1963, May – July 14: (Barbot’s Guerrilla War: The Black Dog, the Poisoned Coffee, the Note on Duvalier’s Desk, and the Death in the Burning Cane Field): Clém…

1963, May – July 14: (Barbot’s Guerrilla War: The Black Dog, the Poisoned Coffee, the Note on Duvalier’s Desk, and the Death in the Burning Cane Field): Clément Barbot, with his wife and children safe inside the Argentine embassy, was ready to take the field. In rapid succession he harried and fooled macoutes and milice, shooting them down from ambush, killing them by tens. Privy even to the mysteries of the telephone system, he got an open line to Duvalier’s ornate white phone and warned the president that his coffee was poisoned — Duvalier’s reply: Clément, you will bring me your head. Barbot raided Fort Dimanche and emptied the armory. When pursuers found his Martissant hideout, all they got was a weapons cache and a black dog that vanished in the night — Haitian suspicions were confirmed: Barbot could at will change himself into a black dog. Word went out from Duvalier: shoot black dogs on sight. Barbot’s answer was to leave a personal note on Duvalier’s desk in the Palais. On the dark night of May 19, the Washington Star’s Jeremiah O’Leary made contact with Barbot at a cane field near Cazeau — Barbot called Duvalier a madman who had ordered 300 persons a year killed by TTMs and had accumulated $1.5 million in a Swiss bank. Duvalier, said Barbot in his soft-spoken intense way, is not a communist, a democrat, or anything else — he is an opportunist. On July 14 the end came: with ammunition running low, Barbot and his pediatrician brother Harry were betrayed by a peasant. Led by Gracia Jacques, the Garde Présidentielle ringed the Cazeau hideout and set the cane afire — when flames finally drove them out, the Barbots broke cover and were mowed down in blasts of automatic-weapons fire. Pictures of their riddled, mutilated corpses were displayed throughout Port-au-Prince. It was months before any black dog was safe.