Haiti

  Roumain himself died a month before his masterpiece was published. He was a young man—barely thirty-seven—but the years of imprisonment and exile had taken their toll. When he had been behind bars in the 1930s, he had taken solace in writing short poems for his young son. One of them described water coming down from the mountain and flowing to the prison, where it gives news of the outside world to a prisoner named “Little Jacques.” Another described a ship heading out onto the open sea—“that great indigo tub”—toward an island in the distance. But alongside these hopeful poems was one that transformed a comforting children’s song—“I’m going to the river”—into a haunting lament. In Roumain’s version, when the speaker gets to the river, he finds it dry. Nearby he sees a threatening presence, a white person, cutting wood. The elliptical poem—the only one Roumain ever wrote in Kreyòl—captured the sense of unshakable menace he felt shadowing Haiti: the threat of outsiders taking away the country’s resources, and its own sources of power and renewal drying up.78

  8

  AN IMMATERIAL BEING

  For six months in 1967, Marie Vieux-Chauvet shut herself in her house in Port-au-Prince to write. In the trilogy of novels she produced—Love, Anger, Madness—men with guns are taking over Haiti: its land, its people, even its spirit. Dressed in red and black, the gunmen shoot songbirds out of trees and, just as casually, mow down fleeing victims in the streets. “Where do these men come from?” wonders one character. “Who is their leader? They suddenly showed up in the country and have taken over without any of us being able to put up a fight. Have we become that weak and spineless?” “They’re here to bring us news of the death of our freedom,” an elderly man explains. Even the soldiers, however, don’t really understand who is controlling them. “I am only a cog in an immense machine,” one says. “The one who gives us our orders is like God, invisible and all-powerful.” Vieux-Chauvet’s characters try to fight back, seeking to fulfill their responsibilities to each other, to their ideals, and to their ancestors. But neither open revolt nor escape proves possible. By the end of the trilogy, they are trapped in a nightmarish dead end, with nowhere to go but the grave.1

  Vieux-Chauvet’s women find themselves in particularly horrifying situations, as sexual violence and control become a currency of power. In the first novel, Love, a police commander brutalizes a local woman simply because he finds her haughty and insufficiently submissive. In the second, a young woman tries to save her family and their land by submitting to the repeated sexual assaults of a powerful officer, her body spread out for him as if in a crucifixion. Throughout the novels, hope is never far from hopelessness. “Wasn’t it her role,” one mother wonders, “to shower her children with love, to quietly help them conquer their terror, to shut her eyes and let them take action, all with the conviction that they too would meet with failure?”2

  In the years before she wrote the trilogy, Vieux-Chauvet had sought to create a refuge for art by organizing weekly meetings for Haitian writers in her home. They called themselves Les Araignées du Soir—“the Spiders of the Night.” “Like actual spiders,” explains novelist Edwidge Danticat, “they hoped to weave a protective web around themselves and keep out predatory pests.” But Vieux-Chauvet was also driven to describe—to bear witness to—what was going on outside her doors. She knew that she had to be careful: during the 1960s, many intellectuals and artists had found themselves in prison, forced into exile, or worse. Three members of Vieux-Chauvet’s extended family had been killed by government forces in previous years. So she set her trilogy in a vague, unspecified period of Haitian history. It started at some point after the U.S. occupation, but nothing specifically dated it to the reign of François Duvalier. Though Vieux-Chauvet was obviously writing about the omnipresent roving militia forces that Duvalier had created, she never used the nickname given to them by Haitians: Tontons Makouts. (That moniker came from a frightening character in Haitian folktales who carries away naughty children in his makout, or bag, and it captured the way in which the militia lurked somewhere between reality and nightmarish imagination.) The fact that Vieux-Chauvet didn’t feel she could even say their name was a testament to their power.3

  When she was finished writing Love, Anger, Madness, Vieux-Chauvet sent the manuscript off to the leading French press Gallimard. A few months later, she heard that they were going to publish it. Ecstatic, she threw a party at her house and, for the first time, read excerpts from the book to her friends. As they listened, however, some of them became increasingly worried. They saw clearly what she hadn’t seen, or perhaps hadn’t wanted to see: despite the care she had taken not to name Duvalier, it was obvious that the work was a critique of his regime. In 1962, the president had declared, “I am even now an immaterial being,” and it was all too easy to conclude that Vieux-Chauvet’s portrait of a ghostly, all-powerful leader was meant to describe him. If she published the work, friends warned Vieux-Chauvet, she would endanger not only herself but potentially her acquaintances and family as well.4

  At first Vieux-Chauvet ignored these warnings and told Gallimard to go ahead with the publication. But when the Haitian ambassador in Paris received an advance copy, he, too, said that she would probably be targeted if the book was released. Vieux-Chauvet, now more frightened—this new warning had come from an official government figure—asked the press to stop distributing the book. Her husband apparently tracked down the small number of copies that had arrived in Haitian bookstores, purchased them, and destroyed them, and they soon fled into exile. It would take several decades before the trilogy finally gained a wide readership and the critical recognition it deserves as one of the great works of twentieth-century Haitian literature.5

  Today, Vieux-Chauvet’s novels vividly transport readers back to the claustrophobia and terror of the years when Duvalier steadily eliminated, neutralized, and co-opted all of the independent institutions in Haitian society. A careful student of his country’s history and politics, Duvalier offered a brutally successful response to the decades of political crisis that had followed the U.S. occupation, tapping into a long tradition of authoritarian rule in Haiti and carrying it to new heights of cynicism and effectiveness. Love, Anger, Madness captures the stunningly effective construction of this regime, portraying a time when many found that there was nowhere to turn but inside—only to discover that even their interior life was inescapably haunted by the specter of oppression.

  * * *

  By the mid-1940s, many Haitians found themselves increasingly frustrated with the rule of President Élie Lescot. A decade after the end of the U.S. occupation, a new generation of student activists felt that Haiti’s political class was once again selling out the mass of the population to foreign interests. Lescot found himself particularly vulnerable to such charges not only because of his involvement in the antisuperstition campaign of 1941, but also because of the negative impact of one of his major economic initiatives: the attempt to bring rubber cultivation to Haiti. A development project designed in close collaboration with the United States, the rubber cultivation scheme highlighted the profound divisions that still remained between Haiti’s governing elite and the rural majority.

  When Lescot first launched the project, it had seemed like a perfect plan: World War II had greatly increased demand for rubber in the United States, and Haiti offered the ideal climate for growing it. A $5 million loan from an American bank (equivalent to about $68 million today) powered the creation of the Société Haitiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole, or SHADA. The agricultural development society was hailed as a model of Haitian-American collaboration: SHADA was headed by a U.S. agronomist, but its vice president was Haitian minister of agriculture Maurice Dartigue. A botany professor from the University of Michigan traveled to the Philippines to identify and collect the best hevea trees (from which rubber is harvested) for transplantation to Haiti. With the plants and capital in hand, the Haitian state provided the final piece of the puzzle: land.6

  That land, of course, had to
be taken from someone. For rural Haitians, SHADA thus represented another assault of the kind now wearily familiar. The government expropriated family fields, forced residents to leave, and razed their houses. The scale of the dispossession was staggering: nearly fifty thousand acres of land throughout Haiti were cleared to make way for imported hevea seedlings. In the process, decades of agricultural work by rural farmers was destroyed. In Jérémie, as many as a million fruit trees were chopped down, while the destruction of rice fields led to a significant rise in food prices across the country. Maurice Dartigue, alarmed by SHADA’s tactics, pleaded with the U.S. head of the company to take into consideration “the mentality and the legitimate interests” of Haitians and to use less brutal measures for acquiring land from the peasants. But he quickly found that although he held the title of vice president of the company, he had little power to change its policies. What’s more, hopes that rubber production would bring prosperity were quickly dashed. The 1943–44 harvest was a poor one, and by the following year—with World War II ending—demand for the particular kind of rubber produced by SHADA had declined. In the end, the project left little in its wake but dislocated families, their fields emptied of trees that had once provided breadfruit, mangoes, and other crops to the local population. An embittered Lescot asked for a new loan from the United States in 1945, but was turned down.7

  The SHADA fiasco emboldened leftist activists who had long argued that U.S. involvement in Haiti was a menace rather than an opportunity. They lambasted Lescot for having been too eager to collaborate with the United States and too weak to resist the American designs on rural Haiti. More broadly, they accused him of having failed to address the overall issue of Haitian poverty. In January 1946, students poured out of schools in downtown Port-au-Prince, shouting anti-Lescot chants, singing the national anthem, and heading for the National Palace. Workers and state employees joined in. A panicked Lescot escaped by hiding in the back of a U.S. embassy car, and he warned that the Garde d’Haïti would take “the most drastic measures to re-establish public order.” The next day, when the widow of Jacques Roumain led a march to the National Cathedral, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding several others. As word spread about the deaths, crowds stormed police stations and ransacked the houses and stores of government ministers. Outside the city, drums and bamboo pipes rallied the population, and several government-owned factories were burned to the ground.8

  With Haiti apparently on the verge of a revolution, several leaders of the Garde d’Haïti, including a high-ranking officer named Paul Magloire, stepped in and sent Lescot on the well-trodden path to political exile. In his place, the military established a three-man executive council and announced that they would be overseeing new presidential and parliamentary elections. The population of Port-au-Prince took to the streets in jubilation, shaking palm fronds—as one would on Palm Sunday—to announce a rebirth. It was a watershed moment, the first time a U.S.-supported regime in the Americas was overthrown by a popular uprising. At the same time, however, it set a dangerous precedent: the young student activists had initiated the uprising, but it was the Garde d’Haïti that harvested political power as a result, placing itself in charge of the balloting. In the elections that followed, none of the leftist groups won political office, and when they accused the Garde d’Haïti of electoral fraud, the response from the military council was all too familiar: the imposition of martial law and a ban on protests.9

  Still, while leftist parties didn’t gain political power directly, they did shape the policies of the candidate who was ultimately elected by the parliament to succeed Lescot: Dumarsais Estimé, a teacher at the Lycée Pétion. A dark-skinned man from a modest background, Estimé was a brilliant orator: the American writer Edmund Wilson, who heard him speak, proclaimed that Estimé possessed a “style and a sweep of historical imagination well beyond the reach of any living white statesman known to me, not excluding Winston Churchill.” Once in power, Estimé launched a range of progressive programs, expanding educational opportunities for poorer Haitians, organizing the beginnings of a social security system, increasing the minimum wage, and instituting new labor laws. His new constitution included protections for unions and far-sighted environmental stipulations, and he initiated irrigation and reforestation projects to improve agricultural productivity and fight the degradation of farmland.10

  Estimé knew that his progressive social policies would go nowhere if he didn’t address the country’s economic difficulties, and he energetically sought to secure what he called Haiti’s “financial emancipation.” But like all Haitian leaders going back to Boyer, he found himself hamstrung by the problem of debt: the government was still paying off the occupation-era loan contracted with the United States in 1922. Estimé pleaded with the U.S. government to forgive the debt, but to no avail, and with Haiti’s state budget sapped by debt payments, many of Estimé’s ambitious ideas remained nothing more than that. In a bid to increase government revenues, he nationalized the banana industry that had been run by the Standard Fruit Company; but Haitian ships lacked the necessary refrigeration capabilities and this, coupled with mismanagement, led to what one historian calls an “unmitigated disaster.” Soon, the once-thriving business was in shambles.11

  After the nationalization of the banana industry failed, Estimé looked to another possible solution to his country’s economic problems: tourism. In 1949, hoping to draw visitors to Haiti, he organized a bicentennial exposition commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Port-au-Prince. The event was widely covered in the U.S. media, helping to spread positive images of the country and showcasing the art of various Haitian painters. The American dancer Katherine Dunham, meanwhile, helped bring Haitian culture to eager audiences abroad. Estimé’s plan worked to some extent, and for a time Haiti became a fashionable destination for wealthy whites and African Americans who wanted to purchase Haitian paintings and watch performances of Vodou music and dances. But the promotion came with a sizable price tag. The bicentennial exhibition cost $4 million (the equivalent of over $37 million in today’s currency)—nearly a quarter of the Haitian government’s total annual budget. And ultimately, Estimé’s investment in publicity did not pay off. The number of tourists who came to Haiti steadily grew during the next decade, reaching over sixty thousand in 1956; but Haiti never became an attraction on the level of Jamaica or Cuba, and tourism’s impact on the broader economy always remained relatively small.12

  By the late 1940s, Estimé found himself increasingly frustrated in his attempts to transform the economic order in Haiti, and his opponents grew more vocal and hostile. Critics on the left accused him of spending too much money on trying to impress foreigners and not enough on helping his own people, while those on the right declared that his social welfare policies were radically leftist. A Haitian army officer in the Dominican Republic complained that Estimé’s administration was “composed exclusively of blacks of the lowest social level” and accused him of trying to replace Catholicism with the “barbarous and primitive voodoo cult, the ritual of which is bloody sacrifice.” Another opponent dubbed him “cannibal, thief, and bandit” and his regime “the most dangerous Bolshevik cell in the Antilles.” In 1950, Estimé tried to revise the constitution so that he could extend his time in power, but the parliament refused to cooperate. After a group of angry Estimé supporters responded by ransacking the Senate, the military officer Paul Magloire took control and forced the president into exile.13

  Once again, as in 1946, Magloire declared that he would supervise a transition to a new government. This time, however, the transition he oversaw was to himself. Styling himself as a “citizen-soldier” who would ensure stability, Magloire was elected by the parliament to be Haiti’s next president. In sharp contrast to Estimé, he made the suppression of leftist activity a hallmark of his regime: he signed an anticommunist pact with the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and actively attacked union organizers. “The people of Haiti are imm
une to Communism,” he announced, “because the goods are well distributed among everybody.”14

  Magloire was well aware that such declarations were music to the ears of American policymakers during the Cold War, and he made the most of the situation. Where Estimé had insisted that Haiti should pursue economic independence and self-sufficiency, Magloire eagerly sought out U.S. investment and financial assistance. On a visit to the United States, Magloire was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York, and in Washington he declared to a joint session of Congress that Haiti’s “destiny” was “closely linked to that of the great American democracy, for better or worse.” Soon, aid money from the United States, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization began pouring into the country, along with new groups of volunteers and missionaries, who established schools and hospitals. The foreign assistance enabled Magloire to rebuild roads that had fallen into disrepair and to construct a dam in the Artibonite Valley for hydroelectric power and irrigation. In 1954, he also organized massive celebrations of the sesquicentennial of Haitian independence, with the African American singer Marian Anderson performing a concert at the ruins of Christophe’s Sans-Souci palace. These projects made the early years of Magloire’s presidency popular with many Haitians: one observer has dubbed his time in office a “golden age” for Haiti, a period of stability and relative prosperity that made the regime’s reactionary rigidity less conspicuous.15

  Ultimately, though, Magloire’s conservative approach and his courting of foreign aid were no more successful than Estimé’s progressive policies at arresting Haiti’s economic decline. Agricultural production, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the gross national product, was stagnating, having sunk by some accounts to levels as low as those of the worst stretches of the nineteenth century. Deforestation and soil erosion were an increasingly dire threat, and rural residents continued to leave for Port-au-Prince in droves. In 1954, the situation was worsened dramatically by a massive hurricane that killed five thousand people, left a quarter of a million homeless, and destroyed much of the year’s coffee and cocoa crops. Almost a decade after a popular uprising had removed Lescot from power, the country’s situation seemed as desperate as ever. As Haitians began talking about who would succeed Magloire at the end of his term, one commentator declared that “the choice of the future president is for the laboring classes a matter of life and death.”16