1910–1911: (McDonald’s Railroad and the Five-Dollar Pearls: American Capital Arrives in Haiti): Entwined with the affairs of the BNRH was the Chemin de Fer N…

1910–1911: (McDonald’s Railroad and the Five-Dollar Pearls: American Capital Arrives in Haiti): Entwined with the affairs of the BNRH was the Chemin de Fer National, a dormant venture revived in August 1910 by American carpetbagger James P. McDonald. The National Railroad was to link the North, the Artibonite, and the West, financing itself from export duties on figues — fig bananas, a Haitian delicacy McDonald was to cultivate on public land. McDonald swung the contract through the president’s daughter Célestina Simon, who was also the head of a Voodoo cult and wielded great influence over her father — McDonald is said to have told Célestina that all the crown princesses of Europe had collections of jewels, inquired where hers was, and upon her reply that she had none, produced a string of pearls that were hers if and when her father signed the concession. Antoine Simon signed that afternoon and the pearls — which cost five dollars — were delivered that evening. Construction consisted of three separate sections where the going was easy but failed to link up across mountains and thus never realized the road’s prime objective of unifying the various regions. The National City Bank took over the project in 1911, and the City Bank executive already serving as American vice-president of the BNRH was in 1913 appointed president of the National Railroad — his name, synonymous for more than a decade with American financial interests in Haiti, was Roger L. Farnham. Meanwhile, fifteen months of Simon’s contracts had made the country restive: editors of Le Bon Sens and L’Impartial were imprisoned in chains, Dr. Rosalvo Bobo of Cap Haïtien was hauled in for raising his voice at the president, and in January 1911 Firmin aboard S.S. Montreal tried vainly to go ashore while the guns of Fort National remained trained on the ship. The structural irony of the railroad episode — an American carpetbagger bribing a Voodoo manbo with five-dollar pearls to secure a concession that would never be completed, backed by the same National City Bank that now controlled Haiti’s central bank — captured in miniature the neocolonial machinery that was replacing the old French and German financial architecture: the forms had changed, but the extractive logic remained identical to that which had structured Haiti’s relationship with the metropole since the indemnity of 1825.