1970, April 24: (The Cayard Naval Revolt: Colonel Octave Cayard’s Five Ships Open Fire on the Palace, the Army Uprising That Never Materialized, the 105mm Gu…

1970, April 24: (The Cayard Naval Revolt: Colonel Octave Cayard’s Five Ships Open Fire on the Palace, the Army Uprising That Never Materialized, the 105mm Gun Last Fired in 1957, and Gunnery Worse Than the Navy’s): In April 1970, again smelling sedition, Duvalier conducted wholesale arrests, retired more officers, and replenished his supply of hostages. Unusual for him, he missed certain key men. On April 24, sortieing from Bizoton, all five ships of the Garde-Côtes — commanded by noir Colonel Octave Cayard, for years a staunch pillar of the regime — took station off the city and commenced shooting at, but not hitting, the Palais National. Pandemonium again ensued, but the essential ingredient of the attentat — an army uprising to be coordinated with the ships’ gunfire — never materialized. With miliciens stationed behind every cannoneer, soldiers managed to get one of the famous 105mm guns, last fired in 1957, into action on the waterfront near the site of old Batterie St. Claire, but their gunnery was, if possible, even worse than the navy’s. The Cayard revolt — a loyal noir officer turning his ships against the palace he had defended for years, the coordinated army uprising collapsing because miliciens stood with loaded weapons behind every artilleryman — demonstrated the final triumph of Duvalier’s strategy of counterbalancing forces: the FAd’H could not act because the TTMs watched its every move, the TTMs could not act because they had no institutional cohesion beyond personal loyalty to Duvalier, and no external force could prevail because the population, atomized by terror and stripped of every organizational structure from unions to political parties to the Church, had no mechanism through which collective resistance could be mounted — the dictator had achieved what no Haitian ruler before him had accomplished: the complete privatization of the state and the complete immobilization of the society, a political equilibrium maintained not by consent or legitimacy but by the universal distribution of fear.