Catherine Porter:

Well, you know, what was really interesting is — first, you had these French colonial masters, and they held a tight grip on Haiti, long after independence. And finally, you know, the way that they held on to the financial strings of the country was through the Haitian National Bank. And soon enough, American banks took an interest in the Haitian National Bank, because as we saw, increasingly, more and more bankers from around the world saw this was a place that despite how poor it was, they could get rich. So we discovered that one of the reasons the United States, you know, invaded Haiti and occupied it for a very long time starting in 1917, was because a bank that is now known as Citigroup had really prodded the State Department to go in and secure its interests and the Haitian National Bank. And that then quickly developed into a full-fledged occupation. So part of the impetus was financial interests of Wall Street bankers.

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