Port-au-Prince gets its first air raid and the bomb does not explode

By May 1957 nobody governed Haiti. A committee of the candidates' representatives collapsed as fast as it was assembled. Every night after dark people hammered on iron lamp posts and fuel drums with stones and skillets, a din called bat teneb that announced how far the mourning had spread. Mobs attacked schools. Jeremie, a stronghold of the mulatre elite, was overrun by ten thousand peasants and set on fire. Committees of Public Safety took over Cap-Haitien, Gonaives and Saint-Marc, where peasants with machetes piled boulders and tree trunks into a barricade sixty feet long to stop food reaching the capital. On Flag Day the cathedral filled with Fignole's supporters and police killed two of them. Colonel Armand then moved against Colonel Cantave with the cadets, the police and three old artillery pieces. The one flyable aircraft dropped leaflets, came back armed, and rolled a bomb out of its side door over the barracks. It bounced across the parade ground and slid to a stop unexploded. Nobody had fused it. The guns shelled the bay. The coup failed and both colonels agreed to retire.

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab states.

Arriving at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica one day after his ouster, the Haitian military president Paul Magloire remarked that when he left Haiti it was on fire and that it was now going to explode. Smith builds his conclusion on that line, arguing that in Haiti the removal of a hated ruler has usually opened a long and halting march toward change rather than concluding one, and that Magloire's comment applies as well to 2004 and 1986 as to 1956. What distinguishes the most recent instance in his account is the continuing support for Lavalas, obscured by heavily armed gangs in the capital with unreliable political allegiances, a long list of contentious presidential candidates, the drug trade, and the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie and the army.

Destin records that Magloire reached celebrity status in the United States when Eisenhower invited him for a state visit, having made the cover of a national magazine the year before. The tour was received with publicity, especially over his views on race in America. As a guest in the wake of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, the leader of the first black republic was interviewed about the case and predicted that discrimination in the United States would soon be a bad dream. He received an honorary doctorate of law from a black sociologist serving as a university president, and further honours in New York. Destin sets the visit inside the period called the golden age, when coffee prices were high and the country was the only one in the Caribbean where the tourist industry was controlled by nationals.