The Seeds of Fiction (8 page)

I drove Baptiste to a private clinic in Santo Domingo and checked him in under a fictitious name. Papa Doc had spies everywhere. Baptiste's leg was set and placed in a cast. I paid the $180 bill, and when he was released from the hospital he convalesced in my home office, sleeping next to the telex machine and playing with our infant son.

‘So how is it they ended up in this place?' Graham said as we veered off the road and drove up a narrow dirt driveway to the grounds of the former insane asylum.

‘The conditions at the garrison in Neyba were so bad I asked Reid Cabral to help us out.'

‘And this is the help they got.'

‘This is it.'

The asylum consisted of a series of long concrete barrack-style buildings set one after the other with a main door and barred windows. When the Kamoken first arrived, the inside of the buildings were filled with mountains of goat shit. They spent days shovelling out the manure and cleaning up.

The goats remained and roamed freely around the compound and inside the barracks. Adding a touch of the surreal to the scene, a crude barbed-wire fence separated the asylum from an empty field in which a herd of African zebras that had belonged Trujillo were pastured.

We found Baptiste in one of the buildings, which still reeked of goats. He was lying on a cot, resting his injured leg. When we entered he stood and with the aid of a stick walked with us out to the garden.

The compound did not look or feel like a guerrilla training centre. The group was using the goat manure as fertilizer to grow vegetables. They had organized a small education centre and invited the children of the Dominican soldiers guarding the property to attend, teaching them to read and write Spanish.

Graham shook his head. ‘How can they succeed by determination alone?' The Kamoken were everyday Haitians, taxi drivers, former soldiers, mechanics, farmers, schoolteachers and peasants from different regions of the country. ‘There are so few of them. They have no arms.'

‘Yet this is the insurgency against Papa Doc,' I said.

‘They're just going to end up like all the rest. Like Riobé and Pasquet.'

‘They all think it's going to be different with them. Castro started his revolution with twelve men.'

Graham shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand and looked at me. ‘That's different. Batista was a fool. And Castro had the support of the people.'

‘I agree. But you try to tell them they can't do it.'

Graham looked away where two billy-goats were charging and butting heads against one another.

We walked back across the garden. Graham paused to observe several of the guerrillas who were completing a new bamboo aqueduct to irrigate their crops of tomatoes and beans. Baptiste pulled me aside.

‘Maybe the Englishman can get guns for us,' he whispered in Creole.

‘No,' I said. ‘It's not his business.'

‘Maybe he has connections,' Baptiste persisted.

I walked away from Baptiste and met Graham between rows of tomato plants. Later Graham gave the rebels a $30 contribution. Baptiste told him the money would go to purchase hatchlings for a chicken farm.

The following day I picked up my friend, Jean-Claude Bajeux, an exiled Haitian Catholic priest, and we went to collect Graham. The three of us left Santo Domingo in the pre-dawn darkness and began our trip across the island in my chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle. A snow-white quilt of mist hung over the fields of leafy tobacco in the rich Cibao Valley as we clattered through the Dominican countryside. Mornings are the best time of day in the Caribbean, and that morning in January 1965 was no exception. I made a comment about the air that rushed through the windows carrying the fragrance of tropical flowers, the wet earth and burning charcoal. Graham took a deep breath and said he preferred the smell of Haiti. ‘It is very much like West Africa.'

The highway to the north coast had no speed limit, so we motored with the accelerator pushed to the floor, and the Beetle's 36-horsepower engine chattered away like a noisy sewing machine. The Beetle was a despised symbol during the latter years of the Trujillo dictatorship because it had become the preferred vehicle of El Jefe's dreaded secret police, the SIM (Military Intelligence Service). His
caliés
— plainclothes thugs and spies — rode three to a car with their Dominican-made San Cristóbal rifles at the ready. The noisy putt-putt of a SIM Beetle's little air-cooled engine when it came up the driveway was enough to freeze the blood of the bravest Dominican. None the less the car was economical and versatile, and it was all I could afford at the time.

Graham was cheerful. He seemed excited at our starting out. ‘We'll get a good look at Papa Doc's Haiti from as close as humanly possible, and perhaps we'll provoke him a little,' he said, delighted at the prospect of action.

But as we cruised along the two-lane road, talking over the sound of the engine and the wind became laborious. Cattle and donkeys attracted to the warm asphalt of the roadway during the night were slow to give up their bed. Avoiding these slow-moving and unpredictable creatures as well as a variety of other animals became a game of Dominican roulette for Graham. He said chickens were fair game, and he displayed a mischievous, boyish delight at the contest of hitting chickens on the road. He peered out his window making cluck-clucking sounds, then snapped back in his front seat as another startled hen fluttered past our windshield, and he would credit me with another point. In the back seat Father Bajeux had managed to curl up his lanky frame and had fallen asleep.

We stopped for petrol in the city of Santiago. I noticed Graham had trouble with the door handle. He always seemed to have difficulty with mechanical things.

We drove on in silence, and as we passed the first crossroads out of the city I thought of my own life and the close calls I had experienced in Haiti. I feared what might lie ahead and the risk we were taking travelling a relatively unmarked and little-respected border between the two countries.

I had my own bizarre relationship with Papa Doc. The little country doctor had walked into the office of my newspaper on 5 September 1956. He sat across my desk with his hat on and stared at me through his thick glasses. He wore a thick serge suit and a bow tie and spoke in French. When I picked up a pen and a pad he raised his hand slightly and explained he was only making a courtesy call in preparation for announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the republic.

‘What do the Americans think of me?' he asked. By Americans he meant the US embassy. Any candidate needed the support of the Americans ever since the 1915—34 Marine occupation. The Embassy, he appeared to think, could be an obstacle to an ambitious Haitian politician. Despite his early anthropological writings, earlier career in politics and service in the Estimé government, Duvalier's style had not brought him great public notice.

I told him that the Americans working with the Inter-American Cooperative Public Health Service (known by its French abbreviation initials SCISP) spoke well of him. I admitted that I was not privy to the Embassy's thinking.

He smiled, revealing a gold tooth. But what I didn't say, although he probably already knew it, was that the US Embassy looked kindly on the candidacy of Senator Louis Déjoie, who had actively courted them with his upper-class sophistication, charm and success in agribusiness.

Duvalier did not appear to be a strong contender for the presidency. He had trouble with newspapers misspelling his name. He wouldn't discuss his own childhood or personal life and gave no hint of his origin. Not even his close associates could furnish any details of his private life.

Watching him being driven away that day, seated alone in the back seat of a Buick, I could not help thinking that, while he had none of the charisma of populist Daniel Fignolé, none of the expertise of technocrat Clément Jumelle and none of the flamboyance of Déjoie or the other minor candidates, he had a confidence and a quiet determination about him. Still, he hardly seemed presidential material.

I covered the 1957 election and Papa Doc's rise to power. The mild-mannered country doctor, François Duvalier, became Haiti's all-powerful and feared Papa Doc. By early 1963 his gratuitous brutality had generated headlines around the world. Much of the reporting was mine. Every day I
chronicled how the by now well-entrenched Papa Doc faced down the Kennedy administration in Washington and the newly elected Juan Bosch in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Papa Doc's bully-boys were, at the beginning, recruited by Duvalier from the city's demi-monde of thieves and other criminals. They soon became known as the Tontons Macoutes, after the Haitian folkloric bogeyman who strides over mountains snatching up misbehaving children and tucking them away in a
macoute,
a large sack he carries on his back. These street criminals had no conscience, and in their acts of brutality they were always sending Papa Doc's message: conform and collaborate — or else. The most notorious Macoutes sported Runyonesque names such as Boss Paint, Ti-Bobo, Ti-Cabiche, Boss Justin and Madame Max (one of many female Macoutes). Haiti had become the land of ‘look behind'. No one began a conversation without first looking over his or her shoulder. In a land that was once uninhibitedly fun-loving, paranoia was now universal. The country had become a tropical psycho ward. Some referred surreptitiously to Papa Doc as the
zombificateur
— zombie-maker.

The quiet, seemingly moderate and pliable physician who had championed the middle class as an early proponent of the concept of
noirisme —
blacks in power — was proving to be more interested in becoming the absolute mystical master of Haiti. He had carefully tooled up his regime for the sole purpose of retaining power.

Even Duvalier's own middle class suffered. There were no sacred cows. The mulatto élite at first suffered but were quick to make the necessary accommodation to Duvalier — and he to them. Haiti's impoverished masses were offered only hyperbole. They were learning from both his rhetoric and his actions that their new Papa was not in the least permissive or forgiving. Even based on the most dispassionate analysis, the regime of François Duvalier ranks as one of the most inhuman. And covering Haiti as a newsman had become a high-risk occupation. No story equalled the naked terror of Papa Doc's Haiti in the early 1960s. It was a pervasive terror that clawed at your viscera, which haunted you day and night. Duvalier's brutality was at once predictable and capricious, meted out by savage, sick and sadistic henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, who were given
carte blanche
— they didn't need to explain their excesses to anyone. Some of the criminals became pro-Duvalier fanatics.

Duvalier's decapitating of Haiti's Catholic Church, the university and the high schools left the country an intellectual cripple and even co-opted God. The damage wrought by Papa Doc would have long-term effects even after Duvalier was buried. Hundreds of Haiti's best and brightest — teachers, lawyers, economists, agronomists, jurists and other professionals — fled the
country. It was more than just a brain drain; it was a mass exodus of the country's most talented. Semi-literate Duvalierists replaced skilled professionals in government jobs as rewards for loyalty. Many of the competent professionals who lost their jobs were even barred from joining the exodus (Duvalier personally controlled all exit visas), so they remained and vegetated, ever fearful of the knock on the door. At first Duvalier branded his enemies lizards and then, more politically profitably, communists. He outlawed youth associations and judo classes and purged the ranks of high-school and university teachers. Higher education in Haiti, as professor or student, became the domain of only loyal Duvalierists.

As for the Catholic Church, with orders to be ‘rough and rapid', Papa Doc's police placed 56-year-old Monsignor François Poirier, the last in a long line of French archbishops of Port-au-Prince, on a plane to Miami with a dollar and a prayer book. The government publicly accused Poirier of financing communist students in a plot to overthrow Duvalier. The archbishop, a strident anti-communist, turned almost apoplectic when he learned of the charge. Haiti's only Haitian-born Catholic bishop soon followed Mgr Poirier into exile, as did another French bishop and the rector and priest-professors of Petit Seminaire St Martial high school. The first Haitian-born bishop was seized and deported without even time to put in his false teeth — they remained on his night table. I couldn't help thinking that Graham would be interested — as a Catholic convert and creator of the whisky priest of
The Power and the Glory
— in exploring Papa Doc's fight with the Church.

In retaliation, the Vatican in 1961 excommunicated Duvalier and all other Haitian officials involved in the expulsion of Catholic clergy. The Vatican noted that it was the first excommunication of a head of state in the western hemisphere since dictator Juan Perón of Argentina in 1955. Duvalier ignored Rome's action against him. No news of the excommunication was published in Haiti.

The once-powerful Roman Catholic Church, the army, the judiciary and the Congress had all been purged and neutralized. As Duvalier said, it was those four powers that usually overthrew a president, so he overthrew them first. Most Haitians lived in silent terror behind masks of normality, pretending to know nothing, praying for a miracle of change, playing games to survive.

Duvalier's response was to withdraw further into his surreal world whose dementia was catching like some infectious disease. Sublimely Papa Doc decreed the country would celebrate 22 April to 22 May 1963 as the ‘Month of National Gratitude' — to him. It was to be a ‘carnival of flowers and of joy', but it turned out to be a carnival of carnage and blood, with still more foes of the brooding dictator, real and imagined, tracked down and killed. Haiti's glistening white National Palace had known elegant black-tie banquets and
formal balls for visiting heads of state. Pink flamingos had daintily stalked the lawns and gardens. The birds-in-residence now were some kind of metaphor, guinea hens and randy cocks — Papa Doc's political symbols. Haitians feared the National Palace as a house of horror.