Haiti

  As tensions mounted, Duvalier rarely appeared in public, and when he did, he was always surrounded by groups of Tontons Makouts. “It was a marvel,” wrote a pair of U.S. journalists, “that Duvalier was not killed accidentally amid the ocean of cocked pistols waving around him.” At the same time, he baited his opponents, declaring a celebratory “month of gratitude” in his own honor. Dr. Jacques Fourcand, the head of the Haitian Red Cross and a loyal Duvalierist, set the standard for defiant pugnacity in his speech at the celebrations. If anyone tried to attack Duvalier, he declared, Haiti would become a “Himalaya of corpses … Blood will flow in Haiti as never before. The land will burn from north to south, from east to west. There will be no sunrise or sunset—just one big flame licking the sky. The dead will be buried under a mountain of ashes.” Fourcand also lashed out against the American criticisms of the Duvalier term-extension referendum. Given the segregation and racial violence in the U.S. South, and Americans’ own history of invading Haiti, he said, “what right have they to advise us and give us a lesson in constitutional law?” In a final insult, he dubbed the United States a “democracy of sluts.”49

  A few days after Fourcand’s speech, the car bringing Duvalier’s children to school was ambushed by gunmen. The precise goal of the attack was unclear, and the children were able to flee unharmed into their school, though their bodyguards were killed. Duvalier’s reprisals were immediate, furious, and indiscriminate. When suspicion fell on François Benoît, an army officer who had been trained as a sharpshooter by the United States, Duvalier’s militia stormed his house. Benoît himself wasn’t there—he had fled to the Dominican embassy—but his parents were on the porch when the Tontons Makouts arrived, along with a family servant and a neighbor. The militia opened fire, killing them all. Afterward, they burned the house down; inside was Benoît’s baby, who died in the flames.50

  Angry that Dominicans were shielding suspected conspirators, Duvalier sent his militia into the Dominican embassy, where they roughed up the lone secretary who was there at the time. The Dominican ambassador had already moved to his own, better-guarded residence, along with the group of Haitians who had requested refuge; but Duvalier’s forces surrounded the house, making it impossible for anyone to go in or out. “Only a government of savages, of criminals, is capable of violating the sanctity of a foreign embassy,” a furious Bosch declared. In the capital of the Dominican Republic, crowds threw stones at the Haitian embassy, and the Haitian ambassador himself decided to resign and go into exile, announcing that he felt compelled to join “the forces fighting to regain the prestige my country deserves.” Summing up the situation, Bosch said that “Haiti is a powder keg and we are a lake of gasoline,” adding that if outside governments wanted to prevent a crisis, they should “send a psychiatrist down to examine Duvalier.”51

  Alarmed by the developments, the OAS dispatched a mission to Haiti. Duvalier brought in huge crowds of supporters to the National Palace and delivered a blistering speech to the visitors. “I am the personification of Haiti,” he declared. “Those who seek to destroy Duvalier seek to destroy our fatherland … God and the people are the source of all power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it and, damn it, I will keep it forever.” “I am here to continue the tradition of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines,” he went on. “No foreigner is going to tell me what to do.” Duvalier’s representative to the United Nations, meanwhile, complained that criticisms of Haiti were part of a racist conspiracy aimed at “bringing about the death of the only Negro republic on the American continent.”52

  For all their strong language, neither Kennedy nor Bosch was willing to carry out a direct assault against Duvalier. A bigger threat, as it turned out, was someone much closer to home: Clément Barbot, the man who had been one of Duvalier’s most important partners during his rise to power. Barbot had overseen the creation of the Tontons Makouts, and in 1959 he had briefly taken over the reins of government while Duvalier was recovering from a heart attack. When the president got better, Barbot stepped down. He ended up paying for his loyalty: Duvalier concluded that his longtime ally, having tasted power, was now a threat, and threw him into prison. Eighteen months later, without explanation, Barbot was set free. He kept out of sight for a while, but eventually decided to use the very networks he had created to support Duvalier to overthrow him. The attempt to kidnap the president’s children was in fact his doing, though Duvalier didn’t suspect so at the time, and he followed it up with a series of guerrilla attacks. “Duvalier is a madman,” Barbot told a U.S. reporter who managed to interview him during this period. “Duvalier is not a communist, a democrat, or anything else. He is an opportunist.” A few months later, Duvalier’s forces tracked down Barbot and his small group of supporters. The rebels fled into a nearby sugarcane field, but Duvalier’s militia set it on fire and shot the men as they tried to escape the flames.53

  A similarly bleak fate awaited a rebel group led by a young man named Hector Riobé, whose father had been executed by the Tontons Makouts. Tracked down by government forces, Riobé’s band fled into the mountains above Pétionville, where they holed up in a cave stocked with guns and ammunition, holding the militiamen at bay for days. Duvalier dispatched his best troops, a unit of marine-trained soldiers armed with mortars, but they, too, were beaten back. Eventually, he sent Riobé’s mother, on muleback, to the entrance of the cave to plead with him to surrender. Inside, the lone survivor of the earlier battles, Riobé shot himself.54

  With these battles raging in and around Port-au-Prince, many were convinced that Duvalier’s days were numbered. The United States positioned warships around Haiti and developed a plan for a provisional government; Duvalier himself booked seats on a flight to Paris. But he never had to use them. The military structure he had built, it turned out, was strong enough to withstand both foreign pressure and internal insurrection. In September 1963, after just seven months in power, Juan Bosch was overthrown by a military coup in the Dominican Republic. Two months later, Kennedy was assassinated. Duvalier had outlasted them both. Just to make sure that no more rebel groups could attack him from the Dominican Republic, Duvalier ordered his troops to create a no-man’s-land several miles wide along the Dominican border. All the houses in the region were burned, and the residents who lived there were forced out; anyone found moving through the area could be shot on sight.55

  Even with the odds overwhelmingly against them, though, some Haitian exiles still hoped to overthrow Duvalier and reclaim their country. One of the best-organized attempts came from a U.S.-based group of thirteen men who could boast degrees from Harvard and NYU and training from the U.S. military and the CIA. The rebels, who called themselves Jeune Haïti, disembarked in August 1964 on Haiti’s southern peninsula and carried out what Marine Colonel Robert Heinl described as “the most hard-fought guerrilla campaign Haiti had seen since the days of Péralte.” As always, the government’s reprisals were brutal and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because most of the members of Jeune Haïti had roots in Jérémie, Duvalier’s forces killed several hundred people in the town, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. A family called the Sansaricqs fell under suspicion, for example, because one member of the family was studying abroad in the United States. As a result, they were almost entirely wiped out; the victims included a handicapped grandmother and a two-year-old child.56

  The Jeune Haïti fighters managed to keep Duvalier’s militia at bay for a month, but one by one they were eventually tracked down and killed. By the end of October, Duvalier declared “total victory” over the rebels, publishing pictures of the severed heads of three of them. Two captured members of Jeune Haïti were shot by a firing squad in a public ceremony attended by a large crowd and televised live on government TV. Duvalier distributed a leaflet at the execution explaining that he had “crushed and will always crush the attempts of the antipatriots,” whose goal was to put Haiti back under the “whip” of foreign masters. “No force will stop the invincible march of the Duvalierist rev
olution,” he proclaimed. “It carries the strength of a torrent.”57

  There has never been full documentation or public recognition of all the victims of the Duvalier regime. The stories of many of those who lost their lives during this period remain untold. But what happened to one of them can perhaps stand in for the unpredictable and devastating cost exacted by the Haitian state during this period. The soccer player Joe Gaetjens, part of a prominent Port-au-Prince family, was a legend in Haiti both because of his professional playing in the country and for a goal he had scored during the 1950 World Cup—not for Haiti, but for the United States. Gaetjens was living in New York at the time, and thanks to lax regulations about player citizenship, he was recruited to play for the Americans. It was a brilliant choice: against the heavily favored English team, Gaetjens scored on a diving header, and the U.S. won 1–0 in one of the most famous upsets in the history of soccer. When Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1953, he was greeted by a cheering throng and a banner declaring him “the best player in Haiti, the U.S.A. and the Whole World.” Settling down in his native country, he ran a laundromat and coached youth soccer. A few of his brothers were active in politics, supporting Louis Déjoie in 1957 and later joining an anti-Duvalier group, and in 1964 most of the Gaetjens family decided to flee abroad. Joe, however, was convinced that—given his fame and the fact that he had stayed out of politics—he was not in danger. He was wrong. On June 8, 1964, two Tontons Makouts stopped him and carried him off to the infamous Fort Dimanche prison. The family never heard from him again. Eventually, the Haitian government confirmed that he had died behind bars. After the fall of the Duvaliers, one of Gaetjens’s relatives visited Fort Dimanche and saw the only trace left of Joe: his name scrawled on the wall of one of the cells.58

  * * *

  By 1964, after several years of crisis and violent conflict, there was no room left in Haiti’s public sphere for anything but strident assertions of loyalty. When Duvalier presented a new constitution to the Haitian Congress that would make him president for life, representatives competed with each other to express the loudest approbation. One exclaimed that followers of the “Duvalierist Revolution” should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause; another riposted they should also be ready to sacrifice “their father, their mother, their brother.” After being approved by Congress, the constitution was presented to the Haitian people for a national referendum. There was only one kind of ballot: it said “yes.” By now Haitian voters knew what they needed to do to avoid trouble, and over 2,800,000 of them cast the preprinted ballots. The three thousand or so who wrote “no” on the cards were in danger of arrest—for defacing their ballots. A few days before the voting, Duvalier had predicted the result. “There will never again be an election to elect a chief of state on the soil of Haiti,” he told a group of judges. “I shall be lord and master.” Along with a lifetime presidency, the new constitution gave Duvalier a series of titles that recalled the elaborate court of Henry Christophe: Supreme Chief of the Haitian Nation, Uncontestable Leader of the Revolution, Apostle of National Unity, Renovator of the Fatherland, and Worthy Heir of the Founders of the Haitian Nation.59

  “Duvalier is the professor of energy,” declared a Haitian newspaper in March 1964. “Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Duvalier is an electrifier of souls.” The government issued a new catechism to be recited by schoolchildren. “Who are Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion and Estimé?” it asked, in what could seem at first an innocent enough introduction to some of Haiti’s historical leaders. The answer, however, was not about history but the inescapable present: “Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion and Estimé are five distinct Chiefs of State who are substantiated in and form only one and the same President in the person of François Duvalier.” A new version of the Lord’s Prayer enabled Haitians to pray for the success of their ruler: “Our Doc, who art in the Palais National for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those antipatriots who daily spit upon our country; lead them into temptation and, poised by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.” The country, writes the historian Claude Moïse, was “saturated with portraits, slogans, posters and speeches constantly reminding people that Duvalier was president-for-life, the supreme chief, and the personification of the nation.”60

  Duvalier also remade the Haitian flag, getting rid of the traditional blue and red horizontal stripes and replacing them with vertical stripes in black and red. The change was a return to the flag used by Dessalines when he was emperor and by Christophe when he was king. It carried a potent meaning: the blue and the red had long been considered symbols of Haiti’s two social groups—red for the lighter-skinned people of mixed ancestry, blue for the darker-skinned blacks. Changing the blue to black made the blacks’ presence more prominent. Switching the orientation of the stripes from horizontal to vertical, meanwhile, meant that instead of having both colors share an equal attachment to the flagpole, the black now became the only color that connected to the mast—just as black leaders, Duvalier argued, should have pride of place. Having remade the design, the president placed a neon sign in front of the National Palace flashing a message with his signature at the bottom: “I am the Haitian flag, One and Indivisible—François Duvalier.”61

  While Duvalier presented himself as the heir to Louverture and Dessalines, he had come most of all to resemble the authoritarian Jean-Pierre Boyer. The political order he created was the most powerful and long-lasting government in Haiti since Boyer’s time. Indeed, Boyer’s ability to control the population was significantly limited in comparison to Duvalier’s. Building on the legacy of centralization from the U.S. occupation, and using his powerful, well-armed militia, Duvalier had established an iron grip on the country beyond anything that Boyer could have imagined. And unlike Boyer, who struggled for years to gain international recognition and only bought it at the steep price of the 1825 indemnity, by the mid-1960s, Duvalier had managed to stare down the United States and win. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson had resumed diplomatic relations with Haiti. A new ambassador was sent from Washington, and he declared that his government looked forward to “close cooperation and solidarity” with Duvalier.62

  American journalists, for their part, found Duvalier a fascinating subject. The president for life had a friendly chat with a visiting reporter from Newsweek magazine, and when asked about malnutrition among Haitian peasants, had “goggled with disbelief.” “Do you know how many mangoes they eat a year?” he asked, and then “answered himself with a spur-of-the-moment statistic: ‘400 million.’” Duvalier, the journalist wrote, “impressed me as Big Brother masquerading as the Mad Hatter.” Much of the coverage tended toward the sensationalistic, and recalled the outlandish visions of Haiti cultivated during the U.S. occupation. “Foreign journalists and scholars in search of exotic buffoons,” notes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “enjoyed painting François Duvalier as an incoherent madman, a black Ubu, a tropical Caligula who would spout any amount of nonsense at any time.”63

  While Duvalier denounced negative depictions of Haiti, he also played a complicated double game, cultivating the idea that his form of despotism was the country’s only viable form of governance. He hired a publicity director named Herbert Morrison, a one-time Hollywood press agent, who in an NBC interview gave credence to the idea that Duvalier used Vodou to keep his hold on power. Morrison claimed that Duvalier’s office had a “voodoo altar” with two dolls of U.S. officials—former president Eisenhower and former secretary of state John Foster Dulles, the latter with pins stuck around his pancreas. Such descriptions were calculated to appeal to U.S. stereotypes of voodoo dolls, which are not a part of most Haitian Vodou practice. But they also served Duvalier’s political interests, urging viewers to conclude that Haiti had the leader it needed and deserved. Many in the United States decided that the Haitian population as a whole was
primitive and irrational. In 1957 a New York Times editorial described Haitians as a “highly emotional people, who have little but tribal rule and superstition to guide their thinking” and who were therefore “notoriously susceptible to demagogic political appeal.” A decade later, a study carried out by the State Department said that Duvalier had a “paranoid personality” that “approached psychotic proportions at times.” However, the document went on, that made him a fitting president for Haitians, who were a “paranoid” group in general. Even Haitians who had a “veneer of education,” the study argued, were burdened by a belief in “animism.”64

  The logic of such reports was that while Duvalier might be brutal, he was the inevitable product of Haitian culture. As during the U.S. occupation, depictions of the supposed religious and cultural backwardness of Haiti conveniently neglected to consider the effects of America’s massive economic and military involvement in the country. The exoticizing representations of Haiti and Duvalier both justified U.S. support of his regime and buttressed his hold on power, legitimizing it by delegitimizing the idea of Haitian democracy.