1929, December 4–5: (The Massacre at Les Cayes: The Douaniers Walk Out, the Piquets March, and Twenty Marines Fire 600 Rounds): Within twelve hours after Rus…

1929, December 4–5: (The Massacre at Les Cayes: The Douaniers Walk Out, the Piquets March, and Twenty Marines Fire 600 Rounds): Within twelve hours after Russell asked for reinforcements, on the morning of December 4, the douaniers walked out, in the process manhandling an American collector of customs — when the collector fought back, the douaniers rampaged, bashing another American with a steel bar when he tried to phone the police. As crowds gathered in the Rue du Quai, employees at the financial adviser’s office joined the strike. Russell reactivated martial law, proclaimed a curfew, and ordered the Marine brigade to take charge of Port-au-Prince. The elite protest found an echo in the South — emissaries from Port-au-Prince had early reached Les Cayes as well as Jacmel, Miragoâne, and the Goâves. The day the douaniers erupted in the capital, stevedores and douaniers at Cayes halted the unloading of two ships. Next morning, December 5, the Garde commanding officer at Cayes reported disturbances getting rapidly out of hand, and telephone lines were cut — as were lines leading into Jacmel, where intelligence reported the landing of a shipment of weapons from Guatemala. The peasants of the Plaine des Cayes, hard-pressed by a poor harvest, resentful of higher taxes on alcohol and the opening of a competing distillery in Port-au-Prince that had cut into profits on local kleren, had grievances of their own for which the agitators from the towns provided slogans. At Torbeck and Chantal, home grounds in olden times of the Salomons and of Acaau, noir mobs armed with sticks, machetes, and spears, chanting à bas Borno, à bas Freeman, all but overran the tiny Garde avant-postes and, fueled with tafya, hatred of the town, and expectation of loot, marched as so often in times past against the city. Outside Cayes a crowd encountered a section of Marines with an automatic weapon. For half an hour the 1,500-man crowd milled, hurled stones, and tried without success to creep past in the cane, then twice turned back when the twenty Marines fired overhead. A leader stepping forward to parley suddenly grappled with and bit a Marine; as another Marine prodded the assailant off with a bayonet, the piquets charged. This time the Marines fired for effect, expending 600 rounds — abandoning twelve dead and twenty-three wounded, the mob evaporated. The massacre at Les Cayes — twenty Marines firing 600 rounds into a crowd of peasants armed with sticks, machetes, and spears on the same Plaine des Cayes where Acaau’s piquets had marched in 1844 and Salomon’s partisans had risen in 1883 — completed the circuit that the occupation had drawn around itself: the Americans who had come to bring order had now fired into the same peasantry they claimed to be liberating, on the same ground where every previous regime had fired into them, and the twelve dead of Les Cayes would accomplish what fourteen years of Union Patriotique memorials, Senate hearings, and Nation editorials had failed to achieve — they would bring the occupation to an end.