Failure to Launch: Haitian Radio, Empire, and the US Archive, 1915–71

On May 16, 1963, Deputy Assistant Director of the Latin American office of the United States Information Agency (USIA), Kermit K. Brown, sent a handwritten note and typed remarks outlining a possible contingency plan for Haiti in the event that Dictator François Duvalier was overthrown. In his remarks to Public Affairs officer Fred Barcroft, Brown underscored the centrality of broadcasting to the proposal, writing that, “...we would approach this problem...using Haitian radio to our best purposes.” Although never implemented, the plan’s appearance in the U.S. National Archives (NARA) exposes a long history of Haitian broadcasting within U.S. imperial imaginary. This presentation examines the history of Haitian broadcasting in relation to U.S. assertions of imperial dominance between the 1915 U.S. Occupation and the Duvalier dictatorships. By tracing instances of neglected invasion schemes alongside moments of proposed broadcasting collaboration between Haitians and Americans, it argues that both aborted and successful ventures illuminate not only shifting American imperial interests, but also Haitian visions for inter-American cooperation through radio. Scholars such as Gary Wilder and Alejandra Bronfman have called for scholarship that both acknowledges moments that might be deemed historical failures and silences. This presentation aims to build on their work by thinking critically about the simultaneously hidden and forgotten nature of these histories, as it asks how they allow us to understand not only Haiti’s past but its present amid a renewed moment of American authoritarian intervention in the region. Drawing on declassified communications and program notes in NARA, as well as Haitian newspapers including Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin, this paper suggests that reading the archive, as Ann Laura Stoler notes, against its imperial grain reveals Haitian broadcasting as a contested space where imperial, national, and individual aspirations were continuously negotiated—on air and in classified print.