Istwa Nou

Duvalier survived three attempts to remove him, in 1968, in 1969 and in 1970. Part of the reason sat in his hangars. In September 1964, while the American economic squeeze was officially still running, the United States allowed military aircraft to be exported to Haiti, two T-28 trainers among them, and began helping to rebuild the Corps d'Aviation. It later licensed one more F-51 fighter and paid in some fashion for commercial overhauls in Miami of every Haitian F-51 and of other planes that had been sitting grounded. In November 1970 the Nixon administration gave up the pretence of an arms ban altogether, issuing licences to private dealers for light weapons and six patrol boats for the coastguard. By 1971 more than a million dollars of private American arms sales to Haiti had been approved. None of it passed through Congress. Duvalier voted with the United States against Cuba at the Organisation of American States, and that was the service being paid for.

May was the season for these attempts, because the coffee and sugar harvests were over, the work had stopped and money was short. On 20 May 1968 two aircraft from the Bahamas landed at Cap-Haitien and put ashore about thirty five men in camouflage suits with a label sewn into them reading Big Game, styled by Broadway. A leaflet raid on Port-au-Prince that morning had failed because nobody cut the string on the bundles before dropping them. One aircraft left to fetch reinforcements and never came back, the pilot having lost his nerve. The follow up force of nearly a hundred men with heavy weapons stayed in the Bahamas because their ship was allowed to sink. Duvalier's answer in the capital was to execute hostages at Fort Dimanche, fifty seven of them by the exiles' count, and to keep his ministers sleeping on mattresses in the palace under guard. The coastguard shelled the rebels out of the Cap after two days.