Journey of a Lifetime

Having considered the pleas of his wife and daughter, then pregnant, he spared Col. Dominique, but sent him into exile and out of the way as ambassador to Spain. As they left for Madrid, the President and Mrs Duvalier came to the airport to bid a sorrowful farewell to Di-Di.

For the traditional VIP goodbye picture the young couple stood at the aircraft door, waving to parents, friends and staff. As the door was closing upon the happy couple, there came a nod from Papa Doc. Their chauffeur and two bodyguards were shot down in front of them. Dr Duvalier was making his own farewell gesture of disapproval.

He turned and left the bloodstained tarmac without another glance at the dying men. They lay in the sunlight under the eyes of the few horrified passengers en route from Miami to Puerto Rico. The aircraft then departed abruptly. An American airman who had seen it all told me, “That captain practically took off with the door open. They just wanted to get out of there.”

There were no further executions on the evening of our arrival, but the scarred walls were adequate reminders. Outside we were distributed among waiting taxi drivers. They were all Tontons Macoutes, Papa Doc’s private army licensed to extort. Driving a cab was the best-paid job in the land at the time—the only one in which a Haitian could get his hands on foreign currency.

My personal Tonton was silent and sinister, with a Gauguin face. He had the poetic name of Racine. He also had red eyes.

There was no question of hotel selection; you went and lived where you were put. Racine drove us skilfully through the bumps and up the hillside to the white concrete Castelhaiti Hotel, overlooking the town. It was empty—but ready for us.

That evening ours was the only occupied table as we tackled some stringy chicken. Groups of listless waiters stood around in the gloom, watching and whispering while a piano and violin wailed mournfully in the shadows. Outside the fearful town, hushed and tense, awaited its regular power cut.

My crew soon gave up, and went to sort their equipment. It was jollier. We had called the camera for tomorrow and would find something to shoot. We needed to establish contact with the inaccessible Papa Doc. “Once we’ve been seen with him, talking to him, we’ll be all right,” said my Australian researcher, Ted Morrisby, who as usual had tuned in cleverly. “Then the Tontons and the rest of the town will know he accepts us. That means we shan’t get hassled, or shot.”

Well, he convinced me. In a land where we had no friends for protection, no embassy to turn to, there was a convincing argument for establishing contact before any more shots rang out.

Certainly Papa Doc was not easy to reach. His massacres had generated terror and despair and hidden fury, so every day he prepared to face some sort of counter-attack. He rarely left the white American-built National Palace, the only important building in town which could be instantly switched into a floodlit armed fortress, yet he did not feel secure even behind its walls and guarded gates.

The President had ousted Paul Magloire, who had twice sent in old B25 aircraft on bombing runs. The grounds were ringed by anti-aircraft guns and elderly armoured cars. The President also beseeched protection from a new prayer of which he was author. He sought support from all sides:

Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for Life,

Hallowed be thy name, by present and future generations

Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces.

Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the

trespasses of the anti-patriots…

By a stroke of Whicker’s luck we discovered that next day Our Doc was making a rare expedition into the anxious surroundings outside his palace. He was to open a new Red Cross centre, a small building a few hundred yards from his fortress.

We left our silent hotel at dawn and reached the area as troops and armed men began to assemble for the ceremony. There were hundreds of soldiers in well-pressed khaki with medals and white gloves, and of course a lot of armament. Militia wore blue denim with a red stripe for the occasion, like army hospital patients; more guns, of course. Mingling with authority among them were men in thin tight suits, snap-brimmed fedoras and shades, like Mods heading for Brighton Beach and waving light automatics around casually: the Tontons.

As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.

It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.

The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.

To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.

So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.

The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.

They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.

A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.

He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “So sorry, do you mind?”

In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.

Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.

Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.

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 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.