Haiti

  These new troops—the men with guns who pop up everywhere in Vieux-Chauvet’s novels—were quickly deployed by Duvalier to assert complete control over all political activity. Early in 1960, a group of them entered the house of Dantès Bellegarde in downtown Port-au-Prince. The former minister of agriculture had retired from public life several years before and now spent much of his time cultivating his garden, a small oasis in the increasingly run-down center of the capital. But this disengagement didn’t offer him protection: his status as a renowned intellectual was enough to make him a potential threat who needed to be intimidated into silence. The men held a gun to him and ransacked his residence, ripping up his papers and throwing his books on the ground. Bellegarde was comparatively lucky: the intruders, having roughed him up, left him in his home. Many others simply disappeared. When six senators from Duvalier’s slate spoke up against some of his actions in late 1959, the president declared them “enemies of the Republic” and accused them of terrorism. Five of them fled into exile, but one, an Episcopalian minister named Yvon Emmanuel Moreau, stayed behind. He declared that he was “a believer in democracy” and just doing his job as a senator. Within days, Moreau was arrested, and he was never heard from again.33

  Well-known activists and politicians were not the only ones Duvalier saw as a danger to his regime. In September 1960 he arrested several young university students, accusing them of “subversive activities.” When other students went on strike in protest, Duvalier closed the university, declaring an early vacation, and reorganized the university system in a way that gave him firmer control over the institution. During the same period, four of Haiti’s major newspapers were shut down, their premises destroyed, and their journalists imprisoned and tortured. Duvalier also attacked unions, arresting the president of the country’s largest labor organization. “All popular movements will be repressed with utmost rigor,” he announced. “The repression will be total, inflexible and inexorable.” Among the groups he banned under this edict was the Haitian Boy Scouts.34

  The violence infused everyday interactions with terror and uncertainty. To protect themselves from being harmed by the state, people sought to tie themselves to it in whatever way they could. At the same time, government connections became a sort of trump card that could put an end to any argument. “In the course of daily life anyone could claim a relationship, even fictitious, to the sole center and source of power in order to ensure a place on the side of the survivors,” notes Trouillot. “Thousands of everyday disputes, from a parent’s arguments about a child’s school grades to a brawl at a nightclub over a dancing partner,” led “one or another of the contending parties” to invoke the regime as a way of gaining the upper hand. This habit constantly reinforced and solidified the state’s claims to power, sundering links of friendship and conviviality. Over time, people coped with the situation in different ways. Some chose to work with the regime, seeing this as the only way to guarantee a certain level of security for themselves. Others sought simply to minimize their interactions with the state and go about their daily lives as quietly as possible. Many went into exile, waiting and hoping that they could one day return to a land free of Duvalier. Year after year, however, the regime seemed only to get stronger.35

  “Do you know why I have succeeded where other intellectuals, like Firmin and Bobo, failed?” Duvalier once asked a group of army officers. “I was the first to have a pen in one hand and a gun in the other.” Drawing skillfully on his own involvement in the decades of intellectual and cultural effervescence that began in the 1920s, Duvalier presented himself as the embodiment of the aspirations of an awakened Haitian nation. His regime, he insisted, was the fulfillment of the powerful demands made during and after the occupation for a more authentic, indigenous form of governance. “The Haitian democracy is not the German or the French democracy,” Duvalier declared a few years after his election. “It is neither the Latin American or U.S.-type democracy. It is defined in full, according to the ethnic background of the people, its history, its traditions, its sociology, all overflowing with humanism.” Those who opposed him abroad, he proclaimed, were participating in a form of “masqueraded colonialism.” “No power in the world can come and give us a lesson in democracy,” he belligerently announced in 1963.36

  Duvalier’s self-presentation as a champion of authentic Haitian culture made expert use of the language of Haiti’s cultural renaissance. The irony—and indeed tragedy—of the situation was that he twisted the argument for culturally rooted forms of governance into nothing more than a justification of authoritarian rule, stifling any hope for actually achieving social change. Like many leaders before him, Duvalier trumpeted the virtues of Haitian independence and sovereignty while doing little to address the profound social and economic difficulties facing the population. And though he played up his devotion to the rural Haitian masses, most of them remained profoundly disempowered. His regime offered them little more than symbolic inclusion, frequently busing in large numbers of supporters from the countryside to listen to his speeches in Port-au-Prince. Duvalier became a patron for popular singers, and he sponsored celebrations in his honor that showcased the traditional rara music played by musicians during the carnival season. But Haitians who tried to exercise the traditional right to parody long granted to carnival acts found that this, too, had been taken away from them. One performer in 1962 built a castle out of papier-mâché and carried it through the streets, demanding pennies for “maintenance”—a humorous reference to the government’s habit of demanding coerced “contributions” for new construction projects. Many laughed at the joke, until the Tontons Makouts came to arrest the man. Another group pantomimed a forceful critique of life under Duvalier: they worked on repairing the road, but whenever they asked their boss for their wages, he pulled out a mimed gun and pointed it at them. These performers, too, soon found themselves facing the quite real guns of the militia, and were taken off to prison.37

  Observers of Duvalier’s implacable hold on power have often dwelled, sometimes obsessively, on one aspect of his rule: his use of the symbols of Haitian Vodou. Some have claimed that in order to spread fear among the population, Duvalier consciously dressed so as to make himself look like the Vodou lwa Bawon Samèdi, who wears a dark suit and top hat and is associated with the realm of the dead. Duvalier was widely reputed to be a practitioner of Vodou, even an oungan himself, leading many to conclude that Vodou was one of the central pillars of the regime and its practitioners near-automatic Duvalier supporters. In fact, however, Duvalier approached Vodou in the same way that he handled all other institutions in Haitian society, through a combination of co-optation and repression. He eliminated those oungans and manbos who resisted his regime and rewarded those who supported him. In the countryside, where religious leaders wielded significant influence, Duvalier did recruit many of them as militia members or local enforcers; but this was a strategic decision, meant both to draw on the existing rural power structures and to make them subordinate to the state. Overall, Duvalier’s use of Vodou was opportunistic, and he did little to change the status of the religion in the country. Indeed, laws outlawing “superstitious practices” remained in effect throughout his time in power. As for the loyalty of Vodou practitioners, the extremely diverse and decentralized nature of the religion meant that it was never a monolithic political force. Vodou rituals were deployed both to support the regime and to resist it, depending on the region, the circumstance, and the individuals involved.38

  Duvalier’s attitude toward the Catholic Church was similarly driven by political calculations rather than any overarching principle. As a young intellectual, Duvalier had made a name for himself in part by criticizing the Church for its 1941 antisuperstition campaign, and many Catholic priests in the country remembered this with bitterness: during the 1956 election, a prominent bishop had opposed Duvalier’s candidacy by calling on Haitians to “vote Catholic.” Once in power, however, Duvalier frequently used Catholic imagery to present hims
elf as Haiti’s moral leader. A newspaper published an image of Christ tapping Duvalier’s shoulders and declaring “I have chosen him,” and a popular portrait of the president showed him at his desk with Jesus standing behind him, like a patron and protector.39

  While he embraced Catholic imagery, however, Duvalier saw the established Catholic Church in Haiti as a potential threat to his power, an institution that might provide opponents with a sanctuary and a platform for airing their grievances. Soon he found the perfect pretext to attack the Church, one that fit well with his image as an ardent nationalist: he denounced it as a foreign establishment. It was an easy charge to make: in the early 1960s, the Catholic Church in Haiti was still staffed almost completely with priests from France, Canada, and Belgium. Duvalier also took advantage of the simmering anger in the countryside about the anti-Vodou campaign, accusing a foreign priest of having destroyed “archaeological and folkloric riches” in his diocese.40

  Such claims, along with more direct accusations of sedition, formed the basis for a systematic purge of priests and bishops who were critical of the Duvalier regime. The attacks were carried out with startling brazenness: at one point, Duvalier sent troops to break up a prayer meeting in the Port-au-Prince cathedral and briefly arrested the bishop. Eventually, he negotiated with the papacy to secure the nomination of five Haitian bishops, who distinguished themselves by their steadfast support of the regime. Still, as with Vodou, Duvalier’s co-opting of the Catholic Church was never complete, and it continued to harbor pockets of resistance to his rule throughout the years—resistance all the more meaningful because now the Church was largely Haitian.41

  * * *

  While Duvalier was extremely adept at gaining control over the institutions of Haitian civil society, that would not have been enough to sustain his regime if he had not also been able to outmaneuver the most powerful outside force he faced: the United States. At the time, Washington’s approach to Haiti was (as it so often has been) uneven and fragmented, with different actors—the president and Congress, the State Department and the diplomatic corps in Haiti, the CIA and the U.S. military—each pursuing their own agenda. Duvalier understood that, and he also understood that the broader Cold War context provided him with ample opportunities to manipulate the U.S. government to his own ends.

  When the 1956 election began, the U.S. State Department had initially come out in support of Déjoie, not Duvalier. But some U.S. officials in the country noted that Déjoie was distinctly oriented toward France, while Duvalier had long-standing professional connections with the United States. Duvalier also offered what some Americans saw as an appealingly limited project of reform, an anticommunist agenda that did not call for overthrowing existing economic hierarchies. Many Haitians became convinced that Duvalier was the U.S. government’s preferred candidate, and though there was in fact division among the ranks of American officials, just before the election, the U.S. embassy openly endorsed him. Duvalier responded in kind: in his first press conference as president, he announced his hope that Haiti would become the “spoiled child of the United States, with the help of American capital.” The example of Puerto Rico’s prosperity, he said, was an inspiration.42

  As soon as he was installed in office, Duvalier hired a New York public relations firm headed by John Roosevelt, the son of Franklin, to promote Haiti and the Duvalier regime. (This was the first of many U.S. firms hired by Duvalier, who at one point turned to Lehman Brothers for advice on economic reforms.) The publicity efforts soon paid off. A New York Times editorial concluded that, despite the problems with the election, Duvalier should be “accepted as the legitimate president of Haiti”: what was done was done, and it was in the best interests of the United States to work with the country’s new ruler. And in May 1958, a Marine Corps training team, led by a veteran of the U.S. occupation, arrived to work with the Haitian army. Though quite small, the marine presence was symbolically significant, buttressing Duvalier’s power during his crucial first years. Direct financial aid also began to pour in from the United States: $7 million in 1959, and over $9 million in 1960—30 percent of the state budget in that year. By 1961, the $13.5 million received from the United States (the equivalent of over $100 million in today’s currency) made up 50 percent of the Haitian budget. In addition, both the Haitian military and the Tontons Makouts were largely armed with U.S. weapons: the Americans sent about two million dollars’ worth of equipment in 1959, including rifles, mortars, and machine guns. Though the weapons were technically U.S. property under control of the marine mission, they were in fact widely distributed and stockpiled by Duvalier’s militia units. U.S. officials working in Haiti were well aware of the violence of Duvalier’s regime. But Duvalier’s repressive approach also gave his government unusual stability—something that the United States had long wanted to see in Haiti, and that they found particularly appealing in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.43

  For a brief moment in the 1960s, the U.S. government did seem poised to turn decisively against Duvalier. The John F. Kennedy administration, pursuing a new approach for economic and political collaboration with Latin America known as the Alliance for Progress, saw Haiti, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as a “disgrace to this hemisphere.” “We were very concerned about Haiti,” Rusk later recalled. The country was “a political and social cesspool,” plagued by problems of “poverty, illiteracy, superstition, inadequate public services of the most minimum sort, human rights—make your own list.” One U.S. official who served in Haiti during this time summed up Duvalier’s regime as “unconstitutional, uncooperative, unreliable, unresponsive, unfriendly, inhumane, insincere and ineffective.” Americans also felt that Duvalier represented a strategic liability. The Alliance for Progress, as one official put it, was supposed to “encourage the growth of reasonably stable governments capable of absorbing reform and change, secure from both the extreme Left and the extreme Right,” and Duvalier did not fit the bill. They feared that he could end up being for Haiti what Batista had been for Cuba: a brutal dictator who opened the way for a communist revolution. In addition, U.S. officials were worried about Duvalier’s new militia, which they rightly perceived as usurping the role of the traditional military. Since creating the Garde d’Haïti, the U.S. military had maintained close contacts with the Haitian army and indeed trained a number of Haitian officers, and Washington considered that institution an important conduit for the transmission of U.S. ideals.44

  The showdown between Duvalier and the Kennedy administration began in earnest in May 1961. Haiti’s constitution established a six-year presidential mandate, which meant that Duvalier was supposed to leave office in 1963. In the previous decades, every Haitian president approaching the end of his term had tried to extend his time in power; Duvalier decided to get an early start on the process. In 1961 he called a referendum on a yes-or-no question: Should he continue to serve as president until 1967? The U.S. considered the election a farce: under the watchful eyes of the president’s militia, voters filed in and had to publicly ask for either a yes or a no ballot. Unsurprisingly, a massive majority voted in favor of the extension. In protest, Kennedy withdrew his ambassador and cut off direct military aid, though the United States continued to supply some assistance to the country. The goal was to establish distance from Duvalier himself and search for a political alternative within Haitian society, while trying to avoid a social upheaval by continuing to provide humanitarian assistance.45

  With Kennedy’s approval, the CIA gave some financial support and military training to groups of exiles who volunteered to invade the country. One plan, optimistically, hoped to kill two birds with one stone: a joint force of Haitian and Cuban exiles would topple Duvalier, then Castro. But support for such schemes was halfhearted at best, and the exile groups who eventually did attack Haiti from the United States in the 1960s would do so largely on their own initiative. In the meantime, the CIA explored other possible ways to influence Haiti: for a short time they apparently bou
ght editorial control of the astrological forecast of the French magazine Horoscope, which they believed Duvalier read avidly, hoping to manipulate him through the stars.46

  As Rusk himself later admitted, the United States found the Haitian dictator to be “extraordinarily resistant.” In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Duvalier astutely played on U.S. fears about the spread of communism in the Caribbean. “Haiti has to choose between the two great poles of attraction in the world today to realize her needs,” he threatened in a 1960 speech. At a key meeting of the Organization of American States in January 1962, when the United States was pushing for the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS, the Haitian foreign minister met with Dean Rusk and offered his support in return for a promise of aid. The U.S. secretary of state agreed, and Haiti cast the swing vote. A burst of aid to Haiti soon followed. The pointed joke among staffers in Washington was that on his return from the meeting, Rusk submitted a receipt for expenses that read, “Breakfast: $2.25. Lunch with Haitian Foreign Minister: $2,800,000.00.”47

  Even as he held the United States at bay, however, Duvalier faced continuing threats of coups and insurrections in his own country. Many of these plots originated right next door, in the Dominican Republic. After his election Duvalier had signed a pact with the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo: the two agreed to protect each other by suppressing any such conspiracies within their borders. Trujillo was nearing his third decade in power, and he planned to stay seemingly indefinitely; at one point he declared that he would still be running the Dominican Republic in the year 2000. In May 1961, however, he was assassinated. The longtime Trujillo opponent Juan Bosch returned from exile, won the ensuing election, and embarked on a far-reaching project of reform. Bosch made no secret of his distaste for Duvalier, and he allowed groups of Haitian exiles planning to overthrow the president to gather and train in the Dominican Republic. One of these groups flew planes over Port-au-Prince dropping leaflets announcing that they would destroy “all noxious insects who accompany the gorilla Duvalier” and calling on army officers to join in the uprising.48