1957, June 14–16: (The Rouleau Compresseur: Kébreau’s Coup Completed, the Teledjòl of Fignolé’s Execution, the Attack on Fort Dimanche, and the Machine Guns …

1957, June 14–16: (The Rouleau Compresseur: Kébreau’s Coup Completed, the Teledjòl of Fignolé’s Execution, the Attack on Fort Dimanche, and the Machine Guns of Bel Air): Kébreau was nothing if not thorough. Before the Western and its gun smoke had vanished into the setting sun, the cabinet were on their way to jail along with some twenty Fignolist bosses simultaneously picked up. Next morning at 10:30, as Fort National’s battery boomed, the general announced that again the army had taken charge — we soldiers, he told the press, are the fathers of the family, we aren’t politicians, we simply want to restore order and conduct elections from which will emerge a legitimate president. Bel Air and La Saline had a last word: on the night of the 16th, as the bat tenèb began to reverberate after the eight o’clock curfew, came a new sound like the roaring ocean — Fignolé had been secretly executed, said teledjòl, and the response of the slums was overwhelming. With the ferocity of 1791, the rouleau compresseur swept across Port-au-Prince, leaving a pall of darkness as streetlights were broken, followed by a pillar of flame. The fire department had its apparatus smashed and hose slashed; Fort Dimanche, under attack from La Saline, responded with machine guns; then, behind half-tracks and light tanks, the army moved in, machine-gunning streets and whole blocks of flimsy huts, soldiers and police firing point-blank into stone-throwers. The rouleau compresseur — the steamroller uprising of Fignolé’s urban poor, triggered by the false teledjòl of his execution, crushed by the army’s half-tracks and machine guns in the same slums where the MOP had been born — was the last autonomous act of the Port-au-Prince proletariat as a political force before the Duvalier regime would absorb, co-opt, and ultimately destroy every institution of popular organization that the city had produced since 1946, transforming the energy that had toppled Lescot and Estimé and terrified Magloire into the instrument of a dictatorship that would render all future rouleau compresseurs impossible.