Epilogue: The Final Frontier

Abstract

The first foreign head of state to visit the Republic of Haiti was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In July 1934, the United States President paid a goodwill visit to Cap Haitien to announce that the last American marines would leave Haiti in another few weeks, thereby ending 19 years of American Occupation. Haiti was set to embark on what its then President, Stenio Vincent, termed its ‘Second Liberation’. On 31 March 1995, United States President Bill Clinton arrived in Haiti to witness the final withdrawal of American troops. Six months earlier, fifteen thousand heavily armed troops had intervened in Haiti to restore to power Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These events, sixty-one years apart, are a dramatic index of the intense relation that has existed between the two oldest republics in the Western Hemisphere.