other powers. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the United States was the last of the
Western powers to recognize Haiti’s independence in 1862, but the years of Haiti’s essential
non-existence for U.S. foreign policy meant that the Monroe Doctrine had in fact done little to
shield Haiti from European interests. American interest in Haiti had remained distant until the
United States tried to secure the promontory of Môle St. Nicholas in Haiti as a strategic naval
base in the Caribbean in 1891. Negotiations for this area failed, and the United States obtained
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba as a naval base in 1903. Franklin Knight calls the United States a
“reluctant imperialist” in terms of Haiti but specifies that the United States nonetheless wanted
hegemonic power in a dependent hemisphere.^178 The precarious nature of Haiti’s economic and
political viability which marked the last decades of the nineteenth century would eventually
culminate in the nineteen-year-long American Occupation which would begin in 1915.
Haitian intellectuals who wrote amidst such domestic instability and internationalprejudice were generally united when defending Haiti to the outside world. Although
distinctions between blacks and mulattos were frequently made within Haiti in reference to
Haitian heads of states and even in reference to some historians, the same is rarely true for
essayists, prose writers, and poets writing after 1830. David Nicholls sets up a definition for
race and color which will be useful when discussing these complexities in Haitian society. He
explains that Haitians of both colors (black and mulatto), even from the time before the Haitian
Revolution when they were lumped together as “non-white,” accepted that they belonged to the
African or black race. He explains the racial unity that Haitians often embraced against the
West:
(^178) Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990) 224.