14 April to 2 May 1969 · Haitianspan
The communist party is destroyed in the space of three weeks
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The Haitian communists had only just combined into a single party when the regime came for them. On 14 April 1969 a gunfight between militiamen and communists at Boutilliers, on the slope above Port-au-Prince, opened into something larger, and within days Radio Moscow was reporting arrests and summary executions. At Cazale near Arcahaie the organiser Alix Lamaute was killed. At the Cap, according to a letter Graham Greene sent to the Times of London, the shooting took in poor residents of La Fossette who had nothing to do with any party. On 2 May soldiers and militia surrounded a house at Fontamara and fired into it with automatic weapons and grenades for about seven hours, killing at least twenty two people inside, among them Joseph Roney, who had led the student strikes of 1960. The bodies were displayed outside Fort Dimanche. More than two hundred cadres died. In July Nelson Rockefeller arrived from Washington and the last American reservations were dropped.
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