This name was controversial because the airport's namesake's son, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, harshly repressed the Haitian Revolution during the Saint-Domingue expedition. Christiane Taubira, then-Member of the National Assembly of France for Guiana, requested in 1999 that the name be changed. Multiple proposals were submitted, including Cépérou, a seventeenth-century indigenous chief. It was finally renamed Félix Éboué Airport in 2012, the change becoming official in January of that year. The code for the airport remains CAY.