answered that one himself, right away: “If he comes here he will be killed, because he is what you call a vagabond. A vagabond.”
Almost half of Haiti’s revenue was spent on Papa Doc’s personal security. So I questioned the use of his hated Tontons Macoutes: “It is a militia, they help me to clean the streets, they help me to cultivate the land, they help the Haitian army and they fight side by side in face of armed invasions.” Papa Doc got out of the limo, and the escort of Tontons instantly set up defensive positions around us, as though assassination was imminent.
He could not understand why he was dreaded by so many of his people: “I am the strongest man, the most anti-Communist man in the Caribbean islands. Certainly the question is a racial one because I am a strong leader. The US considers me a bad example for the 25 million Negroes living there. I should be the favourite child of the United States,” he said, stumbling in his enthusiasm for the subject. “Instead of which they consider me…the black sheep!” He gave me our programme title—a cackle, and one of those ghoulish grins.
Although his 500-strong Palace Guard now recognized us and knew we were harmless and acceptable, they were all permanently terrified of doing anything new, like allowing us through the wrong door. Getting in to see him was a daily problem.
I had the forethought to arm myself with a pass sternly addressed to “All Civil and Military Authorities” and signed by the President himself. This got me through the sentries on the palace gate, past a quiver of anxious guards on various doors, up the stairs and along the corridor and right up to the entrance to his chambers. There I was stopped by the Presidential Guard itself, a nervous group of captains and lieutenants who admitted they knew he was expecting me, but had no authority to disturb him. This was the Haitian “Catch-22”.
The only person who could actually approach him was his secretary, Mme Saint-Victor, a formidable lady and sister of another son-in-law—but she was away ill. So we sat under the chandelier in his annex while the President sat inside and waited, and nobody had the determination to knock on his door.
In exasperation I finally broke the stalemate by leaving the palace and going to the town’s telegraph office. I had seen a telex in Papa Doc’s inner sanctum and noted the number—3490068—so sent a message: “Mr President, I am waiting outside your door.” This worked.
Encouraged by our successful tour of the town, I suggested he might show us Duvalierville, which he ordered built several years ago as a national showplace, a sort of governmental Brasilia which would be his memorial. He said it was 20 miles away, and that was too far for him to travel. He was always most cautious when on the open road.
We later went to look for ourselves and found he was not missing much. Like everything else in Haiti, his empty dream had died for lack of finance. Crumbling and overgrown, the few piles of cracking white concrete stood in wasteland populated by a few listless squatters. It seemed a fitting monument. However, the President agreed to organize a visit to a nearby health centre. I listened as on one of the few working telephones in the land he chased his daughter to become an extra: “C’est le President de la République! Where is Di-Di?”
A stoic health centre patient with hepatitis had been organized to be looked at by Papa Doc, so now he would not dare to die. Across the body I recalled that the President was still a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in London. He was delighted. “Do you know that? Yes, I am surprising, eh? I am still interested in medical matters and until I die I am just an MD and after that President of Haiti. It was the best time of my life, when I was practising medicine.”
I wondered what he now did for relaxation. “My reading and writing, because this is another aspect of Dr Duvalier. He is a writer and a reader. Even when I am going to sleep I have a book in my hand. This is morphine for me. If I do not read I cannot sleep.” Sometimes he was a hard man to dislike.
I had established an unusual relationship with him, and on occasion he could even make him laugh. Despite the fact that I was persuading the grim but courteous Papa Doc to speak English—he was far more comfortable with French or Creole—it seemed he was beginning to enjoy a conversation withsomeone who was not trembling.
Ambassadors and archbishops expelled, ministers sacked, critics shot, yet television entertained and hostile questioning accepted…A strange world.
It was getting stranger, for we were running out of film. We had already shot programmes in Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador, and our messages calling for the dispatch of further film stock were growing more urgent. Yorkshire Television had only been running a few months and was still not quite sure what owning a major television centre was all about. Our cables were ignored because it was a weekend, and Christmas was approaching.
When stock was eventually dispatched from Leeds it was not sent directly to Jamaica, our neighbouring island, but via PanAm’s notorious Cargo section in New York where, as we feared, it disappeared from sight.
Filming, however, was going brilliantly. All we needed for our documentary was a climax, and we got that when Papa Doc told me that next day he was going Christmas shopping with Mme Duvalier and Di-Di, and would I like to film the expedition? When presidents start suggesting their own sequences, even I begin to feel quietly confident. The prospect of the terrifying dictator taking our film crew shopping around his capital was like a skeleton in a paper hat: macabre, but fascinating. It had to be the televisory situation of a lifetime.
My crew sensed an award-winning programme. This reconciled us wonderfully to the gloom and anxiety, the inedible food and the unpredictable presidential moods, the constant fear that at any moment something could go fatally wrong—and no one would hear a cry for help.
At that moment we ran out of film.
This presented endless new problems. As I had discovered with General Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, filming a dictator who does not want to be filmed can be quite dangerous. What is even more fatal, however, is not filming a dictator who wants to be filmed. He is not used to arguments or excuses or sweet reason. Dictators can only dictate.
Back at the hotel we had a despairing conference around empty camera magazines. What to do? One way or another he was going to be displeased. This could lead to a sudden restriction of liberty—or even a spilling of blood.
We could hardly say we were not interested any more, thank you, Mr President. We could not stand him up, or we might be escorted downstairs to the dungeons. We could not leave the country without an exit visa—and anyway our movements were followed by scores of eyes.
We had been anxious to establish a relationship, but now it seemed, to my surprise, that one could get too close to a dictator.
On the morning of our Christmas present expedition I was half hoping the guards outside the palace would hold us up again, even more firmly, but of course for the first time we were swept straight in, with salutes. So I handed my cameraman Frank Pocklington the small pocket camera I used, a little half-frame Olympus Pen F, and went on to spend the morning chatting with a marvellously relaxed President in various jewellers’ shops while my cameraman took happy-snaps, in anguish. For a documentary it was a dream situation—except that our cameraman was taking despairing paparazzi pictures, incredulous at what he was missing.
Papa Doc did not notice the absence of our Arriflex, of course. He was far too busy selecting the best jewellery he could find in the guarded shops, while behind him his womenfolk went through the stock with shrewd and practised eyes. I watched Di-Di riffle through a boxful of diamonds; she was surely a chip off the Old Doc.
As our presidential cortège arrived, each jeweller’s face became a study: on one hand, it was
