Statement from The Queen on the Day of Remembrance

Royal Court of Cap-Paradis
8 November 2026

On this Day of Remembrance, We join the nations of the world in honoring the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have laid down their lives in defense of human dignity and freedom, on distant fields and on their own soil. Some of their names are cut into stone in a thousand towns. A great many more are written nowhere at all. To all of them We offer the homage of Our Person, Our Court, and Our people.

We turn Our thoughts in particular to the sons of Haiti, whose part in the Second World War the world has been slow to record. Haiti declared war upon Japan on the eighth of December 1941, and upon Germany and Italy four days after. A small republic, only seven years delivered from foreign occupation, it had little cause to expect the gratitude of the great powers. It placed its harvests, its coasts, and its young men at the service of the Allied cause all the same.

Early in 1943, Raymond Cassagnol, Alix Pasquet, and Philippe Célestin left Port-au-Prince for the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, and Ludovic Audant, Eberle Guilbaud, and Nicolas Pelissier followed after them. They were men of a sovereign Black nation, and on the road to their training they were made to ride where Jim Crow directed. They bore that insult and mastered their craft.

Nor did the children of Haitian soil serve beneath one flag alone. Philippe Kieffer, born at Port-au-Prince, joined the Free French in 1940 and led French commandos ashore in Normandy, where, twice wounded, he refused for two days to leave his men. His son, fighting in the maquis, was killed by German troops in that same season. How many others of Haitian birth or blood served and fell under Allied colors, the record does not readily tell. We honor them unnamed, and We charge those who come after to go on searching for their names.

The war spared Alix Pasquet, but his country's struggle did not. Fifteen years after Tuskegee, he gave his life at Port-au-Prince in armed opposition to the brutal rule of François Duvalier. Raymond Cassagnol, the last of the Haitian Airmen, lived to the age of one hundred and two, and saw the honors owed him arrive long after they were due.

These men stood in an old succession. Soldiers of Saint-Domingue shed their blood for the liberty of another people at Savannah in 1779. In August 1791, the enslaved of the northern plain rose to claim their own, and over twelve years of war they met the armies of France, Spain, and Britain. Toussaint Louverture, seized by treachery, died a prisoner at the Fort de Joux. Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe carried the struggle on, and at Vertières, in this same month of November, in 1803, the Indigenous Army broke the power of France in Saint-Domingue.

On the first day of 1804, Haiti stood free.

We honor Lieutenant Sanité Bélair, condemned in 1802 to the blade because she was a woman, who demanded a soldier's death and faced the firing squad without a blindfold. We honor those who held Crête-à-Pierrot. We honor the thousands of that army whose names survive, if at all, only in the ledgers that had listed them as property.

We remember as well all who, like Alix Pasquet, defended freedom at home against the brutal regimes of the United States occupation and the Duvaliers. Dignity has never been a gift to the descendants of the enslaved. It has been defended, at great cost, by those who would not surrender it.

Our island stands at the south end of the Windward Passage, and a watch was kept upon it for the duration of the Second World War. The sea those airmen searched is the sea that washes Our shores. We therefore invite all Navassans, on this day, to keep a moment of silence, and to speak these names aloud where they have too seldom been heard.

That this remembrance may outlast any one reign, We do hereby declare that Remembrance Sunday shall be kept throughout the Kingdom of Navassa as a Day of Annual Thanksgiving, to be honored on the second Sunday of November in this and every year hereafter, in gratitude for the lives given and the freedom they secured.

Their watch is ended. Ours continues.