1908–1911: (A Public Nuisance: The American Mediterranean and Haiti’s Vulnerability): Haiti had changed hardly at all, but the world around her was changing …

1908–1911: (A Public Nuisance: The American Mediterranean and Haiti’s Vulnerability): Haiti had changed hardly at all, but the world around her was changing a great deal. The Spanish-American War had put the seal of American hegemony over the Caribbean — editorial writers were already calling it Mare Nostrum in the style of ancient Rome. Cuba had twice been reoccupied and pacified by U.S. Marines between 1900 and 1910, Puerto Rico was an American colony, and so was the Panama Canal Zone, while the United States had or was attempting to negotiate customs receiverships in Honduras, Nicaragua, and next door in Santo Domingo. The central concept underlying U.S. foreign policy was the Roosevelt Corollary: the United States would not brook European intervention in the Americas but would help and if need be compel countries to end the disorder, peculation, and misbehavior that invited intervention. Reinforcing this was Dollar Diplomacy, stated by Secretary Knox in May 1911 as the policy of making American capital the instrumentality to secure financial stability and hence prosperity and peace to the more backward republics near the Panama Canal. Haiti, despite a century of freedom, was more underdeveloped and unstable than any nation in the region, flanked the main Caribbean approach to the canal, and was widely thought to be the object of German interventionist aspirations. On June 10, 1908, French Ambassador Jusserand wrote Pichon that the great American Republic would not tolerate outside intervention in the Black Republic — if Haiti collapsed, the Americans would take on the task themselves, but he found it impossible to credit that they were seeking to provoke such a development or burning to add to the number of their black charges. Read through the decolonial lens, the architecture of Dollar Diplomacy and the Roosevelt Corollary represented the final transformation of the Monroe Doctrine from the defensive shield that Firmin and Price had invoked to spike Gherardi’s guns into an offensive instrument of imperial penetration — the same doctrine that had once protected Haitian sovereignty now became the juridical framework for its subordination, justified by the same civilizational hierarchy that had underwritten the original indemnity of 1825.