Istwa Nou

Major Armand was conspiring against the president he served. With the interior minister Frederic Duvigneaud and a Captain Merceron, he planned to have Vincent and Colonel Calixte killed, after which Duvigneaud would take the presidency and Armand the Garde. In late November 1937 Calixte learned he was to be shot on the Petionville road going home, and arrested the men waiting for him. Vincent dropped Duvigneaud from the cabinet and told Armand not to be foolish. On the evening of 12 December, while Armand and Merceron were drinking rum outside the Cafe Rex at the top of the Champ de Mars, a taxi slowed alongside them, someone fired, and both officers went down wounded. The car, plate P-3031, was found abandoned. Its passengers were five junior officers of the Garde led by Lieutenant Bonicias Perard, who was Calixte's nephew. Port-au-Prince had a kouri the next day, shutters going up along the Grand'Rue. On 9 January 1938 Vincent shipped Calixte to Nice as Inspector of Consulates.

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.