Journey of a Lifetime. Alan Whicker
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 early to be ready to film the dockside departure. As we drove down the mountain, there in the middle of the road was a brand new corpse, still bleeding.
The unfortunate man was obviously dead. A body asleep, drunk or just unconscious is somehow…different. I told Racine to stop so that we could go back and at least cover the poor chap. He refused, and drove on faster. No Haitian would ever touch or rearrange any Tontons’ handwork for fear of suffering the same fate. That was why those bullet-scars across the airport walls had been left uncovered.
So all the cruise passengers in their motorcade which followed us down the mountain had to drive solemnly and in procession around that corpse. What the blue rinses from Pasadena made of this holiday demonstration I cannot imagine, but it surely did nothing for the Tourist Board’s “Come to Happy Haiti” promotion.
Haitians have seldom been able to summon up more energy for imported Christianity than was required to bury their dead, Tontons permitting. They may be 90 per cent Catholic, as the reference books say, but they are 100 per cent voodoo. In Haiti the supernatural is still alive.
When a peasant dies, before being placed in his coffin he may be dressed in his best clothes—if he has any—and seated at a table with food and a lighted cigarette between his lips or, if a woman, a clay pipe. When friends and neighbours arrive the feasting and dancing of the wake begins. Although by law the corpse is supposed to be buried within twenty-four hours, decomposition is often allowed to set in. This ensures that sorcerers will not dig him up and make a zombie, a work slave, out of him. The heavy stone slabs with which Haitians cover their graves are added insurance that the dead will not rise to slave as zombies for the rest of time.
Papa Doc angrily denied to me that he was a houngan, a voodoo priest—or even a follower of Baron Samedi, the most powerful and dreaded god in the voodoo pantheon. Baron Samedi personified death itself. He was always dressed in black and wore dark glasses. The President’s choice of wardrobe may not have been accidental.
In 1963 President Duvalier received information that one of his few political opponents still alive, Clément Barbot, a former Commander of the Tontons Macoutes but now in hiding, had transformed himself into a black dog. Papa Doc quickly ordered that all black dogs in Haiti should be killed. Barbot was later captured and shot to death by Tontons; he was still a man.
Certainly there were many stories about the brutal President, some terrible, some silly. It was said that he sought guidance from the entrails of goats, that he lay meditating in his bath wearing his black hat; that he had the head of one of his few enemies still about, Captain Blucher Philogènes, delivered to him in a pail of ice. He then sat for hours trying to induce the head to disclose the plotters’ plans…