The Seeds of Fiction (26 page)

The kind of material they seem to like best from France are trivialities like the tailor who makes Picasso's clothes in return for paintings. Personally I find it a more readable paper now than in the old days — they have at any
rate abolished that awful
Time
's style which meant that every character had to have three adjectives in front of his name. I now read it perhaps two dozen times a year when before I only read it in airplanes. I would have liked to have read your story of Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno. [He had been the leader of the 1965 Constitutionalist rebellion in the Dominican Republic who returned from exile in Cuba to launch a guerrilla movement, only to be killed in the hills of his homeland. My story for
Time
had been ‘outspaced'.] I knew very little about him and I don't think I even remarked his death.
The Times
is almost as bad as
Time
about Latin America, perhaps worse, and somehow I can never bring myself to read
Le Monde
regularly.

Conditions in Haiti under Baby Doc were less dire — if only comparably so — than under his father. Then suddenly, in late 1975, I received belated information that Fred and Renel Baptiste were still alive in Fort Dimanche. Fred was said to be delusional, and both he and Renel were suffering from advanced tuberculosis. Help was urgently needed. At the time the Duvalier regime was seeking more US aid, so I imagined public pressure from the outside might be effective in getting help to the Baptiste brothers. I alerted Graham.

I received his reply dated 13 February 1976.

It's rather horrifying to think that Fred Baptiste and his brother are still alive. Amnesty International have suddenly become very interested in Haiti and I don't think you will mind if I give them your address. They want to revive interest. I am giving a talk to the American Press Corps in March in London and propose to bring up Haiti then. Any up-to-date information you can give me about conditions there would be welcome.

The British journalist Greg Chamberlain, then working in Paris for the Agence-France Presse (AFP) English-language news service, had become interested in Haiti and did part-time reporting on Haiti for the
Guardian
and other British publications. He arranged to interview Graham after his rare appearance at the foreign press luncheon in London in March 1976. They met in a small hotel room not far from Covent Garden and near the offices of Graham's publisher, Bodley Head. The interview appeared in the
Guardian.

Graham was quoted as saying, ‘To kill them [the Baptiste brothers] tomorrow would be a mercy, a release. They have suffered so much.'

During the luncheon, Chamberlain reported, Graham had thrown ‘into the ring his prestige as the origin of most of the world's image of the Duvalier dictatorship and offered the late Papa Doc's son and heir, President Jean-Claude
Duvalier, a deal to free his friends Fred and Renel Baptiste, and perhaps hundreds of other political prisoners'.

‘I want to go back to Haiti to see if it's true that things have improved as the regime claims,' Graham said in the interview. ‘But I will only be convinced and only go back if they bring my two prisoner friends as free men to meet me at the airport.' Chamberlain went on to add:

Greene made his last public statement on Haiti in 1970 when he exposed, in a letter to
The Times
which enraged Papa Doc and more discreetly the State Department, a massacre of about 80 opponents of the regime in the northern town of Cap Hai'tien. The colonel who was named then as the leader of the operation was appointed five months ago as head of the Haitian Tourist Office in New York.

‘A blanket of silence seems to have descended on the world press about the Duvaliers,' he says. ‘One reads about the place only in the glossies now, and in such fulsome tones that they seem to have been put up to it. Only a few months ago the Duvalier family inaugurated a three-million-dollar mausoleum built for Papa Doc. That's a large chunk of the national budget. Yet a few days later, they announce that hundreds of thousands of peasants were dying of starvation in northern Haiti.

‘The British press exposed the scandal of low wages paid by British firms in South Africa, but no one in the United States seems to have made much noise about the virtual slave labour conditions in the new American offshore factories and industries in Haiti. Everyone seems to have forgotten about the hundreds of political prisoners still unaccounted for. Attempts by groups like Amnesty International to obtain lists of prisoners have always met with silence. Prisoners' releases are sometimes announced, but they are often of people long dead or who never existed.'

When Port-au-Prince learned of Graham's challenge of a visit by him in return for freedom for the Baptistes, Paul Blanchet, the late Papa Doc's longtime aide and Information Minister, responded with an anti-Greene editorial in his newspaper,
Panorama:
‘The Incorrigible Graham Greene'. The broadside called Graham ‘facetious' and ‘as extravagant as the novels he dreamed up'. The Port-au-Prince newspaper purported to be

convulsed with laughter at this latest joke of Greene. What a waste of talent. As a good Catholic he could have used it in a wiser crusade. But gallows humour isn't enough for him. Nor nightmares. Nor the inspiration
he affects of someone just back from hell. A mortal sin torments him. But the ‘rabid Catholic' neglects to do penance for having written
The Comedians.
He is a sinner who loves good but does evil.

Panorama
declared that Graham had ‘defied and denigrated Haiti, which he feels nostalgic about'. Echoing the government line,
Le Matin,
the Port-au-Prince daily, said Graham would be ‘mad with rage' at the economic progress it claimed the Baby Doc regime was promoting in Haiti. However, Chamberlain noted in a reaction story published in the 25 May 1976 issue of the
Guardian,
‘The exigencies of political discretion in Duvalierist Haiti … prevented the paper from telling the reader what the author [Greene] had demanded.'

Graham wrote to me on the same day, ‘I am glad to see that I am not forgotten in Port-au-Prince … My interview with the American Press got through to them … and there's a little attack on me in the local paper.'

In September 1965 when the Dominican civil war ended, Fred and his Haitian combatants had to flee the country. We managed to aid Fred and Renel Baptiste with clothes and money. Together with Gerard Lafontant, they departed for Belgium and eventually moved to Paris where the Baptiste brothers joined Lieutenant Sean Pean, a former Haitian military academy instructor, who was top of his academy class of 1956. In Europe, Fred Baptiste began seeking funds for what he termed ‘his' revolution. Along with Lieutenant Pean he visited Graham in Antibes during the filming of the film version of
The Comedians.
Graham introduced them to the cast, and Fred pleaded for funds from them. Peter Glenville told them he had already contributed generously to Father Georges for the Haitian revolution.

In his letters to me from Paris, Fred Baptiste spoke of his frustration but also of his determination to continue his fight. In early 1969 Fred and Renel were arrested upon their return to Santo Domingo. They were in possession of false passports. Fred was later released, but some of his old Kamoken still living in the Dominican Republic had been rounded up and jailed. It was suspected that President Balaguer's well-organized secret service had let Baptiste go for the express purpose of learning more about his intentions.

Then, on 24 February 1970, an article in the
Washington Star
datelined from Port-au-Prince by Jeremiah O'Leary reported that the Baptiste brothers had returned to Haiti.

The two leaders of the anti-Duvalierist group had been in custody until recently … Evidently Balaguer, who had troubles of his own with a presidential election coming up in May, was anxious to convey to Duvalier that the Dominicans were not responsible for helping the rebels cross the frontier. The Communist band is led by Fred and Renel
Baptiste, who are brothers and who took an active part in the Dominican civil war of 1965 on the side of the leftist rebels.

Fred Baptiste went into hiding when he was released on bail and Dominican authorities subsequently learned that he was gathering men and arms. Last week, Santo Domingo intelligence officials say, the brothers plus seven other armed men made their way into Haiti in the vicinity of Jimanf in the south. Evidently hoping to round up the Baptiste band quickly, Duvalier has not announced to his people that they are in the country. The Dominicans similarly have not made public disclosure about the incursion. The Baptistes are tough and well trained. In the past their small group has accepted financial assistance from Fidel Castro and Moscow.

Precisely how the Baptiste brothers ended up in Papa Doc's hands remains a mystery, but it was believed that they were arrested and handed over by President Balaguer to the Haitian authorities.

Papa Doc had decided their fate in 1970: the Baptiste brothers should rot to death in Fort Dimanche. They did. Fred died on 16 June 1974. He was forty-one. His corpse was reportedly dragged from his cell and dumped near the sea to rot and be eaten by dogs. Renel, who was thirty-five, died on 19 July 1976. Both were said to have contracted tuberculosis, and Fred had become insane.

Curiously, O'Leary had described the Baptistes as Communists. In 1964 they had been given a clean bill of health by the CIA as non-Communists. It was only later revealed that Fred Baptiste, in his quest to find funds for his revolution, had become a quasi-Maoist and had travelled to China during the Cultural Revolution. There are various versions of whether in fact Red China supplied Fred Baptiste with funds and, if they did, whether they were stolen. It is true that at the time of his death Fred was left with only a Maoist cap, which he had worn proudly in Paris.

Graham wrote their epitaph in the
Daily Telegraph
magazine on 12 March 1976. ‘I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier … They were patriots, simple men, not from the elite. Unlike many exiles, they were brave enough to go back and fight the Duvaliers on their home ground.'

I had just completed my work on a
Time
cover story on the Panama Canal and the treaty negotiations when
Time
assigned me to cover the last leg of a twelve-day mission to the long-neglected Caribbean by President Carter's UN Ambassador Andréw Young. In Venezuela I joined Young and his entourage. While most of the journey was dedicated to spreading Jimmy Carter's gospel of goodwill, Haiti was to be the exception. Ambassador
Young had an important human rights message for Baby Doc that the US envoy intended to be loud and clear.

When I had first heard of Young's trip I asked Georges Salomon, Haiti's Ambassador to the United States, to ask Jean-Claude Duvalier whether he had any objection to my visiting Haiti with Young, even though I was still officially
persona non grata.
Salomon reported back that Jean-Claude had no objections. However, when I arrived in Santo Domingo with Ambassador Young's delegation to spend the night prior to flying on to Haiti, an official from the local US embassy placed my bags to one side, explaining that I was not going to Haiti. When Young heard what the embassy official said, he became angry. ‘You are going with us,' Young assured me. The US embassy in Santo Domingo was instructed to notify the US ambassador in Port-au-Prince to advise the Palace. I was coming back to Haiti.

US embassy officials in Haiti were visibly irritated by my presence and complained to their colleagues in Santo Domingo, and later to me personally, about the many trips they had to make to the National Palace to gain entry for a newsman who was — in diplomatic protocol terms — officially unwelcome. Nevertheless they had a stubborn human-rights advocate on their back. Young was determined to see that I returned to Haiti for the first time in fourteen years. In retaliation, the Palace was placed off-limits to all the media, and Young's entire news entourage was, according to a furious State Department official, prevented from covering the meeting between Duvalier and Young at the Palace.

My problems aside, it turned out Ambassador Young's 24-hour visit to Haiti saved the lives of at least 104 political prisoners. A general amnesty and the release of many political opponents followed the US envoy's quiet lecture to Baby Doc Duvalier. Young was respected in Haiti because he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr, and a speech Young made from the steps of the old plantation-style US ambassador's residence, overlooking Port-au-Prince, was remarkably plain-spoken.

Young recalled the United State's own tortuous civil-rights history, and while professing that he had no intention of telling Haiti how to run its internal affairs he made clear that Haiti's human-rights record would in large part set the tone of relations between the two countries, particularly the amount of US aid. He cautioned the Baby Doc regime to take some sailing lessons from Washington. ‘When people understand the way the winds are blowing, they trim their sails accordingly,' Young said, emphasizing that the prevailing wind blowing out of Washington was in support of human rights.

Jean-Claude Duvalier must have felt that wind because later at the Palace, when Young handed Duvalier a list of Haitian political prisoners prepared by Amnesty International, Baby Doc promised the prisoners would be freed, at least in cases that did not involve serious crimes of violence. That was a
major caveat since presumably any political prisoner could be so accused. Still, Duvalier added that his regime, which had long exercised unlimited powers of arrest, was preparing to announce
habeas corpus
guarantees — previously unheard-of in Duvalier-era Haiti. Haitians were impressed with Young's visit. Eleven of the 104 political prisoners released were expelled from the country as so-called ‘terrorists', too dangerous, Baby Doc's government said, to be left on domestic soil. One of the released prisoners said of his fellow inmates, ‘Those who lived were the ones who nurtured the flame of hope. Those who died were the ones who gave up. A man who decided he couldn't live didn't.'