style="font-size:15px;"> He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”
“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”
His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.
In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.
All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”
The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.
By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence. In that manacled land it seemed unlikely that there was anyone left to criticize, let alone attack. A missing Haitian would be unimportant and unnoticed, though the arrest or death of a foreigner could only be ordered by the President. There was little comfort in that, for he seemed totally unconcerned about international criticism.
A foreign passport was no protection. The Dominican consul was found with his throat slashed so ferociously that his head was almost severed. Cromwell James, a 61-year-old British shop owner, was arrested by Tontons and severely beaten—presumably for resisting extortion. It took ten days for his lawyer to reach him in jail, to find he had been charged with highway robbery! He died four days later: gangrene, from untreated wounds.
In a destitute land, such extortion yielded diminishing returns, for there were always fewer victims to be squeezed. When the Tontons began to demand money from foreigners the British Ambassador, Gerald Corley-Smith, complained. He was thrown out and the embassy closed. Duvalier renounced the convention of political asylum and raided other embassies to get at terrified Haitians hiding from the Tontons. Washington was curtly told to recall its ambassador, Raymond Thurston—who was Papa Doc’s financial crutch.
Though Haiti was officially Catholic, the church was also attacked. Archbishop Raymond Poirier was arrested and put on a Miami flight wearing a cassock and sash and carrying one dollar. Soon after his successor, the Haitian Bishop Augustus, was dragged from his bed by Tontons and not even allowed to put in his false teeth before he was deported. The Catholic Bishop and eighteen Jesuit priests followed him, as did the American Episcopal Bishop Alfred Voegeli, who had ministered to Haitians for twenty years. Papa Doc accepted the Pope’s excommunication with his usual equanimity and went on to ban the Boy Scouts.
Next year President Johnson agreed to send another ambassador to Port-au-Prince, Mr Benson Timmons III. Papa Doc kept him waiting five weeks for an audience, and then gave him a stern lecture on how a diplomat should behave.
Committing international hara-kiri, antagonizing the world while continuing to ask for aid, may not have made economic sense, but to Haitians it made some emotional sense: proud Haiti, first to defy the slave master, once again standing alone. From their point of view Dr Duvalier had one vital thing going for him: most of Haiti’s presidents had been upper-class mulattoes with light skins, but Papa Doc was as black as his hat.
In the years following the war some hundreds of millions of dollars were given or loaned to this friendless nation, much of it going directly to President Duvalier. The world finally realized Haiti was too corrupt and hopeless to help, so the dollars dried up. When we arrived in December 1968 the economy was in a state of collapse—finance in chaos, public works decaying, few passable roads and a government so venal that all trade not offering corrupt officials a rake-off was at a standstill.
With the lowest income, food intake and life expectancy in the hemisphere, the lives of the amiable, long-suffering Haitians have changed little since the days of slavery two centuries ago. Shoes are still a luxury. I found it impossible to exaggerate the poverty of a land so out of step with the rest of the world. From a workforce of two or three million, only 60,000 had jobs—almost all on the government payroll.
There seemed little chance of strikes. The unemployed had heard the President’s personal physician Dr Jacques Fourcand warn what would happen if Haiti ever found the energy to rise against Papa Doc: “Blood will flow as never before. The land will burn. There will be no sunrise and no sunset—just one enormous flame licking the sky. It will be the greatest slaughter in history—a Himalaya of corpses.” That benevolent doctor was a neurosurgeon and President of the local Red Cross, when not attending to the Father of the Nation.
Fear and violence were not new to that fevered land where the cheapest possession had always been life. It was once the richest French colony, but after the only successful slave revolt, in 1804, suffered a succession of tyrannical black governors, emperors and kings. In half a century there were sixty-nine violent revolutions. They left behind the world’s poorest country—a mountainous, teeming tropical land, only twice the size of Yorkshire. Nine out of ten of the 5 million Haitians are illiterate, but they are a sympathetic and artistic people, the women docile and, it was said, like panthers dreaming.
My only pleasure in that cowed capital came from the Peintres Naïfs. I was particularly taken with Préfet Duffaut, a sort of Haitian Lowry who always painted his native village of Jacmel and peopled it with busy matchstick figures. I bought two of his paintings and later gave the better one to my friend, the lovely Cubby Broccoli who was my Christmas host later that month in Beverly Hills. I realized on arrival at Cubby’s new home that the simple, charming primitive painting was quite out of place in his grand new mansion off Sunset Boulevard, and was surely destined to rest in one of his distant loos. I longed to ask for it back in exchange for something more suitable—say, a Rubens.
For any foreigner not affected by poverty or tyranny, Haiti still provided a dramatic holiday background. In those stricken days one cruise ship arrived each week from Miami. This stayed only a few hours, as most of the passengers were too frightened to go ashore.
To tidy up the foreground for the adventurous, all beggars were banished to the countryside for the day. Jealous Tontons stood watching for the braver to file ashore and fill their predatory line of elderly taxis. They were then driven up the lowering mountainside behind the capital to the little resort of Kenscoff, where they watched some flaming limbo dancers across their cold buffets before returning with relief to their ship, and sailing away.
We recorded their sad celebration amid despair, but left
