The latest transition of power in Haiti is highlighting long-standing fault lines between the country’s Black majority and the mostly mixed-race business class and threatens to inflame unresolved social dynamics, spilling into the country’s already volatile politics. Adding to the tensions: The U.S. State Department is weighing into the fray, accusing unnamed “malign actors” of trying to destabilize the crisis-wracked nation by offering bribes to block the hand-over of power.

On Thursday, Laurent Saint-Cyr assumed the leadership of Haiti’s ruling nine-member Transitional Presidential Council from Fritz Alphonse Jean, a U.S.-educated economist, as part of a rotating presidency. Saint-Cyr represents the private sector on the council, which has some presidential powers and is tasked with restoring law and order to the Caribbean nation.

Ahead of the change over, concerns over a possible coup led to increased security precautions. There was no coup, but on the morning of the swearing-in, armed gangs launched attacks on the road leading to the seat of government after Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, a leader in the Viv Ansanm gang coalition, announced his intent on social media to attack the prime minister’s office and the Villa d’Accueli, where both the prime minister and Transitional Presidential Council work.

Saint-Cyr is slated to remain in power until Feb. 7, 2026, which is supposed to be the end of the transition and a run-up to national elections. His ascension consolidates power in the hands of members of the country’s small, lighter-skinned economic elite for the first time in recent memory, and has been for months the subject of political infighting and intense debates about colorism and class that harken back to Haiti’s colonial history.

Tensions peaked last week when bribery allegations surfaced amid reports of an attempt to remove Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé ahead of the changeover to shift the balance of power. Jean and other council members, along with the head of the Pitit Desalin political party, Jean-Charles Moïse, reportedly held secret talks about replacing Fils-Aimé as prime minister after efforts to dissuade Saint-Cyr from taking the helm failed.

Fils-Aimé was unanimously appointed to the prime minister job in November after the council abruptly fired his predecessor, Garry Conille, after barely six months. Like Saint-Cyr, Fils-Aimé is from the business community and is considered part of Haiti’s self-described “mulatto” class, which, along with the private sector, has historically been a lighting rod for the country’s ills.

Last Friday, the State Department took to X and, in a highly unusual post, the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs made it known Washington will “hold accountable anyone who seeks to disrupt” the transition.

“The United States is aware of reported bribery attempts to undermine Haiti’s stability,” the post said. “We commend those [council] members for rejecting corruption and reaffirm our support for their collaborative work with the Prime Minister to work together to stabilize Haiti, in our shared national interests.”

State Department officials, responding to an inquiry from the Herald, did not provide details or say what fueled the post on Haiti. They would only say that they are “aware of credible reports that malign actors are actively seeking to destabilize the transition government.”

Jean, who took over the council’s presidency in March, and Moïse denied the bribery allegations, and argued they were justified in their concerns about the transition, which would place two lighter-skinned men in the two top positions of power in Haiti, because of the country’s long, tortuous history in which a small, lighter-skinned minority class has long controlled the majority of the wealth.

“Analyses are pouring in on social media and on radio stations on social rifts that may occur with Saint-Cyr and Fils Aimé occupying the top of the executive branches,” he said.

He also dismissed the allegations of any bribery taking place behind the scenes.

“This question of bribery is a pure narrative manipulation of political entrepreneurs fighting to keep the status quo,” Jean said ahead of Thursday’s swearing-in ceremony. “It is a desperate and trivial effort to attract the sympathy of American congressmen and women, and the U.S. administration.”

The optics are not lost on Haitians, who worry about political fallout from the country’s small economic elite taking such a visible role when armed gangs have targeted their properties, and foreign governments have openly accused some of them of financing the gang warfare. But critics and political observers also say that Jean and others who are part of the transition are weaponizing the class and color issue to hide their own failure to put Haiti on the path to stability.

“We have to recognize that nothing is working here,” said Pierre Esperance, a human rights advice who recently issued a scathing report on the council’s failings. The presidential council, he added, “isn’t any good, the governance isn’t good, and the country is not being governed. You have a group of individuals who are fighting among themselves while at the same time collecting on all the privileges the state gives them each month, and they are not doing anything for the country.”

Espérance warned that if the council and the prime minister fail to take action soon to initiate a political dialogue on governance, Haiti will face even greater instability.

In the 16 months that the transitional council has been in power, Haiti is no closer to holding elections or getting the armed gangs under control. Instead, the country has ceded ground to gangs, which now control up to 90% of Port-au-Prince and are spreading to other regions to the north.

“Every time there is a change on the council, there is this kind of conflict,” said Jacques Ted St. Dic, who calls the infighting a diversion to hide the failings and corruption in the system.

St. Dic acknowledges that given Haiti’s history, the country finds itself at a difficult juncture, where the racial conflict between Blacks and lighter-skinned Haitians could resurface at any moment.

“All of those conflicts can emerge into a battle of politicians, a real political fight,” St. Dic said. “And that’s where the danger lies.”

The issue had already broken into the publicly this week, when Moïse, the head of the Pitit Dealin party, pushed back on radio on the State Department’s post, and evoked the race and class question in his defense.

Moïse acknowledge he had meetings about two weeks ago with Fils-Aimé about his concerns, as well as with three council members who have been indicted in a bribery scheme in which they are accused of demanding credit cards and cash from the head of a state-owned bank.

Jean, the outgoing head of the presidential council, said he has spoken out about the “danger” of Saint-Cyr and Fils-Aimé holding power at the same time.

More than two centuries after enslaved Africans defeated their French colonizers, there remain deep and divisions and distrust between Haiti’s mostly poor, Black population and the small, mixed-race elite in Haiti. For example, on Wednesday, Jean took to social media to distance himself from the council’s support of a contract that gives elements of the private sector 24 years of control of 70% of all the cargo-container traffic coming into Port-au-Prince, after questioning its legitimacy in Haiti’s economy, which relies heavily on imports and exports.

Meanwhile, with armed gangs now seizing on the tensions to advance their attacks, Haitians find themselves divided about whether the new political landscape will bring more violence or help to finally pave the way for a return to stability.

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