1970, April 24–26: (The Cayard Stalemate Resolved: The F-51 Stripped of Its Ordnance on Palace Orders, Two Days of Land Fighting Sea Without Casualties, and …

1970, April 24–26: (The Cayard Stalemate Resolved: The F-51 Stripped of Its Ordnance on Palace Orders, Two Days of Land Fighting Sea Without Casualties, and the Entire Garde-Côtes Sails to Guantánamo): When the lone flyable F-51 was ordered to attack Cayard’s rebel ships, it was discovered that on palace orders the airplane had been stripped of its ordnance and the guns were nowhere to be found — Duvalier’s own precaution against an air force coup had neutralized his only weapon against a naval revolt. For two days, in complete stalemate, land fought sea and sea fought land, but without casualties on either side. Then, with fuel running low and no response from confederates ashore, Cayard took the squadron northwest to Guantánamo Bay and, with him, the entire Garde-Côtes, into asylum. Thus, like its predecessors, ended unsuccessfully the last of at least nine invasions, coups, and insurgencies directed against the extraordinarily durable man who had ruled Haiti for thirteen years. The Cayard affair’s conclusion — the dictator’s own anti-coup precaution rendering him defenseless against a different kind of revolt, the two-day standoff ending not in victory but in mutual exhaustion, the navy sailing intact into foreign asylum — closed the cycle of armed resistance to François Duvalier with a finale whose absurdist symmetry matched every predecessor: each attempt foiled not by the regime’s strength but by the opposition’s structural incapacity to coordinate a single decisive blow against a system whose survival depended not on loyalty but on the universal fragmentation of every institution capable of collective action.