Istwa Nou

Germany used asylum as an instrument in Haiti. Its legation and consulates took in political men, with particular hospitality for those Berlin expected to succeed later. In 1910 the American legation reported that starting trouble had become easy because there was always somewhere safe to run, and that the German consulates sheltered refugees because Germans were always mixed into the revolutionary business. The Haitian navy at that moment amounted to three ships and a joke. The Liberte had been bought in New York for fifteen thousand dollars, entered in the Port-au-Prince budget at one hundred and twenty-six thousand, and blew up on 24 October 1910. The Antoine Simon could not get under way, and its Italian powder was quietly rotting in the palace basement. The Nord Alexis was no better. Into this McDonald sold the government a secondhand American yacht, clearing about seventy-five thousand dollars, and at its commissioning a Vodou baptism was held and a sheep was put over the side for Agwe, the spirit of the sea.

The explosion that destroyed the National Palace in August 1912 has an ordinary explanation. Antoine Simon had left decaying Italian gunpowder in the basement and it went off. Henry Furniss, the American minister in Port-au-Prince, sent Washington a confidential note that complicates it. When President Cincinnatus Leconte was recovered from the wreckage, the head, the arms and the legs had been separated from the trunk. That condition is consistent with a killing followed by the firing of the magazines, which is why the accident has never entirely settled. Suspicion fell first on the Zamor brothers and the Caco fighters behind them, who wanted the palace and had it within two years. One further coincidence sits in the file. Leconte died on the exact anniversary of the day he had finally driven Anténor Firmin out of the country. Offered a choice of culprits, opinion in the capital settled on the Syrian merchants, who served as the standing scapegoats of every Haitian crisis.