Istwa Nou

Cincinnatus Leconte was schooled as a boy in Mainz and worked as a young man in the German consulate at Cap-Haitien. German firms paid for his rise. After he took power in 1911 the German merchants advanced him two million gourdes, and Perl, the German minister, was overheard predicting that they would hold the customs houses before the year was out. The investment fitted a pattern running back forty years. Germany had extracted an apology from Haiti at gunpoint in 1872, delivered ultimatums since, sent the gunboat Panther to destroy the Haitian warship La Crete-a-Pierrot in 1902, and bought the bonds of every rebellion at ten cents on the dollar. What the merchants had purchased in Leconte turned out to be a man who declined to serve as their instrument once he held the palace. Their money bought them access and no obedience, which was the standing risk in the whole arrangement, and one reason Germany kept having to finance the next candidate as well.

Cincinnatus Leconte confounded everyone who had predicted what he would be. Within weeks of taking office in 1911 the American minister Henry Furniss reported that the new collectors of customs were, without exception, men known to be honest. Leconte said he would leave departmental business to his ministers, which Furniss noted would be a first for a Haitian government. He made serious judicial appointments to courts that had been bywords for corruption since the founding. At the education ministry he installed Tertullien Guilbaud, a distinguished writer and lawyer, who restarted the school inspectorate, raised the pay of teachers who had been earning less than jailers, pushed the long-postponed vocational school, and went after the rural schools that existed mainly on paper as salaries for the godchildren and dependants of deputies and generals. Leconte cut the army and improved what remained, built new barracks in 1912 named for his great-grandfather Dessalines, and gave Haitian soldiers a rifle range for the first time.

On 7 August 1911 Antenor Firmin came within sight of the Haitian coast aboard a French steamer. Cincinnatus Leconte was already in Port-au-Prince with the army behind him, and Firmin did not land. He died in exile on St Thomas five weeks afterward. In 1885 Firmin had published De l'Egalite des Races Humaines, a direct answer to Arthur de Gobineau's ranking of human races, written by a Haitian living in Paris and then ignored for a century by the discipline it had corrected. As foreign minister in 1891 he refused an American demand for a naval station at the Mole Saint-Nicolas while Admiral Gherardi's squadron sat in the harbour. He was the ablest man in Haitian public life and he never governed it. Three times his supporters rose and three times the army beat them. His weapons were seized in New York in 1908, his men were cut down outside Gonaives, and the last he saw of his country was a coastline from the deck of someone else's ship.

Cincinnatus Leconte entered Port-au-Prince on 7 August 1911, went to the cathedral for mass, and was proclaimed head of the executive while the guns of Fort National fired a salute of twenty-one. On 14 August the National Assembly ratified what the army had already settled. Leconte was born on 29 September 1859 and was a great-grandson of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who declared Haitian independence in 1804 and was killed by his own officers two years later. Descent from Dessalines was an asset no president had carried since Faustin Soulouque. In a country where the revolution was the one source of legitimacy everybody agreed on, the name promised that the debt of 1804 might still be collected. Leconte governed for a year. On 8 August 1912 the palace blew up in the night with the president and several hundred soldiers inside, and Haiti returned to the run of short governments that ended with the American landing of 1915.