Haiti

  Back in 1950, Magloire had intervened to depose Estimé when he tried to extend his time in office. As the end of Magloire’s own term approached in 1956, however, he proved no more willing to relinquish power and refused to call an election. When that decision was met with protests, he declared a state of siege. The result was a violent, year-long struggle over control of the presidency, and when the fighting ended, it was a relative unknown—a doctor, writer, and occasional activist—who had taken power. Having carefully watched what had happened to the previous leaders, François Duvalier would offer his own response to Haiti’s situation: a twisted synthesis of Estimé’s populism and Magloire’s conservatism, with a ferocious cult of personality at the center.17

  * * *

  The 1956 tug-of-war over the presidency was not Duvalier’s first venture into Haitian politics. As a student at the prestigious Lycée Pétion, he had counted Estimé and Jean Price-Mars among his teachers, and after graduating from medical school, he combined his work as a doctor with writing for newspapers. By 1934 he was publishing regular columns about literature and politics under the memorable pen name Abderrahman, in reference to Abd-al-Rahman, a tenth-century Muslim caliph in Spain who founded the medical school in Córdoba.18

  In one of his newspaper columns, Duvalier railed against the “useless elite, bloated with pride, stupid, and imbecile” that governed Haiti. His own career, though, was rapidly propelling him from a middle-class childhood—his father was an elementary school teacher, and his mother worked in a bakery—toward the elite ranks. In the early 1940s he was hired to be part of a U.S.-sponsored program aimed at the eradication of yaws, an infectious tropical disease that left many crippled in Haiti. Because he spoke some English, Duvalier became the interpreter for the American leader of the project, and soon he was named to head one of the anti-yaws clinics. The prestige of his work as a doctor also contributed to his social advancement: in 1939 he had married Simone Ovide Faine, the daughter of a wealthy light-skinned merchant from the prosperous neighborhood of Pétionville. The match highlighted the complicated ways in which class and color interacted in shaping the hierarchies of Haitian society. Though light-skinned Haitian families often considered dark-skinned suitors like Duvalier to be unsuitable, education and professional success could overcome such barriers. Simone would eventually accompany Duvalier to the heights of power, playing a vital role behind the scenes.19

  Despite his firsthand experience with the fluidity of Haiti’s social system, in his political thought Duvalier held fast to the idea that there was a fundamental opposition between “black” and “mulatto” groups in Haiti. Leftist thinkers such as Jacques Roumain had sought to direct political debate toward issues of class, pointing out that in Haiti discussions of color merely served to hide the more difficult truth: governing elites of all colors had consistently marginalized the population. Duvalier, though, saw the two as inseparable. For him, color was class, and class was color. In a 1946 essay, Duvalier and his friend Lorimer Denis noted that the vast majority of Haiti’s people were black descendants of Africans. But this group, they argued, had always been dominated and oppressed by the country’s light-skinned elites. Dessalines—whom they described as “the first Haitian socialist”—was assassinated by the light-skinned Pétion, they said, because he had planned to distribute land to the ex-slaves. Peasant leaders like Acaau had been likewise crushed by the elites. This nineteenth-century pattern, Duvalier and Denis maintained, had continued through the twentieth century, and it was time to break it. The country needed new black leaders, true heirs to Dessalines, who would finally complete the decolonization begun by the Haitian Revolution.20

  The historical narrative presented by Duvalier and Denis was decidedly selective. Christophe was largely absent: his story didn’t fit well into their narrative about the perpetual exclusion of the black majority. Duvalier and Denis also elided the fact that it was Pétion who had distributed land to his army, thereby helping to lay the foundation for lakou culture. Such details would have muddied the point. In any case, the essay was really less about the past than about the future. As Duvalier launched himself into politics, he realized that the social resentments felt by many darker-skinned Haitians could be effectively channeled into an invitingly simple political argument: remove the light-skinned elite, replace them with black leaders, and Haiti would be saved.21

  After Lescot was forced into exile in 1946, the question of color became a central issue in the election. It did not escape activists’ notice that all four presidents installed through U.S. support—Dartiguenave, Borno, Vincent, and Lescot—had been light-skinned. “The mulatto is a mulatto before being a Haitian,” one newspaper article proclaimed. Another writer declared that blacks were tired of the “contempt and arrogance of the Nazis of Haiti”—that is, the light-skinned elites. Duvalier himself briefly considered running for president, but then decided that it was too early for such a move. Instead, he wound up serving in the administration of his former teacher Estimé, where he witnessed both the president’s attempts at reform and the strenuous resistance they encountered. The provocatively racist tone used by some of Estimé’s opponents confirmed Duvalier’s sense that color conflict was indeed the key to Haitian politics. When Magloire came to power, he dismissed a number of the middle-class blacks hired by Estimé, including Duvalier, who returned to his work in the anti-yaws campaign.22

  Throughout the Magloire years, Duvalier continued to write, further developing his theories about what ailed Haiti and what could heal it. In addition to insisting on the need for black leadership, he also delved into the question of what particular style of government was best suited for Haitians. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Duvalier considered himself an heir to Jean Price-Mars, convinced by the ethnographer’s argument that Haitian cultural and political development had been stunted by subservience to French values. Duvalier’s version of this viewpoint, however, represented an important shift from the approach taken by his mentor. Whereas Price-Mars had emphasized the way that Haitian culture had been forged by the country’s history, Duvalier stressed what he saw as the essential, transhistorical qualities of the African race. In making this argument he drew from a surprising source: the nineteenth-century French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, who had postulated that there were fundamental biological differences between the personalities of different racial groups. Gobineau had specifically cited Haiti as proof of the inferiority of blacks, describing the manners of its people as being “depraved, brutal, and savage.” Back in 1885, Anténor Firmin had energetically attacked these theories in his On the Equality of the Human Races. Duvalier, however, was taken by the idea that there were distinct African and European personalities, and particularly by Gobineau’s suggestion that Africans were naturally inclined to “paternalistic” and “despotic” forms of government. Elaborating on Gobineau, Duvalier proposed that Africans were “communal” in nature, rather than “individualistic” as Westerners were. As a result, he concluded, Africans—and, by extension, Haitians—needed strong leaders, rulers who would be less interested in safeguarding individual rights than in pursuing the good of the national community as a whole.23

  When the political chaos began in 1956, Duvalier decided that the time had come to transform his ideas into action. The situation was muddled and treacherous. After refusing to call elections, Magloire had been forced out of power, and over the next seven months, Haiti had passed through the hands of five temporary governments. Eventually, three major players emerged: the wealthy Louis Déjoie, a descendant of the nineteenth-century president Fabre Geffrard; the working-class leader Daniel Fignolé; and Duvalier. All of them were experienced political operators, who knew both how to deploy public demonstrations and how to work behind the scenes. Déjoie was an agronomist who had studied in Belgium, directed an agricultural school during the U.S. occupation, and worked as a chemist for HASCO before being elected senator; he had the support of many powerful Haitians. Fignolé, a chari
smatic former mathematics professor, was the most popular of the leftist candidates who had been kept from office by Magloire’s military council in 1946, and he continued to command an impressive following among the masses in Port-au-Prince. Fignolé’s supporters, ready to pour out into the streets at his call, were known as his “steamroller.” The fifty-year-old Duvalier seemed, in comparison, to have a much smaller chance of capturing the presidency. But he had many contacts in the countryside, was admired for his medical work, and presented himself as the heir to Estimé, accumulating a significant following among those committed to increasing black political power.24

  Supporters of the three candidates often clashed violently, and Duvalier proved particularly masterful in the tactics of ground-level political conflict. He made especially effective use of a network of hired thugs, known as cagoulards for the cagoules, or masks, they wore over their faces. Duvalier’s cagoulards disrupted the process of voter registration with demonstrations and attacks on electoral offices, and even invaded an official mass in the National Cathedral, starting a melee that left several dead. At night they visited the houses of Duvalier’s opponents, and they seem to have carried out a string of bombings aimed at sowing a climate of fear. Duvalier also cultivated support within the military. The army was initially divided between different candidates—at one point a showdown between two rival groups of soldiers in the streets of Port-au-Prince came complete with artillery fire and a bombing raid—but as the election approached, most of it united behind Duvalier. In May 1957 Fignolé was appointed provisional president, but within weeks he was overthrown by high-ranking military officers and forced out of the country, leaving his supporters without a candidate. When they surged into the streets to protest, the army responded with gunfire, pursuing them into their neighborhoods and killing as many as five hundred.25

  On September 22, 1957, Haitians finally went to the polls. Duvalier was declared the victor, with nearly 680,000 votes, compared to just under 267,000 for Déjoie—though many were convinced at the time, and remain convinced, that his victory was in fact the result of fraud. His sympathizers also secured fifty-six out of the fifty-eight seats in the Congress of Deputies. Déjoie pointed out that Duvalier’s father was not Haitian-born but had immigrated from Martinique, and that therefore (according to the same constitutional provision that should have disqualified Louis Borno) Duvalier was not eligible to be president. Though Déjoie was technically correct, he no longer had any real power, and Duvalier simply ignored the issue. Widespread accusations that he had manipulated the electoral process and stolen the presidency also left Duvalier unfazed. When asked how he had won, Duvalier responded smilingly, “The peasants love their doc.” But he also made it clear that his power was not subject to question. “As President I have no enemies and can have none,” he declared. “There are only the enemies of the nation. And these the nation must judge.”26

  * * *

  “No one is untouchable, and nothing is sacred.” This, writes the Haitian historian Claude Moïse, was the message Duvalier rapidly broadcast from the first days of his presidency. Duvalier’s remorseless suppression of dissent “stupefied” all the other traditional power holders in the country—the church, the political elites, the army, foreign government representatives—and reshaped the entire political landscape. “Duvalierist violence appeared limitless,” writes the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and its “logic lay precisely in the fact that it seemed limitless” and almost random. “A tally of its casualties would count more scapegoats, more victims of sheer arbitrariness, of accidents of birth, or of presence at inopportune times and places than opponents who represented any real menace to the regime.” The randomness was part of the point: “The victims were so many sacrificial offerings, confirming the permanence of power, a reminder to the people of their smallness in regard to the state, a reminder to the executioners of the omnipotence of their chief.” Though no one will likely ever know how many perished at the hands of Duvalier’s regime, estimates range from twenty thousand to as high as sixty thousand killed over the course of three decades. As Moïse puts it, Duvalier became an innovator: his “originality was to elevate repression to a level of brutality and perfection that had never before been achieved.”27

  Duvalier did initially send out some reassuring signals about the kind of regime he had in mind. His cabinet brought together men from a wide range of political and social backgrounds, including a few Marxists, and he garnered strong support from many prominent political and intellectual figures. The new constitution adopted in 1957 preserved the basic civil rights laid out in the previous version of the document, and even expanded some of them in significant ways. Though it did not explicitly name Kreyòl as an official language—that would have to wait another thirty years—Duvalier’s constitution broke new ground by decreeing that Kreyòl could be used in official contexts when necessary to protect “the material and moral interests of citizens who do not speak the French language sufficiently.” The new constitution was also the first to give women the right to vote, while a section on family law established equal economic rights within marriage.28

  At the same time, however, the constitution paved the way for an attack on democratic institutions. Duvalier knew that previous presidents had often encountered powerful opposition in the Haitian Senate, so he abolished the bicameral legislature, which dated back to 1816, replacing it with a single and more tractable house that combined the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The members of this new parliament also had shorter terms than representatives had enjoyed before. In addition, the new constitution put into place a ban on strikes by government employees and gave the executive the right to “militarize” the public sector when necessary. Most significantly, it expanded the government’s right to declare a state of siege: Duvalier could now do so not only in case of foreign invasion but also in response to “civil disturbances” within the country. The term was intentionally vague, so that it could be applied to almost anything—strikes, demonstrations, conspiracies, even mere rumors of any of these. Since a state of siege brought with it a suspension of civil and political rights, the executive was now armed with an extremely powerful mechanism for establishing near-total control. As Claude Moïse notes, this simple-seeming clause within the constitution allowed the president to dispense at will with the entire legal edifice that surrounded it. And Duvalier did not hesitate to take advantage of this ability: indeed, “the entire Duvalier regime can be summarized as an almost uninterrupted chain of states of siege and special powers.”29

  Over the next years, Duvalier created an ever-widening web of repression and terror. Occasionally, his efforts at establishing total control were frustrated: a Cuban opened a clandestine radio station in Haiti that broadcast anti-Duvalier messages, for example, and the police were never able to locate it, even though it was based in a butcher shop across the street from the National Palace. But what the regime lacked at first in surveillance skills, it made up for with ruthlessness that shocked and ultimately silenced most opponents. No one was exempt from the brutality; prominent women, in particular, suffered some remarkably vicious attacks. In early 1958, a group of cagoulards sent by Duvalier entered the home of Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel, an admired feminist activist who had criticized the new regime, beat up her two daughters, and carried her away. The next day, she was discovered dumped along a roadside, unconscious and almost naked.30

  The repression was motivated in part by a series of attempted coups against Duvalier in the early years of his regime. In July 1958, three exiled Haitian officers backed up by a handful of U.S. mercenaries (including two deputy sheriffs from Florida) sailed into Haiti, hijacked a bus, and briefly took over the garrison in downtown Port-au-Prince before being killed by Duvalier’s forces. A year later a small group of rebels landed at Les Cayes, but the Haitian military—working with the U.S. marines—rapidly crushed the uprising and carried out brutal reprisals against those suspected of having aided the insurgents.
In April 1961, the leftist activist Jacques-Stephen Alexis arrived with four other Haitians from Cuba, intending to start a popular uprising, but they were quickly captured. After several days of torture, Alexis and his companions were executed in a particularly gruesome way: local residents were ordered to publicly stone the men to death. “Revolutions must be total, radical, inflexible,” Duvalier declared afterward. “I have conquered the country. I have conquered power. I am the new Haiti. To wish to destroy me is to wish to destroy Haiti itself. It is thanks to me that it breathes, thanks to me that it even exists.”31

  Duvalier seized upon these attacks to justify the creation of his own security forces, transforming the informal bands of cagoulards that had helped him to win the election into a more formal organization under his direct command. Although the Haitian army had played a crucial role in getting him into power, Duvalier was extremely wary of it, realizing that it was one of the few institutions that could effectively stand up to him. Accordingly, he routinely purged the armed forces of anyone he suspected might oppose him, kept the military off balance with frequent firings and demotions, and closed down the military academy to eliminate a source of potentially independent-minded officers. Meanwhile, his longtime collaborator Clément Barbot was placed in charge of creating a new civil militia, which began taking in recruits in 1959. These recruits were paid relatively little, but through their connection with the regime they gained social prestige and nearly limitless power, especially in rural areas. Within a few years, the force was given the official name of National Security Volunteers, while many Haitians had started referring to them as Tontons Makouts. Ultimately, the security forces became twice as large as the Haitian army itself, and by the mid-1960s they were consuming more than two-thirds of the entire government budget.32