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In 1943, in the midst of World War II, an imperial United States reached the zenith of its military power in the Caribbean Sea with bases, landing strips, or garrisoned troops in almost all the islands and territories bordering that body of water. The only ones without a U.S. military presence, the French Antilles and Guyane, came into the fold with the crumbling of the Vichy regime that year. Imperial France reached its nadir, with its colonies occupied by Axis or Allied forces and divided by a dispute between the factions of General Charles De Gaulle and General Henri Giraud. This essay examines aspects of a French and American interimperial encounter during World War II in the Caribbean, the case of Guyane. We begin by comparing the French and American empires with regard to their expansion and defense policies. Within this context, the twofold subaltern roles played by colonials in the imperial armed forces is studied, especially that of the Puerto Ricans in different regional colonial and neocolonial scenarios, namely, the British and French territories and Panama. This is followed by a discussion of Guyane’s strategic position and the participation of Pan American Airways (PAA) in the construction by Puerto Rican civil workers of an airfield for an aerial route toward French West and North Africa. Finally, short quotes from an oral history interview and photographs of Major Juan Meléndez-Utset, a Puerto Rican who served as commander of the American Rochambeau Field in Guyane, bring to life the impact of the U.S. armed forces in Puerto Rico and Guyane by illustrating several of the issues analyzed in this work.1 There were several similarities and differences between the French and U.S. imperial systems. France had a longer experience in the management of overseas empire. Second to Spain in acquiring and settling territory in the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, France focused first on North French and American Imperial Accommodation in the Caribbean during World War II The Experience of Guyane and the Subaltern Roles of Puerto Rico humberto garcía-muñiz and rebeca campo 441 America, then on the Caribbean, and shortly afterward on South America. Cayenne , eventually the capital of Guyane, was established in 1604, one of the early ancienne colonies of the first French empire. Bordering Brazil and Dutch Guiana (Suriname today), Guyane, a backwater in the empire, stumbled initially as a slave-based sugar plantation society.2 In 1803, as a result of Napoleon’s plans to retreat from the Western Hemisphere due to the defeat of French forces in Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti), France sold the Louisiana territory to the United States: “Louisiana was a remarkable case of expansion without conquest . . . but it was nonetheless an imperial acquisition—imperial in the sense of the aggressive encroachment of one people upon the territory of another, resulting in the subjugation of that people to alien rule.”3 As a result, France facilitated American expansion by land and sea—opening a territorial front on the Gulf of Mexico and furthering the United States’ continental expansion westward to the Pacific. Imperial France ceased to be a North American power and lingered mainly in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyane, colonies whose contribution to the national economy diminished in the mid-1840s as sugar beets displaced slave-planted cane as the leading crop for sugar production, an ironic twist of history considering that France had retained Guadeloupe rather than Canada in the Seven Years’ War. In the second half of the nineteenth century France failed twice to position itself geopolitically in the Western Hemisphere, first, with Maximilian’s fiasco in Mexico and, second, with Ferdinand de Lesseps’s debacle in attempting to build an isthmian canal. By that time, Guyane had become a penal colony (le bagne) infamous for l’ affaire Dreyfus. Successful in its continental expansion in the nineteenth century, the United States failed to expand simultaneously in the Caribbean: no free space remained for a colonial scramble. Except for independent Haiti (1804) and the Dominican Republic (1844), all Caribbean territories were in British, Danish, Dutch, French, or Spanish hands long before the United States attained its independence in 1783. The United States failed to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands (1867), to acquire the Spanish colonies of Cuba (1848) or Puerto Rico (1868), to annex the sovereign Dominican Republic (1870), or to rent land for naval bases in such places as Môle St. Nicholas in...

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