1969, April 14 – May 2: (The PUCH Destroyed: The Boutilliers Shootout, Radio Moscow Reports Arrests and Executions, Alix Lamaute Killed at Cazale, the Seven-…

1969, April 14 – May 2: (The PUCH Destroyed: The Boutilliers Shootout, Radio Moscow Reports Arrests and Executions, Alix Lamaute Killed at Cazale, the Seven-Hour Siege at Fontamara, and 200 Cadres Slain — A Charade to Welcome Rockefeller): The newly unified communist party, fired to imprudent action by Cuban precepts, did not wait long for its first test. On April 14, 1969, a macoute shootout with communists at Boutilliers on the slopes of Morne l’Hôpital erupted into open warfare; three days later Radio Moscow reported arrests and summary executions of Haitian communists. A week earlier at Cazale, near Arcahaie, another clash had claimed the life of Alix Lamaute, veteran communist organizer and syndicalist. At the Cap, according to Graham Greene’s letter to the Times of London, not only communists and anti-Duvalierists but also impoverished dwellers of La Fossette were cut down by indiscriminate machine-gunning. On May 2, FAd’H units and miliciens surrounded a house in Fontamara outside Port-au-Prince, pouring automatic weapons fire and grenades into the building for some seven hours until they reported the death of twenty-two communist defenders — some accounts said thirty-five — including Joseph Roney, who had led the 1960 student strikes, and Gerald Brisson, whose sister was communist minister Hervé Boyer’s secretary. In what had become a commonplace of the regime, over twenty mangled bodies were publicly exhibited outside Fort Dimanche. An American magazine later reported that the PUCH had launched an underground guerrilla campaign against Duvalier but that an informer on the party’s central committee had compromised the operation, and more than 200 PUCH cadres were slain in the counteroffensive. Why Duvalier struck so hard and so suddenly remained debatable — one well-informed exile publication charged that the communists were merely a pretext for another purge, with hundreds of victims denounced as agents of internal Communism killed, tortured, or arrested while their homes were looted by macoutes. Another surmise, not inconsistent, held that the communists were conspicuously targeted as part of a charade to set the stage for the July visit to Haiti by U.S. presidential representative Nelson Rockefeller — a visit that did indeed result in the final thawing of official American disapproval. The PUCH’s destruction — a party betrayed from within, its cadres slaughtered in a single spasm whose timing coincided with the need to demonstrate anti-communist credentials for an American visitor — revealed the final function of the Haitian left under Duvalierism: not as a political force but as a reserve of expendable bodies whose periodic elimination could be staged for the consumption of whatever foreign audience required reassurance that the dictator remained on the right side of the Cold War.