1957, May 26 – June 14: (Fignolé’s Nineteen Days: The Cutaway and Striped Trousers, Soulouque and Acaau Invoked, the 100 Percent Pay Raise, and Kébreau’s Cou…

1957, May 26 – June 14: (Fignolé’s Nineteen Days: The Cutaway and Striped Trousers, Soulouque and Acaau Invoked, the 100 Percent Pay Raise, and Kébreau’s Coup During the Western): On Sunday, May 26, 1957, Pierre Eustache Daniel Fignolé — tall, slender, ruggedly handsome — took office improbably clad in striped trousers and cutaway, seeming to have come a long way from his native Pestel. His inaugural address to 10,000 followers was a restrained appeal for democracy and unity, but the heroes he invoked included Soulouque, Goman, Acaau, and Rameau. Fignolé’s all-important choice to take hold of the divided army was Colonel Antonio Kébreau, the department commander at Les Cayes — five years older and, though unnoted at the time, a friend of both Trujillo and Duvalier. The new president’s first moves — getting shops open, restoring stability, restarting the country — were all to the good, but there were less promising ones: mass army transfers directed not by Kébreau but by the palace, the commissioning of Fignolé henchmen as officers, and above all the fact that Fignolé unabashedly continued to run for a permanent term while Bel Air clamored for a six-year extension without the bother of an election. When, without consulting Kébreau or the general staff, the president pointedly announced a one hundred percent pay raise for all enlisted men, the high command knew time was running out. That evening — June 14, 1957, the nineteenth since Fignolé took office — while the Port-au-Prince garrison raptly followed a new Western being screened at the casernes, a group of officers led by General Kébreau marched upstairs in the Palais, slammed open the door of the council chamber, silenced the cabinet with a look, and marched off the president before he could utter a word. Stopping only to obtain Fignolé’s signature on a brief letter of resignation, Kébreau drove the ex-president to Bizoton, where a Garde-Côtes cutter had steam up — the party was hardly aboard before lines were cast off and Daniel Fignolé, in the manner of Toussaint, had a last look over the stern at the dimming view of his former capital. Their destination was the Môle, where at the American-built airstrip waited the same DC-3 that had bombed the casernes, and the engines lifted the airplane northwest over the Windward Passage toward Miami. Le Nouvelliste murmured solicitously that they hoped the stay in New York would prove pleasant for M. and Mme Daniel Fignolé.