Le Grand Braquage Américain : Comment l’Or Haïtien de 1914 a Hypothéqué un Siècle de Croissance
OP-ED | The Great American Gold Heist: How the 1914 Seizure of Haiti’s Reserves Mortgaged a Century of Growth By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) There are dates in a nation’s history that sit like a stone in the collective memory. For Haiti, December 17, 1914 is one of them. That morning, eight U.S. Marines walked into the Banque Nationale in Port-au-Prince, loaded 17 crates of Haitian gold —the country’s entire reserve—onto a waiting naval vessel, and shipped it to New York. The official justification was “stability.” Haitians called it what it was: a heist , executed under the shadow of gunboats, months before the full military occupation began. For decades, the episode lived in the footnotes of diplomatic history, sanitized by euphemism. But numbers have a way of cutting through myth. And now, thanks to a new analytical tool—a Monte Carlo simulation app built to model Haiti’s lost century of capital—we can finally quantify what that theft meant. The ...
