Istwa Nou

On 4 June 1969 an ageing Constellation appeared over Port-au-Prince carrying Colonel Rene Leon, another Haitian and several American and Canadian mercenaries. They dropped improvised incendiary devices, which failed to go off, as every bomb dropped on the city so far had failed to go off. The panic was general. Antiaircraft guns at the palace fired into the sky, more than thirty serious road accidents happened in the streets below, fire engines and ambulances drove about at random, professors and students jumped out of the windows of the medical school, and clerks at the new tax office used the opportunity to walk away with the day's receipts. The aircraft flew back to the Bahamas, where the crew was arrested by officials of a government friendly to Duvalier and deported to the United States. Each of these expeditions was more theatrical than the last. None of them ever produced the one thing required, which was a population willing to rise.

In April 1970 Francois Duvalier smelled a plot, arrested widely, retired more officers and refilled his stock of hostages. He missed Colonel Octave Cayard, a Black officer who had propped up the regime for years and who commanded the coast guard. On the morning of 24 April, Cayard sailed all five of his ships out of Bizoton, took position off the capital and opened fire on the National Palace. The shells missed. The city panicked. The other half of the plan, a rising inside the army timed to the naval gunfire, never came, because militiamen stood behind every gun crew with loaded weapons. Soldiers dragged one of the old 105mm pieces to the waterfront and answered with aim no better than the navy's. Duvalier had spent thirteen years setting each armed body against the others so that none could move alone. On this morning the arrangement worked exactly as designed.