thayer Mahan would soon style the American Mediterranean. For Salomon, perfide Albion was the bête noire — going back to the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Salnave and recent British support for the Liberal rebellion. In May 1883, Salomon offered to cede La Tortue to the United States in return for American protection, but Secretary Frelinghuysen declined. Six months later, on November 8, feeling the pressure of his bitter struggle, Salomon flatly offered Môle St. Nicolas or La Tortue — as the U.S. preferred — in return for an American guaranty of Haitian independence, good offices in resolving differences with unnamed foreign powers, assumption of Haiti’s debt, and two cruisers and two gunboats for his navy. This time the proposal reached the White House, but after cabinet discussion President Arthur instructed Frelinghuysen to refuse. Toward Britain, Salomon’s diplomacy was nervous and defensive, focused on forestalling apparent British designs on La Tortue connected to the Maunder claim — a lease dispute over a mahogany concession on the island. In July 1886 and March 1887, a British envoy visited Haiti aboard H.M.S. Canada, arousing intense Haitian anxiety; France promptly sent a frigate to keep an eye on the British, and the United States sounded out London, receiving assurances from Sir Julian Pauncefote that Britain had no designs on the lovely island. Salomon settled the Maunder claim for £32,000. When Foreign Minister Callisthène Fouchard visited Paris in June 1887, President Jules Grévy sent word that the Haitian president could under all circumstances count on France — thus ended four years of intense and effective diplomacy in which Salomon attained satisfactory results, not least the shelter at last of the Monroe Doctrine. That the Black republic’s survival continued to depend on the competing jealousies of the very imperial powers that had impoverished it — France, Britain, and the United States each blocking the others’ designs while none was willing to treat Haiti as a genuinely sovereign equal — reveals the neocolonial architecture that Césaire anatomized: formal independence persisting as juridical fiction within a system where the material capacity for self-determination remained perpetually subordinated to the strategic calculations of the metropoles.