1913, February–May 3: (Auguste’s Last Days: Cacos, Célestina’s Voodoo, and the Syphilitic President): Besides the bankers, Auguste also had the Cacos to reck…

1913, February–May 3: (Auguste’s Last Days: Cacos, Célestina’s Voodoo, and the Syphilitic President): Besides the bankers, Auguste also had the Cacos to reckon with. His election — a Port-au-Prince inside job — had been pulled off without regard to the Cacos or their ever more strident pretensions as kingmakers. In December, paying them off as Leconte had done with arms and money, Auguste for the moment placated the chiefs, just in time to hear of trouble fomented by the Simonists in Les Cayes, where Célestina the manbo had quietly returned and was practicing her arts to no good purpose for the regime. Arrests followed at Cayes, Jacmel, and Jérémie in February and March. And the president’s health was flagging — by April he was bedridden, and teledjòl told of slow poison, though most future historians would repeat this account. With professional exactness, Dr. Furniss cabled Washington that the president’s condition was very serious, that he was delirious, his heart action bad, and unable to retain nourishment. On April 29, Furniss had been asked to participate in a consultation with the president’s physician: the problem was not poison but advanced anemia caused by tertiary syphilis. At 9:00 P.M. on May 3, 1913, it was over — as Auguste’s eyes closed and the rose-garnished block of ice was lifted onto the dead president’s chest, Port-au-Prince learned that for the third time in twenty months, another president had to be chosen. The rapid succession of presidential deaths — Leconte by explosion, Auguste by disease, each following the other in barely a year — compressed into an accelerating rhythm what had been the defining pattern of Haitian governance since 1804: the structural impossibility of institutional continuity within a system where the state existed as the personal property of whoever occupied the palace, and where the death of the occupant — by whatever cause — triggered not constitutional succession but armed competition for the vacancy.