Haiti

  A few American reporters did manage to talk to ordinary Haitians, who described a life plagued not only by state violence but by ever-increasing poverty. “Duvalier has performed an economic miracle,” one Haitian told a U.S. journalist in 1964. “He has taught us to live without money and eat without food.” Indeed, while after his election Duvalier had promised to give the population “the opportunity to liberate itself from the throes of misery,” the Haitian economy worsened significantly during his time in power. He created a strong state, but it was essentially the shell of a state: it served almost entirely to assure control over the people rather than to serve their needs for health care, education, or land reform. Duvalier’s regime perfected the forms of extraction long practiced by Haitian leaders, using monopoly control over a number of industries—tobacco, flour, sugar, automobiles, alcohol, and other goods—as a way of indirectly taxing the rural population. Much of the budget went into officials’ individual accounts, enabling widespread corruption that enriched those tied to the regime even as it sucked resources from the rest of the country. And while Haiti’s population grew and the cost of living increased dramatically, sources of income—particularly agriculture—stagnated. The GNP went from $338 million in 1962 to $329 million in 1967, and coffee exports dropped by 31 percent between 1960 and 1967.65

  In perhaps the most cynical profiteering of all, the Haitian government worked out a deal with the Dominican Republic to earn money from the emigration of laborers who wanted to work on Dominican sugar plantations. Driven to leave their country by the increasingly difficult economic conditions, Haitian workers found themselves indentured to their own government. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, migrant workers had to pay the Haitian government the significant sum of $10 (approximately equivalent to $75 today) to gain the right to go to the Dominican Republic. The plantation owners there paid an additional $15 to the Haitian government for each worker, and subsequently deposited half of each worker’s wages into special accounts held by the Haitian state. Like much of the other money that went into government coffers, these fees mostly flowed to Duvalier and his close associates. By 1981, the Haitian government was charging Dominican planters a fee of $182 per Haitian worker, collecting nearly three million dollars that went into hidden accounts. The garnishment of wages made it extremely difficult for Haitian laborers to do what many had intended to do—work in the Dominican Republic for a while and then return home with savings to buy land. Instead, they were left destitute and stranded.66

  While Haitian migrants were being squeezed by their own government, the rural residents who remained behind were suffering as well. The massive network of rural Tontons Makouts in the countryside used their extensive control to levy arbitrary “taxes” on farmers and market women, and to deprive people of their land under one pretext or another. The prominent anti-Duvalier activist Jean Dominique described the regime as a “dictatorship that systematically organized the pillage, exploitation, spoliation and dispossession” of the poor, leaving them with only two options: “to flee or to fight.” Documenting the sporadic uprisings that took place through the Duvalier years, Dominique compared them to the ancient forms of resistance practiced by the enslaved against their colonial masters. Residents arrested after one such revolt, he noted, sang songs dating back to the Haitian Revolution to taunt and shame their guards.67

  For a short time in the late 1960s, groups of young urban activists sought to tap rural resentments against Duvalier to create a national movement against the dictatorship. Some advocated armed struggle, explicitly presenting themselves as new maroons resisting a new kind of slavery. They were, however, no match for Duvalier’s police apparatus. Students, labor leaders, and others suspected of leftist sympathies were imprisoned, executed, or forced into exile; at one point, Duvalier’s forces attacked the headquarters of an activist group, killing twenty of its members. Duvalier also appropriated the imagery of the resistance, constructing a statue dedicated to the “Unknown Maroon”—a kind of “tomb of the unknown soldier” for those who had resisted slavery and laid the foundation for Haiti’s independence. The message was clear: Duvalier was the one true representative of the Haitian nation, the authentic descendant of the country’s revolutionary founders. The era of resistance was past; the present was for obedience, and the only revolution was the one led by Duvalier himself.68

  Duvalier’s suppression of leftist groups impressed the Nixon administration, which began to strengthen its ties with the regime. In July 1969, Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York, came to Haiti in a high-profile visit and was photographed smiling and shaking hands with Duvalier. The visit marked an era of intense and open cooperation. A new U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Clinton Knox, lobbied so intensely for aid to the Duvalier regime that some Haitian officials apparently dubbed him an honorary Tonton Makout. Soon the Nixon government officially ended the embargo on the sale of arms to Haiti that had been put in place after Duvalier’s 1963 attack on the Dominican embassy, and in 1971, one million dollars’ worth of weaponry was bought by Haiti from the United States. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration had considered Duvalier a threat to democracy and Caribbean stability; a decade later, he had firmly established himself as one of America’s most favored client governments in the region.69

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  Standing on the balcony of the National Palace with Duvalier in 1969, Nelson Rockefeller realized that he had to hold up the president as he waved to the crowd below. The sixty-two-year-old Duvalier was in poor health and becoming increasingly frail. But in an odd if telling oversight, he hadn’t indicated in the 1964 constitution that made him president for life what would happen when that life ended. In 1970, Duvalier explained to his close associates that there was only one solution: his presidency would become a dynasty, passed on to his only son, Jean-Claude. (Though he had older daughters, Duvalier did not consider handing power to them.) Jean-Claude, however, posed a problem: he was only nineteen. He couldn’t even vote, and he certainly couldn’t be president—the constitution required a person to be at least forty years old to take that position. So Duvalier, talking of the need to include Haitian youth more fully in political life, changed the age of majority from twenty-one to eighteen and revised the 1964 constitution to make Jean-Claude Duvalier’s accession to power possible. “That a Duvalier should one day succeed a Duvalier,” the ailing president declared in January 1971, “should alarm nobody.” The next month, Haitians were once again called to the polls. They were asked the following question: “Citizen Dr. François Duvalier has chosen Citizen Jean-Claude Duvalier to succeed him as President-for-Life of the Republic. Does this choice respond to your aspirations and your desires? Do you ratify it?” According to the official results, there were 2,391,916 yes votes. Scholars differ on the question of how many voted against the measure: some say 1, others 0.70

  The United States, eager to see an untroubled transfer of power in the country, sent warships to patrol the waters between Miami and Haiti to make sure no exiles decided to use the moment to launch an attack. The Duvalier regime knew precisely what kind of language to use to appeal to the Americans. The Duvalierist official Luckner Cambronne proclaimed that “in the Caribbean basin, this crossroads of civilization,” Haiti represented “an enviable example of political and economic stability.” The country, he said, was a “barrier” to leftist ideologies that were seeking “the destruction of the spiritual and moral values of a Western civilization based on humanistic and Christian values.” François Duvalier died on April 21, 1971; the next day, Jean-Claude was sworn in as the new president for life. In his first speech, he declared: “The United States will always find Haiti on its side against communism.”71

  The younger Duvalier was widely considered a protected playboy lacking the political skills of his father, and many thought that his reign would not last long. But despite a series of family dramas that intrigued and entertained many observers, he would stay in power for fourteen years. It helped, of cours
e, that he inherited his father’s well-established system of control and extraction, as well as his close ties with the U.S. administration. During his time in office, Haiti’s relationships with the United States and other countries continued to improve, and an increasing amount of foreign investment began coming into the country. Corporations eager to take advantage of the low cost of labor in Haiti built factories to produce wigs, clothes, and baseballs. There was some incongruity to the last item, since Haitians themselves never took up the American sport. Soon, however, every baseball used in the U.S. professional leagues was made in Haiti.72

  Many commentators and economists were optimistic that foreign investment would help transform Haiti into a prosperous nation; one went so far as to imagine it becoming a new Taiwan. By 1984, there were as many as thirty thousand people working in factories around Port-au-Prince, and Haiti was competing with countries like Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong in the production of assembled export goods. Still, even Jean-Claude Duvalier himself admitted that export industries did little to address the overall problem of poverty in Haiti, declaring in a 1981 speech that they “remained enclaves with a weak level of integration into the economy.” A bigger transformation came from two other trends, whose impact continues to be felt to this day: the rapidly growing presence of private foreign aid groups, which came flooding into Haiti in the 1980s, and the creation of a massive diaspora as Haitians increasingly left the country to settle abroad.73

  The amount of aid that came into Haiti during the Jean-Claude Duvalier years was staggering: between 1972 to 1981 alone it amounted to $584 million (roughly equivalent to $2 billion today), with 80 percent of that coming from the United States. But foreign governments were well aware that Duvalier and his associates were simply taking much of the official aid money sent to the country for their own private gain. Loath to stop sending assistance altogether for fear of the social and political consequences, the donor countries found an elegant solution: channeling more and more of their aid into what were then called private voluntary organizations, or PVOs, which now largely go under the name of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Giving money to independent groups bypassed the Duvalier government while still promoting stability by addressing poverty, lack of health care, and agricultural problems. Soon Haiti became a magnet for evangelical religious groups and secular relief agencies alike, in part because of what one scholar describes as the “marketing of its paganism and poverty.” By 1984 there were at least four hundred PVOs, and probably more, operating in the country. Two years later, a Haitian association set up to assist the work of voluntary agencies reported that a new aid group was arriving in Haiti every week. In time this process created what some critics today refer to as the “Republic of NGOs,” with a bewildering patchwork of foreign aid organizations playing a central role in Haiti’s economic and political life.74

  In at least one case, U.S. involvement ended up being devastating for rural Haitians. In 1983, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Haitian government carried out a campaign to prevent the spread of swine flu among pigs in the country. The only way to stop the disease from spreading, they insisted, was to slaughter the entire existing pig population in Haiti. Unlike many other government efforts in the countryside, this one was carried out with remarkable efficiency. “We didn’t imagine the Haitian state was capable of such determination and effectiveness,” an economist who studied the situation later remarked. “And it’s too bad that they don’t apply them to more constructive projects.” Over the course of a few months, nearly two million pigs throughout Haiti were collected and killed. The Haitian government and the aid groups saw this as a logical public health measure, but from the perspective of rural Haitians it was a brutal assault. Haiti’s indigenous black breed of pigs, known as creole pigs, were crucial to rural survival. Descended from animals first introduced to the island by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century, the black pigs were well adapted to the environment, nourishing themselves with local plants, familiar with what they could eat and what was poisonous.75

  USAID and the Haitian government promised to provide compensation for the slaughtered pigs: assistance with purchasing white pigs, to be brought in from the United States. But the reimbursement plan turned out to be much less effectively run than the eradication program, and many Haitians got nothing in return for what they had lost. Moreover, those peasants who did get access to the new pigs rapidly learned that they were effectively useless. Unsuited to the climate, they frequently got sick and died; few of them bore young, and any piglets also usually died quickly. The imported white pigs had to be kept in pens to protect them, and they had to be fed special feed—imported from the United States—that the farmers could not afford. Indeed, as some noted bitingly, the new pigs required food and health care of a kind far superior to what the peasants themselves had access to. As one farmer told journalist Amy Wilentz a few years later, “the big white American pigs … cost too much, they eat too much, they eat fancy feed, not garbage and mango skins like the little Haitian pigs, they need lots of water, and who has lots of water? And then you’d have to find a sty to house them in, because the American pigs aren’t used to Haitian soil … They get sick. They die, and you’ve wasted all your money.” In a way, the moment symbolized all of the contradictions of Duvalier rule: a regime that insistently presented itself as the defender and embodiment of the Haitian nation had allowed outsiders to target a cornerstone of rural life, slaughtering the black pigs and offering foreign white ones in return.76

  As foreign aid groups struggled to find their way, for many Haitians the most important source of external assistance came not from any well-meaning outsiders but from their own connections and relatives abroad. By the early 1980s, Haitians themselves had become the country’s most significant export. The three decades of Duvalier rule were a time of massive exodus, of a scale and breadth never before seen in Haitian history. In one of the many ironic twists in the Duvalier saga, it was money coming from Haitians driven into exile that in many ways propped up the economy during Jean-Claude Duvalier’s rule. In 1960, remittances from immigrants overseas had made up 5 percent of all the money coming into the country; by the early 1980s, that had increased to one-third of the total amount.77

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, those who left Haiti had been mostly wealthier officials and professionals who feared political repression and who were often able to secure visas to travel by airplane to the United States, Canada, or Europe. By the middle of the 1960s, observers estimated that as many as 80 percent of Haiti’s professionals were outside the country; physicians, psychiatrists, and other medical personnel fled in droves. But in time the exodus claimed people from every social group and region in the country. Poorer residents, seeking to avoid the exploitation of working on the sugarcane plantations in the Dominican Republic, began escaping by boat to other parts of the Caribbean and to Florida. Many left hoping for temporary exile, but for most it became permanent. By 1970 there were already 35,000 Haitians in the Bahamas, and the number would continue to increase in the coming decade. A tally of Haitians in New York City found approximately 150,000 of them there in 1976, and that figure would climb to at least 400,000, and probably significantly more, by the end of the 1990s. Although a precise count is difficult to come by, it is estimated that up to a million Haitians—about 15 percent of the country’s population—fled during the thirty years of Duvalier rule.78

  By the early 1980s, Haiti had become what it remains today: a vast and seemingly boundless territory made up of communities not only within the borders of the country but in Boston, New York, Miami, Montréal, Paris, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, the Bahamas, and many other places as well. This diaspora was later dubbed the “Tenth Department”—an international supplement to the nine official districts within Haiti itself—as a way of acknowledging both how essential it is to Haiti’s present and future and how firmly established these emigrants have become in their adopted lands. The n
ovelist Edwidge Danticat, who came to New York as a child in 1981, recalls noting a particularly poignant turning point in the history of that diaspora. For a long time, when a Haitian died in New York, the body would be sent back to Haiti to be buried near family. One day, Danticat heard the news that a Haitian resident of New York had been traveling in Haiti and had died there, and the body was being sent back to New York, to be buried in the new place—the surest sign that it had now become home.79

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  Those in the “liberated territory” of the diaspora had the freedom to speak out against Duvalier, and many took the opportunity to do so. The New York radio station WRUL, for instance, broadcast a daily program in Kreyòl with news about Haiti and sharp attacks against the Duvalier regime; Duvalier tried hard to jam the signal, but many Haitians were able to tune in nonetheless. Within Haiti itself, criticizing the president was still difficult and fraught with danger. In the mid-1970s, though, courageous activists in Haiti began increasingly to test Duvalier’s regime. Newspapers and magazines spoke out against the government, and with the spread of transistor radios, a series of new radio stations popped up, enabling journalists to reach a far greater audience. Some of them began reporting from the countryside, providing accounts of the suffering of rural residents, which in turn emboldened the rural population to organize protests against local officials.80

  Activists in Haiti got a significant boost when Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States in 1976. He instituted a new approach to foreign policy in Latin America, putting pressure on U.S. allies to demonstrate a commitment to human rights in return for continued aid. In response, Duvalier eased restrictions on the press and allowed for local elections. Two non-Duvalierist political parties were formed, and the population in Le Cap shocked the regime by taking the liberalization seriously enough to elect an independent political leader to Congress. Activists created the Haitian League of Human Rights, which collected testimony by victims of the government, while delegations from the OAS published reports detailing the disappearances and government-sponsored torture. During the 1979 carnival, one group of revelers took the bold step of parading through the streets in Fidel Castro masks.81