I walked into the kitchen to fetch more rum and found Ginette busy preparing dessert. She was ecstatic. ‘Did you hear? He never invented a character. Maybe he’s searching for characters for the book on Haiti.’
‘It’s possible,’ I said and pulled out a bottle of Barbancourt. ‘You think he might write a serious book?’
‘Why not?’ Ginette took out an ice tray from the freezer and broke ice cubes into a small bucket. ‘If he has enough characters, maybe he’ll write a book about Papa Doc.’
It seemed like a real possibility. When we went back to the patio, Ginette and I began to talk of some of the people we knew in Haiti and on the Dominican border, characters we thought would entice Graham into writing a powerful novel, something that could be used as a weapon against the dictatorship. Words alone might not bring down Papa Doc, but they could bring world attention to the calamity that had befallen Haiti.
‘There are scores of exiles gathering along the border,’ I said. ‘They’re ill-prepared, but they’re determined.’
‘It’s a real tragedy,’ Graham said quietly.
‘It certainly is,’ I said. ‘I know the guerrillas. We have been doing what we can to help them. Mainly, I have had to transport charity food to keep them from starving.’
Graham looked at me and said nothing.
I took another drink of rum.
‘Do they have any guns?’ he asked.
‘No. They train with broomsticks and old World War I Enfield rifles. They have no logistical support.’
‘At least Fidel had good logistic support effort.’
‘All they have at this point is determination,’ I said.
‘If I came back, could you show me the border?’ he asked.
‘Certainly.’
I poured more rum. I could see he was turning over ideas in his head. Still, I could tell from his questions on Haiti that he was frustrated. Papa Doc’s government had prevented him from travelling to the north where there had been a series of cross-border attacks by General Cantave. He had been stalled. He knew he had only scratched the surface. He needed more, but what he needed he could not get in Haiti.
2 | A QUIXOTIC INSURGENCY
The day before starting our trip to the border I picked Graham up at the British Ambassador’s residence and announced my plan.
‘We’re going to an insane asylum.’
‘Not Haiti, I hope,’ Graham said.
‘No. No such luck. It’s where the rebels are. We’re going to meet the rebels, the Kamoken.’
‘At an asylum? Are you serious?’
He squeezed his tall frame into the seat of my Volkswagen, and we were off without further questions about my own sanity. As we headed west out of Santo Domingo he rolled the word ‘Kamoken’ over and over as a scrabble player might to try and identify it, until he finally asked me about the name.
‘It’s the name of an anti-malaria pill, Camoquin, they sell in Haiti.’
‘Really?’ Graham laughed.
‘The pill gives people a yellow complexion. The first anti-Duvalier invaders were mulattos and whites,’ I explained. ‘Was this recent?’
‘No. July ’58.’
‘You were still in Haiti then and covered it.’
I nodded. ‘I was the only foreign reporter on the scene. Unfortunately the insurgency against Duvalier is full of fantastic plots and even more fantastic failures.’
As we drove out to Nigua I explained to Graham how in the early summer of 1958 rumours of an invasion by an exile force were circulating all over Haiti. Duvalier had been in office for only ten months and there had already been a number of bomb plots against him. Many Haitian military officers such as army captain Alix Pasquet had escaped into exile. The National Pententary prison was full of suspected anti-government agents. (Later Papa Doc made Fort Dimanche his major prison and killing field.)
Pasquet and exiled lieutenants Philippe Dominique and Henri Perpignan, who were living in exile in Miami, recruited Dade County Deputy Sheriff Dany Jones, retired Dade County Deputy Sheriff Arthur Payne and two adventurers Robert Hickey and Levant Kersten to help fight their insurgency. The Haitians agreed to pay the men $2,000 each. The eighth man in the force was Joseph D.J. Walker, captain of the 55-foot launch the Mollie C.
Pasquet was motivated not only by his hatred of Papa Doc but by his own ego and the delusion that he might become ruler of Haiti. He kept in touch with many of his friends and fellow officers, lining them up to support his attack on the Palace. He even sent his wristwatch to a friend to get it fixed at a repair shop in Port-au-Prince, saying he would pick it up in a couple of weeks.
Dominique had been the commander of the military riding school. He had the reputation of a playboy, romancing the younger women at the school, despite being married with children. Perpignan had spent most of his military career behind a desk and had little experience in action. He had been a member of former Haitian President Paul Magloire’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ of unofficial confidants and managed the payroll of government spies to the tune of $12,000 a month.
The group boarded the Mollie C and left Key West on what they said was a lobster expedition. The cabin was crammed with arms and ammunition, and the deck was loaded with drums of fuel. They stopped in Nassau, Bahamas, where they were wined and dined by Clément Benoít, Duvalier’s new Consul. Then, under a full moon, they began the 600-mile journey from the Bahamas. On the afternoon of 28 June the Mollie C entered La Gonave Bay and anchored in a small cove at Deluge, some forty miles north of Port-au-Prince.
The three Haitians stayed inside the boat while Jones and Payne went ashore in the dingy. They posed as typical tourists, wearing only their bathing suits and purchasing several woven straw hats. Payne used sign language to communicate with a group of local peasants, telling them they needed transport to the capital because their boat had broken down. The peasants promised to return with help, but a rural policeman was alerted to the presence of the blans (foreigners) and notified the nearby army post at St Marc.
At ten o’clock that night Walker brought the Mollie C within wading distance of the beach. As the men unloaded their weapons a three-man army patrol drove up to see what they were up to. A firefight ensued. Payne was wounded in the thigh, but the insurgents killed the three soldiers. The eight men climbed into the jeep and sped off into the night, passing through Montrouis and the army post there without being detected.
When they reached the crossroads leading to the town of Arcahaie, not far from another army post, the jeep broke down. Pasquet managed to hire a taptap (jitney bus). Inscribed on its front was the warning Malgre tout Dieu seul maître (In spite of all, God is the only master).
Dominique took the wheel. Pasquet sat next to him in the front while the others sat in the back on the jitney’s two passenger benches. They bound Payne’s leg in a tourniquet and sped off towards the capital, passing two more army posts without incident. They raced through the pre-dawn darkness of the capital and headed straight for the main entrance of the Casernes Dessalines (army barracks), behind the National Palace.
Pasquet barked an order to the sentry announcing they were bringing in prisoners and drew a confused salute as they sped through the gate. Dominique swung the taptap in a sharp U-turn and stopped in front of the administrative offices. They hopped out of the jitney and ran up the steps with Payne following behind.
They surprised the duty officer and shot him dead before he could reach for his gun. Within minutes Pasquet and his men had managed to overcome the sleeping soldiers and secure the barracks. The troops were locked inside the garrison and forced to sit in their underwear with their hands on their heads. Pasquet worked the phones, trying to recruit his friends in the military. Unfortunately none were willing to take a chance. One of his calls was to the Palace, where Papa Doc answered the phone and the two men had a quick and peculiar exchange of words, with Duvalier telling Pasquet to be a man and face him at the gate of the barracks.
Outside the Casernes Dessalines
Haiti had once again woken to the sound of gunfire. The rumours circulated that a rebel force of two hundred had seized the barracks. The entire army and police apparatus appeared paralysed. Many of the army officers were literally sitting on their hands waiting to see how the scales tilted.
The early daylight hours gave some of the Duvalierists more courage. The plea came over the radio. ‘Aid your president,’ the announcer shouted. ‘Hated Magloirists have seized the Casernes Dessalines and they have brought foreigners with them, Dominicans!’
However, few appeared to heed the call. In the downtown area a stream of tradesmen, market women and store employees went about their daily chores, setting up for the day’s business, pretending to ignore the obvious. Market women with baskets loaded with vegetables on their heads walked casually past the National Palace without so much as glancing at the soldiers lying on the ground with rifles at the ready.
Duvalier himself, dressed in a soldier’s khaki uniform, a combat steel helmet and two pistols at his hips, moved about the place giving orders.
Pasquet and his men held the barracks and waited for reinforcements to arrive. But Perpignan, a heavy smoker, could not control his craving. He sent out one of the prisoners, who also happened to be Mrs Duvalier’s driver, to fetch a pack of Haitian-made Splendids from a street vendor. A group of Duvalierists seized and interrogated him, learning the truth: there were only eight invaders.
From there, things got progressively worse for the rebels. The reinforcements Pasquet expected never arrived. Captain Daniel Beauvoir, a friend whom Pasquet believed would side with him and fight Duvalier, arrived with troops from Pétionville and took up firing positions in the military hospital across the streets from the barracks. The four hundred yards separating the Palace and the Casernes Dessalines turned into a free-fire zone. There was a general distribution of pistols to volunteers at the Palace side gate.
The final assault on the rebels came when the Palace guards opened up on the barracks with a .50-calibre machine-gun, making a terrible din. The rebels returned fire with a .30-calibre. Grenades exploded, and there was a loud cheer as fifty soldiers escaped from the barracks, signalling that it was all over for the invaders. The shooting stopped. The eerie silence that followed was broken when a man ran out of the barracks with a bloody cloth in his hands, yelling frantically that he had the brains of Alix Pasquet.
Pasquet’s skull had been shattered. He lay face up with open eyes as if gazing into Duvalier’s official portrait hanging on a wall across the room, a cynical smile on his face, his likeness pierced by a single bullet. Dominique’s bullet-riddled corpse lay propped in the corner next to a door. Near him Captain Walker lay dead, shot through the right ear, a pack of Lucky Strikes balanced on his neck. Dany Jones lay half sitting, a small, clean bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
Payne was still alive. He was wrapped up in a mattress, his complexion pale from the loss of blood from his leg wound. When the soldiers ran in he pleaded for his life and called out, ‘Journalist, journalist!’ But the soldiers cut him down with a burst of gunfire.
Perpignan, Hickey and Kersten managed to escape. Perpignan and Hickey ran across the street, through the grounds of the military hospital and over a back fence. Hickey was spotted by a soldier and shot through the head. Perpignan ran into the yard of a house and forced the houseboy to hide him in the chicken coop, but when the boy heard the mob outside he became frightened and ran. Perpignan shot him down with a burst from his Thompson submachine-gun, giving away his hiding place. The mob closed in. He was shot and stabbed. His clothes were torn and his naked body was dragged through the streets and into the Palace, where it left a trail of blood over the marble floors and stairs as it was hauled before Duvalier.
The mob also caught up with Kersten behind the barracks, where they hacked him to death with machetes and paraded his body through the streets.
‘I can’t believe it. Eight men,’ Graham said when I finished telling him the story. ‘They really thought they could do it.’
‘It always seems to be that way,’ I said.
Graham made reference of the invasion in The Comedians when Philipot visits Brown who is swimming in the pool. The two men speak, wondering what Jones is up to. Philipot tells Brown about the invasion. ‘I told him how seven men once captured the army barracks because they had tommy-guns.’
‘I’m sure that helped Papa Doc more than anyone can imagine,’ said Graham.
‘That’s when he started his Volunteers of National Security.’
‘His militia?’
I nodded. ‘The National Assembly passed laws. There was a curfew, everything. It gave him the excuse to build his terror network.’
‘And there were the usual repercussions, I’m sure.’
‘Oh yes. And he didn’t have to hide it. He positioned a new Palace military staff that was loyal only to him. He made changes in the military. A few foreigners were expelled.’
‘They played right into his plans. It happens every time. It’s like the Bay of Pigs. It did more for Castro than anyone else.’
‘You know,’ I said after a while, ‘the problem with Haiti is that no one seems to care. That invasion made headlines because there were five Americans involved, but Papa Doc is committing horrible crimes every day. It just doesn’t make the papers.’
‘Who would believe that the Cold War would ever come to the Caribbean.’ Graham was pensive, then he added, ‘The US would support the devil if he was anti-Communist.’
‘Fascism may flow —’
‘Washington is paranoid,’ Graham interrupted. ‘They’re obsessed with Fidel. They don’t want another Cuba. Papa Doc knows how to play the anti-Communist card.’
‘If they knew what’s going on,’ I said.
‘Believe me, they know.’
‘I wish Haiti would get more attention in the press. Very little truth comes out of the country, and when it does it doesn’t get much play. There was Hector Riobé. I think he was in his mid-twenties. His father had been picked up by the Macoutes at a roadblock in Carrefour the day of the attempted kidnapping. They took his car, money and land. They executed him the same day but later told the family that he was still alive and needed money in prison. The family finally realized that they were lying. This became a Macoute racket to extract money from other families of the “disappeared”.’
‘But he was dead.’
‘Yes, very dead. Riobé was an only son. He decided to fight against Duvalier, and the Macoutes turned him into an enemy. He took his Ford pick-up and welded steel plates all around it, turning it into an armoured car. He assembled a flame-thrower and attached it to the car. His plan was to take over the police station in Pétionville.’
‘I heard about Riobé in Haiti,’ Graham said. ‘I would like to hear what you know of his fight, which would seem to be driven solely by courage. It sounds like he had no chance of success.’
‘Yes, he was courageous, but it proved to be a suicidal attack,’ I said and told him what I knew. Late on the night of 16 July 1963, as the celebration over the corpse of Clément Barbot was winding down, Riobé and his partisans drove the deserted streets of Port-au-Prince in his armoured vehicle. Halfway up the hill to Pétionville the vehicle overheated. The driver, Demas, jumped out and went to a house to ask for water. It turned out Riobé had welded a steel sheet in front of the radiator, blocking the truck’s cooling system. But it was too late to fix. It was done.
When their makeshift tank finally reached Pétionville the overheated engine coughed and died in front of the small police post at the corner of the Pétionville market. They were only a few blocks from their target.
The policeman on duty offered to fetch some water. Another policeman walked around the strange vehicle, which resembled a Mardi Gras float. He pulled himself up to see what was in the back. Four men with 12-gauge shotguns and a .22-calibre rifle lay on the bed of the truck. The unarmed policeman ran away as the men jumped out, firing in all directions, waking
up the market women sleeping beside their stalls and sending them screaming for cover.
The group abandoned the vehicle. Two of the youths figured the mission had been aborted and walked home. The other three, Damas, Riobé and Jean-Pierre Hudicourt, regrouped further up the road. They decided to make the police post in the small holiday village of Kenscoff their alternate target. They stopped a car driven by a well-known Syrian-Haitian merchant Antoine Izméry and ordered him to drive them up the mountain.
They attacked the police station, killing three policemen and two militiamen and making off with arms and munitions. The little town was in turmoil. The road was blocked, and the militia began a house-to-house search; then they began to comb the mountains. As they neared the summit of Morne Godet they were greeted by gunfire.
Near the top of the mountain there was a strategically situated cave, easily defended. Within hours government reinforcements arrived in Kenscoff and moved into battle positions, but every time a soldier or member of the militia got close to the summit and became exposed a shot from the cave sent him reeling down the mountain dead or wounded.
The authorities believed the cave was defended by a group of well-trained sharpshooters. As the number of casualties grew, the US Marine-trained Casernes Dessalines battalion was ordered to join the war with mortars and grenades. It was becoming an embarrassment to the Palace. The entire country was alive with exciting rumours of a battle that Papa Doc was actually losing.
The firefight continued for three days. Then on the afternoon of Friday 19 July the cave fell silent. The government feared it was a trick. The soldiers didn’t dare approach the cave. The following day the police arrived with Hector Riobé’s mother. They put her on a horse and made her ride up to the cave calling out her son’s name as they followed close behind, using her as a human shield. There was no reply.
When Papa Doc’s forces finally reached the cave they were astonished to find there wasn’t a squad of sharpshooters but a single gunman. Hector Riobé lay dead, a bullet through his head — by his own hand.
The Seeds of Fiction Page 4