1911, February 2–7: (Leconte’s Banner at Ouanaminthe: The Caco Revolution Begins): While Simon’s regime terrorized Port-au-Prince, Cincinnatus Leconte — retu…

1911, February 2–7: (Leconte’s Banner at Ouanaminthe: The Caco Revolution Begins): While Simon’s regime terrorized Port-au-Prince, Cincinnatus Leconte — returned from exile and watching events from the Cap — judged the time ripe to strike. On February 2, 1911, with strong support from Davilmar Théodore, noir senator from Ennery, and from the Zamor brothers Charles and Oreste of Hinche and Cerca-la-Source, Leconte allowed his Caco generals to raise his banner at Ouanaminthe, where — in the old style of Salnave — Dominican auxiliaries could be most helpful. When word reached Port-au-Prince, the government momentarily believed the Dominicans had declared war: soldiers rushed through the streets, the population scattered in every direction, shop doors and shutters slammed shut, and buglers sounded the general call to arms. The panic that seized the capital — a population conditioned by a century of invasions to interpret any disturbance from the East as existential threat — revealed the permanent scar that the Dominican frontier had left on the Haitian political imagination, a wound inflicted not merely by geography but by the structural insecurity that Césaire diagnosed as the abiding condition of the postcolonial state: sovereignty perpetually experienced as precarious, the border perpetually experienced as the membrane through which dissolution might enter.