1969, June 4: (Port-au-Prince’s Second Air Raid: Colonel René Léon’s Aged Constellation, the Incendiaries That Malfunctioned, the Wholesale Kouri, and Mr.

1969, June 4: (Port-au-Prince’s Second Air Raid: Colonel René Léon’s Aged Constellation, the Incendiaries That Malfunctioned, the Wholesale Kouri, and Mr. Pindling’s Collaboration): On June 4, 1969, Port-au-Prince experienced another air raid — this time by an aged Constellation carrying Colonel René Léon, a second Haitian, and several American and Canadian mercenaries. Dropping improvised incendiary devices which, like every other bomb so far dropped on Port-au-Prince, malfunctioned, the plane nonetheless reduced the capital to panic. In the wholesale kouri that ensued, palace antiaircraft cannon sprayed the skies, over thirty serious automobile accidents took place, fire engines and ambulances raced mindlessly from street to street, professors and students at the medical school jumped from windows, and tellers at the new tax office took advantage of the moment — as in the bygone days of mandats — to decamp with the day’s proceeds. It came to nothing: on their return to the Bahamas, the airplane and crew were caught by officials of Duvalier’s collaborator, Mr. Pindling, and eventually deported to the United States. The raid — a single antiquated aircraft armed with malfunctioning firebombs, producing a capital-wide panic in which the tax office was robbed and the medical school evacuated — measured the distance between the exile movement’s fantasies and Haiti’s realities: each successive invasion more theatrical and less effective than the last, the regime’s opponents condemned to repeat the same farcical script because they lacked the one thing that could have changed the outcome — not better weapons or braver men, but a population willing to rise, and that population had long since learned that the cost of a failed uprising was not exile but Fort Dimanche.