1911, May 8: (The Caco Resurgence and the Burning of Villages): Antoine Simon had only scotched the rebellion, not killed it.

1911, May 8: (The Caco Resurgence and the Burning of Villages): Antoine Simon had only scotched the rebellion, not killed it. As soon as the invading government army withdrew from the North, the Cacos — indignant over burned villages and ravaged gardens — undertook new revolt. On May 8, risings burst out through the North wherever the regime’s troops had trod in February, and the government found itself not merely unpopular but actively despised: Cacos burned the railroad’s sawmill and construction camps, fired into the houses of railroad employees, and raised the cry of “Down with McDonald!” — a sentiment no doubt inflamed by the fact that the railroad had surrendered its dynamite, powder, and blasting caps to government forces. The targeting of the railroad — the physical infrastructure of American capital penetration — revealed that the Cacos, however dismissed by foreign observers as mere bandits, possessed a precise political intelligence about who was profiting from Haiti’s misery: the same peasant insurgents whom McDonald’s railroad was meant to civilize through commerce understood perfectly well that the iron tracks being laid across their land served interests fundamentally opposed to their own, a consciousness that Fanon would recognize as the awakening of the colonized subject to the material architecture of his own dispossession.