1914, November–December: (Bons Da: The Newsprint Currency and the Banque’s Double Standard): The extent to which questions of recognition and some special Am…

1914, November–December: (Bons Da: The Newsprint Currency and the Banque’s Double Standard): The extent to which questions of recognition and some special American role in Haiti were complicated by the private interests of the Banque was highlighted in November by a desperate attempt on the part of the government to outflank the Banque by printing up sixteen million gourdes in violation of the Banque’s exclusive right to issue currency. But the need for money, no matter what kind, seemed so pressing that instead of waiting for the shipment from New York, the government ran off eight million gourdes on newsprint at a local job printer’s — mocked in the streets as Bons Da, from Théodore’s nickname, these bills were paid to hungry Cacos who then forced them on merchants with machete and musket. Théodore, who ran through five Finance Ministers in as many months, nonetheless had a fair grievance against the Banque, which the historian Joseph Chatelain well stated: it represented either a strange lack of logic or good faith on the part of the Banque to invoke for its own benefit the argument of force majeure — wartime blockage of exchange transactions — to justify failure to carry out contractual obligations, while at the same time demanding the government, victim of the same circumstances of force majeure, to respect its obligations rigorously. The Banque’s double standard — invoking the World War to excuse its own defaults while demanding that the Haitian government honor its obligations under the same wartime conditions — laid bare the asymmetry that had structured Haiti’s financial relationship with foreign capital since 1825: the rules of the international financial order applied in one direction only, binding the debtor nation while liberating the creditor institution, a mechanism that Fanon would recognize as the economic dimension of colonial sovereignty — the power to define which obligations are sacred and which are contingent, and to ensure that the answer always favors the metropole.