Duvalier’s heart stops and Clément Barbot runs Haiti for a summer

On 24 May 1959 François Duvalier suffered a cardiac arrest and lay in a coma for nine hours. He stayed in bed into the summer. While he was down, Clément Barbot, the man who built the tontons macoutes, took charge of the government. Barbot came out of those weeks believing he could be the real president of Haiti. Duvalier came back and never forgot it: he treated Barbot as an enemy from then on, and Barbot did in the end take up arms against him.