1956, November – December 6: (Duvalier’s Bombs, the Army Plot, the Ambassador’s Blunt Answer, and the Fall of Magloire): By November the atmosphere had turne…

1956, November – December 6: (Duvalier’s Bombs, the Army Plot, the Ambassador’s Blunt Answer, and the Fall of Magloire): By November the atmosphere had turned edgy. Terrorist bombings — a new phenomenon — began in public places, and random shots fired among the market women in the Marché de Fer would trigger a kouri through the waterfront district and the ominous sound of iron shutters creaking shut. Though it was not then suspected, the bombings were the work of Dr. Duvalier’s agents — this would become dramatically apparent in April 1957 when a bomb factory was uncovered in Martissant, the fabricator Daniel François implicating Duvalier and his lieutenant Clément Barbot while admitting in detail the November and December bombings that Duvalier had piously disavowed. What was even less suspected was that since July or earlier, a group of ambitious junior officers discontented with slow promotion — some still lieutenants after twelve years — had been forming a plot focused on the likeable noir Colonel Léon Cantave and the soldierly noir Major Pierre Armand. As conditions worsened — more bombings, Fignolé ambushed on the road to Léogâne but surviving — Magloire rounded up all the candidates, even his own dauphin Jumelle, while the seemingly mild-mannered Duvalier issued a statement deploring all disorder. On December 4 the main reservoir serving downtown Port-au-Prince was dynamited, killing or wounding five people, and another bomb went off among the market women at Marché Vallière. The president clamped down on all political meetings, broadcasts, and publications; the nineteen announced candidates published a defiant round robin of protest; Magloire assumed personal command of the Casernes Dessalines and called in his officers for a loyalty check — only Colonel Cantave and Major Paul Corvington demurred, and Cantave was arrested. Magloire then sent for American Ambassador Roy Tasco Davis to ask if it might not be wise to postpone elections — Davis was noncommittal but returned the next day accompanied by the papal nuncio Msgr. Luigi Raimondi, dean of the diplomatic corps, and their blunt answer was that Magloire had lost public confidence, no longer enjoyed a mandate, and should plan to leave on schedule. On Thursday, December 6, 1956, the president assembled his cabinet, the general staff, and the national establishment, and over Radio Commerce announced that six years having passed, he was stepping down — the most civil of the military rulers, the noir who had transcended the color line and charmed Eisenhower and Spellman and Adam Clayton Powell alike, departed the Palais National not to the sound of the three booms from Fort National that had marked Lescot’s and Estimé’s falls, but to the quieter percussion of a diplomat’s verdict and a nuncio’s nod, the first Haitian president in modern memory to be shown the door not by his own army but by the American ambassador and the representative of the Holy See.