Journey of a Lifetime

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…

He was merciless, despotic, malign; yet he received me in his study with eerie amiability. Behind him were signed portraits of the men he admired: Chiang Kai-Shek, President Lyndon Johnson, the Pope and Martin Luther King.

He told me he blamed the world-wide loathing he had earned on an “international conspiracy set up by several white nations who spent many millions of dollars to destroy our Fatherland, sending the North American 6th Fleet to violate our national sea”.

He then muttered darkly, “The USA has been sending uncapable ambassadors so there is no talk between them and the President of Haiti. It is a question of men. The FBI is doing a good job, but the CIA not. It makes much trouble and must be blamed for the bad impression the world has of my country.”

He dismissed the insurgents’ bombing of his palace: “They are crazy. They will never reach their aim because I know who I am and I can’t be killed by anyone. I have faith in my destiny. No other President of Haiti could stand up and do what I did in the past eleven years—facing eight armed invasions and three hurricanes.”

Though he was President for Life and apparently convinced of his immortality, I wondered whether he had thought of a successor. He had not. “All of them are at school now—they are the young people.”

His only son Jean-Claude was sitting beside us in the presidential study. What he would do with his life? The fat moon-faced 17-year-old was embarrassed. “That depends on him,” said Papa Doc, regarding his son with pride. “I hope he will follow the advice of his father, of his mother, and become a medical doctor.”

As I grew more familiar with the President, I became more convinced that nobody’s all good or all bad. He had been a mild little country doctor looking after the peasants and earning his famous nickname. This non-smoking teetotaller who loved his family now saw himself as a poet. He presented me with Copy No. 892 of his Breviaries of a Revolution, and inscribed a collection of his poems, Souvenirs d’Autrefois, “to a friend of the first Black Revolution, Mr Alan Whicker, in souvenir of his short stay in the Island of Quisquetya, Sincerely, François Duvalier”.

It was said that after dinner in his palace he would sometimes go down to the dungeons to watch some political prisoners tortured, and on occasion might torture them himself. He was certainly known to slap ministers around his study, under the protective gaze of the Presidential Guard. A man of moods, he was sometimes almost playful and anxious to make a good impression, then glowering with suppressed fury at a critical word.

I had played myself in tactfully while getting to know him, leaving the tougher questions for a later visit. Then half-way through one conversation, I caught him regarding me balefully during a long silence. With a low menacing rasp, he said, “Mr Whicker, you are talking to the President of the Republic of Haiti.” It seemed a telling rebuke.

My crew had caught the distant clang of cell doors slamming, so when I turned to less sensitive matters there were audible sighs of relief from behind the camera. On a following day I reverted to my critical questions, about which he was matter-of-fact. It seemed that his occasional moods might be medically induced.

On one of these jollier days he even decided to show us his capital—and certainly one of the best views of Port-au-Prince had to be from the President’s bullet-proof Mercedes 600 limousine.

Papa Doc settled on the back seat alongside his gloomy bodyguard, Col. Gracia Jacques. We had no radio mikes in those days so our recordist Terry Ricketts rigged the unprotesting President with a neck mike and a long lead hidden around his body. Upon jumping out of the limo he several times did himself a slight injury, but without complaint.

He obviously wanted to show how popular he was, and certainly knew how to attract and hold an audience. A breathless cheering crowd chased us as we drove slowly through the town. Then I noticed Papa Doc was throwing handfuls of money out of his window. Our pursuers, scrambling in the dirt, were going frantic. When we stopped the President increased the excitement by bringing out packets of brand-new notes, peeling off wads and handing them out to anyone who seemed to have the right attitude.

In this land of destitution, the arrival of the black Mercedes amid a shower of free banknotes caused far more ecstasy than Santa Claus. With an annual income in every crisp wad handed out, it was well worth trying to keep up with the Duvaliers.

It seemed unreal to be riding around with one of the world’s most feared men, discussing subjects none of his countrymen would dare think. I asked how he felt about Graham Greene and The Comedians. He brushed the novel and the gory film aside. “He is a poor man, mentally, because he did not say the truth about Haiti. Perhaps he needed the money, and got some from the political exiles.”

He was far more bitter about a predecessor, Major Magloire, then living in New York but threatening to return, because he had got away with the money: “He took $19 million from the National Bank of Haiti and used this money to finance armed invasions and to bomb the palace. He tried to kill me when he was president. I was in hiding for several years. Why did he not come here himself instead of sending his young officers?”

He 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 a great honour to be “By Appointment” to Dr Duvalier. Such presidential approval had all sorts of side benefits, like the Tontons did not kill you. On the other hand there was one slight but unavoidable snag: he never paid for anything.

He would make his selections with much care and then, instead of handing over his credit card, would shake the shop-keeper’s hand and award him a wolfish smile. He got a few wolfish smiles back, as though the jeweller was going down for the third time, but there was nothing they could do. At least he only took one item from each shop, and, knowing the gift you carry gets home first, Papa Doc always carried his with him, gift-wrapped, when he left. No exchanges required.

Back in our gloomy hotel, beyond caring and defeated by a distant delivery system, we booked seats on the next flight out to Miami. We had not exposed a foot of film on that unreal and unrepeatable scene. It was lost, along with the remainder of our planned programme climax. Papa Doc had been spared my most pointed questions, which I was thoughtfully withholding for the night before we flew away.