One island. Two occupations. One Senate committee that looked at what the United States military had been doing in the Caribbean — and then filed the paperwork and moved on.

In this episode, we're in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Marines landed in Haiti in 1915. The Dominican Republic had already been under U.S. financial administration since 1907. By 1916, the United States was running military occupations of both countries simultaneously, using the same personnel, the same institutional structures, and the same justificatory language: order, stability, protection of American interests.

What it lacked was an exit plan.

We follow the money that arrived before the Marines, the forced labor system that turned a Haitian community tradition into a counterinsurgency tool, the resistance fighter who became a martyr when the photograph meant to end his movement made him immortal, and the 1921 Senate hearings that produced 1,800 pages of sworn testimony about what the occupations actually looked like — and changed almost nothing.

Cuba had a constitutional clause. Panama had a canal zone. Honduras had a concession system. Haiti and the Dominican Republic had the occupations themselves. And when the occupations ended, they left behind the tools of indirect control.

Next exit: Nicaragua.

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