Istwa Nou

By June 1914 Port-au-Prince was unsafe for the government that held it. An American observer watched Dominican rebels moving freely among the crowd at Pont Beudet station in the Cul-de-Sac, wearing the scarlet hat bands and sashes of the revolution. General Delly judged the moment right and attacked, with heavy street fighting on 17 and 18 July and an assault on the palace on the night of the 19th. The government held. Delly reached the German legation and his slower supporters were run down and shot on street corners. Among those who had joined him was Tirésias Simon Sam, president until 1902, blind since 1908, back at his house on the Rue Lamarre and putting part of a large fortune behind his cousin Vilbrun Guillaume. A Foreign Office clerk in London read the dispatches and minuted that the Haitian government was doomed. Oreste Zamor nevertheless swept the northern plain and took Ouanaminthe on 29 August, and Davilmar Théodore got over the border to Dajabón in women's clothes.

Beating Théodore should have secured the Zamors. It did not, because they had sixty-two thousand dollars left in cash. The Banque again refused to release collected revenue before the fiscal year ended, and the outbreak of war in Europe froze exchange dealings in Paris, which supplied a further reason for keeping money tight in Port-au-Prince. Shipping dislocation and blockade wrecked the coffee export on which the customs depended, and France stopped buying Haitian coffee altogether. By the middle of October the government was finished. Charles Zamor dropped the last pretence and offered Washington whatever it wanted on customs in return for keeping the family in power, and got no answer. He left Cap-Haïtien by sea on 18 October. The next morning Rosalvo Bobo walked out of the German consulate, declared himself civil chief of the revolution and welcomed Théodore, who was proclaimed president on the spot. The Zamors sailed from Gonaïves on 28 October. At four the following morning machine gun fire announced the change in the capital.