8

AN IMMATERIAL BEING

For six months in 1967, Marie Vieux-Chauvet shut herself in her house in Port-au-Prince to write. In the trilogy of novels she produced—Love, Anger, Madness—men with guns are taking over Haiti: its land, its people, even its spirit. Dressed in red and black, the gunmen shoot songbirds out of trees and, just as casually, mow down fleeing victims in the streets. “Where do these men come from?” wonders one character. “Who is their leader? They suddenly showed up in the country and have taken over without any of us being able to put up a fight. Have we become that weak and spineless?” “They’re here to bring us news of the death of our freedom,” an elderly man explains. Even the soldiers, however, don’t really understand who is controlling them. “I am only a cog in an immense machine,” one says. “The one who gives us our orders is like God, invisible and all-powerful.” Vieux-Chauvet’s characters try to fight back, seeking to fulfill their responsibilities to each other, to their ideals, and to their ancestors. But neither open revolt nor escape proves possible. By the end of the trilogy, they are trapped in a nightmarish dead end, with nowhere to go but the grave.1

Vieux-Chauvet’s women find themselves in particularly horrifying situations, as sexual violence and control become a currency of power. In the first novel, Love, a police commander brutalizes a local woman simply because he finds her haughty and insufficiently submissive. In the second, a young woman tries to save her family and their land by submitting to the repeated sexual assaults of a powerful officer, her body spread out for him as if in a crucifixion. Throughout the novels, hope is never far from hopelessness. “Wasn’t it her role,” one mother wonders, “to shower her children with love, to quietly help them conquer their terror, to shut her eyes and let them take action, all with the conviction that they too would meet with failure?”2

In the years before she wrote the trilogy, Vieux-Chauvet had sought to create a refuge for art by organizing weekly meetings for Haitian writers in her home. They called themselves Les Araignées du Soir—“the Spiders of the Night.” “Like actual spiders,” explains novelist Edwidge Danticat, “they hoped to weave a protective web around themselves and keep out predatory pests.” But Vieux-Chauvet was also driven to describe—to bear witness to—what was going on outside her doors. She knew that she had to be careful: during the 1960s, many intellectuals and artists had found themselves in prison, forced into exile, or worse. Three members of Vieux-Chauvet’s extended family had been killed by government forces in previous years. So she set her trilogy in a vague, unspecified period of Haitian history. It started at some point after the U.S. occupation, but nothing specifically dated it to the reign of François Duvalier. Though Vieux-Chauvet was obviously writing about the omnipresent roving militia forces that Duvalier had created, she never used the nickname given to them by Haitians: Tontons Makouts. (That moniker came from a frightening character in Haitian folktales who carries away naughty children in his makout, or bag, and it captured the way in which the militia lurked somewhere between reality and nightmarish imagination.) The fact that Vieux-Chauvet didn’t feel she could even say their name was a testament to their power.3

When she was finished writing Love, Anger, Madness, Vieux-Chauvet sent the manuscript off to the leading French press Gallimard. A few months later, she heard that they were going to publish it. Ecstatic, she threw a party at her house and, for the first time, read excerpts from the book to her friends. As they listened, however, some of them became increasingly worried. They saw clearly what she hadn’t seen, or perhaps hadn’t wanted to see: despite the care she had taken not to name Duvalier, it was obvious that the work was a critique of his regime. In 1962, the president had declared, “I am even now an immaterial being,” and it was all too easy to conclude that Vieux-Chauvet’s portrait of a ghostly, all-powerful leader was meant to describe him. If she published the work, friends warned Vieux-Chauvet, she would endanger not only herself but potentially her acquaintances and family as well.4

At first Vieux-Chauvet ignored these warnings and told Gallimard to go ahead with the publication. But when the Haitian ambassador in Paris received an advance copy, he, too, said that she would probably be targeted if the book was released. Vieux-Chauvet, now more frightened—this new warning had come from an official government figure—asked the press to stop distributing the book. Her husband apparently tracked down the small number of copies that had arrived in Haitian bookstores, purchased them, and destroyed them, and they soon fled into exile. It would take several decades before the trilogy finally gained a wide readership and the critical recognition it deserves as one of the great works of twentieth-century Haitian literature.5

Today, Vieux-Chauvet’s novels vividly transport readers back to the claustrophobia and terror of the years when Duvalier steadily eliminated, neutralized, and co-opted all of the independent institutions in Haitian society. A careful student of his country’s history and politics, Duvalier offered a brutally successful response to the decades of political crisis that had followed the U.S. occupation, tapping into a long tradition of authoritarian rule in Haiti and carrying it to new heights of cynicism and effectiveness. Love, Anger, Madness captures the stunningly effective construction of this regime, portraying a time when many found that there was nowhere to turn but inside—only to discover that even their interior life was inescapably haunted by the specter of oppression.

*   *   *

By the mid-1940s, many Haitians found themselves increasingly frustrated with the rule of President Élie Lescot. A decade after the end of the U.S. occupation, a new generation of student activists felt that Haiti’s political class was once again selling out the mass of the population to foreign interests. Lescot found himself particularly vulnerable to such charges not only because of his involvement in the antisuperstition campaign of 1941, but also because of the negative impact of one of his major economic initiatives: the attempt to bring rubber cultivation to Haiti. A development project designed in close collaboration with the United States, the rubber cultivation scheme highlighted the profound divisions that still remained between Haiti’s governing elite and the rural majority.

When Lescot first launched the project, it had seemed like a perfect plan: World War II had greatly increased demand for rubber in the United States, and Haiti offered the ideal climate for growing it. A $5 million loan from an American bank (equivalent to about $68 million today) powered the creation of the Société Haitiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole, or SHADA. The agricultural development society was hailed as a model of Haitian-American collaboration: SHADA was headed by a U.S. agronomist, but its vice president was Haitian minister of agriculture Maurice Dartigue. A botany professor from the University of Michigan traveled to the Philippines to identify and collect the best hevea trees (from which rubber is harvested) for transplantation to Haiti. With the plants and capital in hand, the Haitian state provided the final piece of the puzzle: land.6

That land, of course, had to be taken from someone. For rural Haitians, SHADA thus represented another assault of the kind now wearily familiar. The government expropriated family fields, forced residents to leave, and razed their houses. The scale of the dispossession was staggering: nearly fifty thousand acres of land throughout Haiti were cleared to make way for imported hevea seedlings. In the process, decades of agricultural work by rural farmers was destroyed. In Jérémie, as many as a million fruit trees were chopped down, while the destruction of rice fields led to a significant rise in food prices across the country. Maurice Dartigue, alarmed by SHADA’s tactics, pleaded with the U.S. head of the company to take into consideration “the mentality and the legitimate interests” of Haitians and to use less brutal measures for acquiring land from the peasants. But he quickly found that although he held the title of vice president of the company, he had little power to change its policies. What’s more, hopes that rubber production would bring prosperity were quickly dashed. The 1943–44 harvest was a poor one, and by the following year—with World War II ending—demand for the particular kind of rubber produced by SHADA had declined. In the end, the project left little in its wake but dislocated families, their fields emptied of trees that had once provided breadfruit, mangoes, and other crops to the local population. An embittered Lescot asked for a new loan from the United States in 1945, but was turned down.7

The SHADA fiasco emboldened leftist activists who had long argued that U.S. involvement in Haiti was a menace rather than an opportunity. They lambasted Lescot for having been too eager to collaborate with the United States and too weak to resist the American designs on rural Haiti. More broadly, they accused him of having failed to address the overall issue of Haitian poverty. In January 1946, students poured out of schools in downtown Port-au-Prince, shouting anti-Lescot chants, singing the national anthem, and heading for the National Palace. Workers and state employees joined in. A panicked Lescot escaped by hiding in the back of a U.S. embassy car, and he warned that the Garde d’Haïti would take “the most drastic measures to re-establish public order.” The next day, when the widow of Jacques Roumain led a march to the National Cathedral, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding several others. As word spread about the deaths, crowds stormed police stations and ransacked the houses and stores of government ministers. Outside the city, drums and bamboo pipes rallied the population, and several government-owned factories were burned to the ground.8

With Haiti apparently on the verge of a revolution, several leaders of the Garde d’Haïti, including a high-ranking officer named Paul Magloire, stepped in and sent Lescot on the well-trodden path to political exile. In his place, the military established a three-man executive council and announced that they would be overseeing new presidential and parliamentary elections. The population of Port-au-Prince took to the streets in jubilation, shaking palm fronds—as one would on Palm Sunday—to announce a rebirth. It was a watershed moment, the first time a U.S.-supported regime in the Americas was overthrown by a popular uprising. At the same time, however, it set a dangerous precedent: the young student activists had initiated the uprising, but it was the Garde d’Haïti that harvested political power as a result, placing itself in charge of the balloting. In the elections that followed, none of the leftist groups won political office, and when they accused the Garde d’Haïti of electoral fraud, the response from the military council was all too familiar: the imposition of martial law and a ban on protests.9

Still, while leftist parties didn’t gain political power directly, they did shape the policies of the candidate who was ultimately elected by the parliament to succeed Lescot: Dumarsais Estimé, a teacher at the Lycée Pétion. A dark-skinned man from a modest background, Estimé was a brilliant orator: the American writer Edmund Wilson, who heard him speak, proclaimed that Estimé possessed a “style and a sweep of historical imagination well beyond the reach of any living white statesman known to me, not excluding Winston Churchill.” Once in power, Estimé launched a range of progressive programs, expanding educational opportunities for poorer Haitians, organizing the beginnings of a social security system, increasing the minimum wage, and instituting new labor laws. His new constitution included protections for unions and far-sighted environmental stipulations, and he initiated irrigation and reforestation projects to improve agricultural productivity and fight the degradation of farmland.10

Estimé knew that his progressive social policies would go nowhere if he didn’t address the country’s economic difficulties, and he energetically sought to secure what he called Haiti’s “financial emancipation.” But like all Haitian leaders going back to Boyer, he found himself hamstrung by the problem of debt: the government was still paying off the occupation-era loan contracted with the United States in 1922. Estimé pleaded with the U.S. government to forgive the debt, but to no avail, and with Haiti’s state budget sapped by debt payments, many of Estimé’s ambitious ideas remained nothing more than that. In a bid to increase government revenues, he nationalized the banana industry that had been run by the Standard Fruit Company; but Haitian ships lacked the necessary refrigeration capabilities and this, coupled with mismanagement, led to what one historian calls an “unmitigated disaster.” Soon, the once-thriving business was in shambles.11

After the nationalization of the banana industry failed, Estimé looked to another possible solution to his country’s economic problems: tourism. In 1949, hoping to draw visitors to Haiti, he organized a bicentennial exposition commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Port-au-Prince. The event was widely covered in the U.S. media, helping to spread positive images of the country and showcasing the art of various Haitian painters. The American dancer Katherine Dunham, meanwhile, helped bring Haitian culture to eager audiences abroad. Estimé’s plan worked to some extent, and for a time Haiti became a fashionable destination for wealthy whites and African Americans who wanted to purchase Haitian paintings and watch performances of Vodou music and dances. But the promotion came with a sizable price tag. The bicentennial exhibition cost $4 million (the equivalent of over $37 million in today’s currency)—nearly a quarter of the Haitian government’s total annual budget. And ultimately, Estimé’s investment in publicity did not pay off. The number of tourists who came to Haiti steadily grew during the next decade, reaching over sixty thousand in 1956; but Haiti never became an attraction on the level of Jamaica or Cuba, and tourism’s impact on the broader economy always remained relatively small.12

By the late 1940s, Estimé found himself increasingly frustrated in his attempts to transform the economic order in Haiti, and his opponents grew more vocal and hostile. Critics on the left accused him of spending too much money on trying to impress foreigners and not enough on helping his own people, while those on the right declared that his social welfare policies were radically leftist. A Haitian army officer in the Dominican Republic complained that Estimé’s administration was “composed exclusively of blacks of the lowest social level” and accused him of trying to replace Catholicism with the “barbarous and primitive voodoo cult, the ritual of which is bloody sacrifice.” Another opponent dubbed him “cannibal, thief, and bandit” and his regime “the most dangerous Bolshevik cell in the Antilles.” In 1950, Estimé tried to revise the constitution so that he could extend his time in power, but the parliament refused to cooperate. After a group of angry Estimé supporters responded by ransacking the Senate, the military officer Paul Magloire took control and forced the president into exile.13

Once again, as in 1946, Magloire declared that he would supervise a transition to a new government. This time, however, the transition he oversaw was to himself. Styling himself as a “citizen-soldier” who would ensure stability, Magloire was elected by the parliament to be Haiti’s next president. In sharp contrast to Estimé, he made the suppression of leftist activity a hallmark of his regime: he signed an anticommunist pact with the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and actively attacked union organizers. “The people of Haiti are immune to Communism,” he announced, “because the goods are well distributed among everybody.”14

Magloire was well aware that such declarations were music to the ears of American policymakers during the Cold War, and he made the most of the situation. Where Estimé had insisted that Haiti should pursue economic independence and self-sufficiency, Magloire eagerly sought out U.S. investment and financial assistance. On a visit to the United States, Magloire was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York, and in Washington he declared to a joint session of Congress that Haiti’s “destiny” was “closely linked to that of the great American democracy, for better or worse.” Soon, aid money from the United States, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization began pouring into the country, along with new groups of volunteers and missionaries, who established schools and hospitals. The foreign assistance enabled Magloire to rebuild roads that had fallen into disrepair and to construct a dam in the Artibonite Valley for hydroelectric power and irrigation. In 1954, he also organized massive celebrations of the sesquicentennial of Haitian independence, with the African American singer Marian Anderson performing a concert at the ruins of Christophe’s Sans-Souci palace. These projects made the early years of Magloire’s presidency popular with many Haitians: one observer has dubbed his time in office a “golden age” for Haiti, a period of stability and relative prosperity that made the regime’s reactionary rigidity less conspicuous.15

Ultimately, though, Magloire’s conservative approach and his courting of foreign aid were no more successful than Estimé’s progressive policies at arresting Haiti’s economic decline. Agricultural production, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the gross national product, was stagnating, having sunk by some accounts to levels as low as those of the worst stretches of the nineteenth century. Deforestation and soil erosion were an increasingly dire threat, and rural residents continued to leave for Port-au-Prince in droves. In 1954, the situation was worsened dramatically by a massive hurricane that killed five thousand people, left a quarter of a million homeless, and destroyed much of the year’s coffee and cocoa crops. Almost a decade after a popular uprising had removed Lescot from power, the country’s situation seemed as desperate as ever. As Haitians began talking about who would succeed Magloire at the end of his term, one commentator declared that “the choice of the future president is for the laboring classes a matter of life and death.”16

Back in 1950, Magloire had intervened to depose Estimé when he tried to extend his time in office. As the end of Magloire’s own term approached in 1956, however, he proved no more willing to relinquish power and refused to call an election. When that decision was met with protests, he declared a state of siege. The result was a violent, year-long struggle over control of the presidency, and when the fighting ended, it was a relative unknown—a doctor, writer, and occasional activist—who had taken power. Having carefully watched what had happened to the previous leaders, François Duvalier would offer his own response to Haiti’s situation: a twisted synthesis of Estimé’s populism and Magloire’s conservatism, with a ferocious cult of personality at the center.17

*   *   *

The 1956 tug-of-war over the presidency was not Duvalier’s first venture into Haitian politics. As a student at the prestigious Lycée Pétion, he had counted Estimé and Jean Price-Mars among his teachers, and after graduating from medical school, he combined his work as a doctor with writing for newspapers. By 1934 he was publishing regular columns about literature and politics under the memorable pen name Abderrahman, in reference to Abd-al-Rahman, a tenth-century Muslim caliph in Spain who founded the medical school in Córdoba.18

In one of his newspaper columns, Duvalier railed against the “useless elite, bloated with pride, stupid, and imbecile” that governed Haiti. His own career, though, was rapidly propelling him from a middle-class childhood—his father was an elementary school teacher, and his mother worked in a bakery—toward the elite ranks. In the early 1940s he was hired to be part of a U.S.-sponsored program aimed at the eradication of yaws, an infectious tropical disease that left many crippled in Haiti. Because he spoke some English, Duvalier became the interpreter for the American leader of the project, and soon he was named to head one of the anti-yaws clinics. The prestige of his work as a doctor also contributed to his social advancement: in 1939 he had married Simone Ovide Faine, the daughter of a wealthy light-skinned merchant from the prosperous neighborhood of Pétionville. The match highlighted the complicated ways in which class and color interacted in shaping the hierarchies of Haitian society. Though light-skinned Haitian families often considered dark-skinned suitors like Duvalier to be unsuitable, education and professional success could overcome such barriers. Simone would eventually accompany Duvalier to the heights of power, playing a vital role behind the scenes.19

Despite his firsthand experience with the fluidity of Haiti’s social system, in his political thought Duvalier held fast to the idea that there was a fundamental opposition between “black” and “mulatto” groups in Haiti. Leftist thinkers such as Jacques Roumain had sought to direct political debate toward issues of class, pointing out that in Haiti discussions of color merely served to hide the more difficult truth: governing elites of all colors had consistently marginalized the population. Duvalier, though, saw the two as inseparable. For him, color was class, and class was color. In a 1946 essay, Duvalier and his friend Lorimer Denis noted that the vast majority of Haiti’s people were black descendants of Africans. But this group, they argued, had always been dominated and oppressed by the country’s light-skinned elites. Dessalines—whom they described as “the first Haitian socialist”—was assassinated by the light-skinned Pétion, they said, because he had planned to distribute land to the ex-slaves. Peasant leaders like Acaau had been likewise crushed by the elites. This nineteenth-century pattern, Duvalier and Denis maintained, had continued through the twentieth century, and it was time to break it. The country needed new black leaders, true heirs to Dessalines, who would finally complete the decolonization begun by the Haitian Revolution.20

The historical narrative presented by Duvalier and Denis was decidedly selective. Christophe was largely absent: his story didn’t fit well into their narrative about the perpetual exclusion of the black majority. Duvalier and Denis also elided the fact that it was Pétion who had distributed land to his army, thereby helping to lay the foundation for lakou culture. Such details would have muddied the point. In any case, the essay was really less about the past than about the future. As Duvalier launched himself into politics, he realized that the social resentments felt by many darker-skinned Haitians could be effectively channeled into an invitingly simple political argument: remove the light-skinned elite, replace them with black leaders, and Haiti would be saved.21

After Lescot was forced into exile in 1946, the question of color became a central issue in the election. It did not escape activists’ notice that all four presidents installed through U.S. support—Dartiguenave, Borno, Vincent, and Lescot—had been light-skinned. “The mulatto is a mulatto before being a Haitian,” one newspaper article proclaimed. Another writer declared that blacks were tired of the “contempt and arrogance of the Nazis of Haiti”—that is, the light-skinned elites. Duvalier himself briefly considered running for president, but then decided that it was too early for such a move. Instead, he wound up serving in the administration of his former teacher Estimé, where he witnessed both the president’s attempts at reform and the strenuous resistance they encountered. The provocatively racist tone used by some of Estimé’s opponents confirmed Duvalier’s sense that color conflict was indeed the key to Haitian politics. When Magloire came to power, he dismissed a number of the middle-class blacks hired by Estimé, including Duvalier, who returned to his work in the anti-yaws campaign.22

Throughout the Magloire years, Duvalier continued to write, further developing his theories about what ailed Haiti and what could heal it. In addition to insisting on the need for black leadership, he also delved into the question of what particular style of government was best suited for Haitians. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Duvalier considered himself an heir to Jean Price-Mars, convinced by the ethnographer’s argument that Haitian cultural and political development had been stunted by subservience to French values. Duvalier’s version of this viewpoint, however, represented an important shift from the approach taken by his mentor. Whereas Price-Mars had emphasized the way that Haitian culture had been forged by the country’s history, Duvalier stressed what he saw as the essential, transhistorical qualities of the African race. In making this argument he drew from a surprising source: the nineteenth-century French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, who had postulated that there were fundamental biological differences between the personalities of different racial groups. Gobineau had specifically cited Haiti as proof of the inferiority of blacks, describing the manners of its people as being “depraved, brutal, and savage.” Back in 1885, Anténor Firmin had energetically attacked these theories in his On the Equality of the Human Races. Duvalier, however, was taken by the idea that there were distinct African and European personalities, and particularly by Gobineau’s suggestion that Africans were naturally inclined to “paternalistic” and “despotic” forms of government. Elaborating on Gobineau, Duvalier proposed that Africans were “communal” in nature, rather than “individualistic” as Westerners were. As a result, he concluded, Africans—and, by extension, Haitians—needed strong leaders, rulers who would be less interested in safeguarding individual rights than in pursuing the good of the national community as a whole.23

When the political chaos began in 1956, Duvalier decided that the time had come to transform his ideas into action. The situation was muddled and treacherous. After refusing to call elections, Magloire had been forced out of power, and over the next seven months, Haiti had passed through the hands of five temporary governments. Eventually, three major players emerged: the wealthy Louis Déjoie, a descendant of the nineteenth-century president Fabre Geffrard; the working-class leader Daniel Fignolé; and Duvalier. All of them were experienced political operators, who knew both how to deploy public demonstrations and how to work behind the scenes. Déjoie was an agronomist who had studied in Belgium, directed an agricultural school during the U.S. occupation, and worked as a chemist for HASCO before being elected senator; he had the support of many powerful Haitians. Fignolé, a charismatic former mathematics professor, was the most popular of the leftist candidates who had been kept from office by Magloire’s military council in 1946, and he continued to command an impressive following among the masses in Port-au-Prince. Fignolé’s supporters, ready to pour out into the streets at his call, were known as his “steamroller.” The fifty-year-old Duvalier seemed, in comparison, to have a much smaller chance of capturing the presidency. But he had many contacts in the countryside, was admired for his medical work, and presented himself as the heir to Estimé, accumulating a significant following among those committed to increasing black political power.24

Supporters of the three candidates often clashed violently, and Duvalier proved particularly masterful in the tactics of ground-level political conflict. He made especially effective use of a network of hired thugs, known as cagoulards for the cagoules, or masks, they wore over their faces. Duvalier’s cagoulards disrupted the process of voter registration with demonstrations and attacks on electoral offices, and even invaded an official mass in the National Cathedral, starting a melee that left several dead. At night they visited the houses of Duvalier’s opponents, and they seem to have carried out a string of bombings aimed at sowing a climate of fear. Duvalier also cultivated support within the military. The army was initially divided between different candidates—at one point a showdown between two rival groups of soldiers in the streets of Port-au-Prince came complete with artillery fire and a bombing raid—but as the election approached, most of it united behind Duvalier. In May 1957 Fignolé was appointed provisional president, but within weeks he was overthrown by high-ranking military officers and forced out of the country, leaving his supporters without a candidate. When they surged into the streets to protest, the army responded with gunfire, pursuing them into their neighborhoods and killing as many as five hundred.25

On September 22, 1957, Haitians finally went to the polls. Duvalier was declared the victor, with nearly 680,000 votes, compared to just under 267,000 for Déjoie—though many were convinced at the time, and remain convinced, that his victory was in fact the result of fraud. His sympathizers also secured fifty-six out of the fifty-eight seats in the Congress of Deputies. Déjoie pointed out that Duvalier’s father was not Haitian-born but had immigrated from Martinique, and that therefore (according to the same constitutional provision that should have disqualified Louis Borno) Duvalier was not eligible to be president. Though Déjoie was technically correct, he no longer had any real power, and Duvalier simply ignored the issue. Widespread accusations that he had manipulated the electoral process and stolen the presidency also left Duvalier unfazed. When asked how he had won, Duvalier responded smilingly, “The peasants love their doc.” But he also made it clear that his power was not subject to question. “As President I have no enemies and can have none,” he declared. “There are only the enemies of the nation. And these the nation must judge.”26

*   *   *

“No one is untouchable, and nothing is sacred.” This, writes the Haitian historian Claude Moïse, was the message Duvalier rapidly broadcast from the first days of his presidency. Duvalier’s remorseless suppression of dissent “stupefied” all the other traditional power holders in the country—the church, the political elites, the army, foreign government representatives—and reshaped the entire political landscape. “Duvalierist violence appeared limitless,” writes the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and its “logic lay precisely in the fact that it seemed limitless” and almost random. “A tally of its casualties would count more scapegoats, more victims of sheer arbitrariness, of accidents of birth, or of presence at inopportune times and places than opponents who represented any real menace to the regime.” The randomness was part of the point: “The victims were so many sacrificial offerings, confirming the permanence of power, a reminder to the people of their smallness in regard to the state, a reminder to the executioners of the omnipotence of their chief.” Though no one will likely ever know how many perished at the hands of Duvalier’s regime, estimates range from twenty thousand to as high as sixty thousand killed over the course of three decades. As Moïse puts it, Duvalier became an innovator: his “originality was to elevate repression to a level of brutality and perfection that had never before been achieved.”27

Duvalier did initially send out some reassuring signals about the kind of regime he had in mind. His cabinet brought together men from a wide range of political and social backgrounds, including a few Marxists, and he garnered strong support from many prominent political and intellectual figures. The new constitution adopted in 1957 preserved the basic civil rights laid out in the previous version of the document, and even expanded some of them in significant ways. Though it did not explicitly name Kreyòl as an official language—that would have to wait another thirty years—Duvalier’s constitution broke new ground by decreeing that Kreyòl could be used in official contexts when necessary to protect “the material and moral interests of citizens who do not speak the French language sufficiently.” The new constitution was also the first to give women the right to vote, while a section on family law established equal economic rights within marriage.28

At the same time, however, the constitution paved the way for an attack on democratic institutions. Duvalier knew that previous presidents had often encountered powerful opposition in the Haitian Senate, so he abolished the bicameral legislature, which dated back to 1816, replacing it with a single and more tractable house that combined the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The members of this new parliament also had shorter terms than representatives had enjoyed before. In addition, the new constitution put into place a ban on strikes by government employees and gave the executive the right to “militarize” the public sector when necessary. Most significantly, it expanded the government’s right to declare a state of siege: Duvalier could now do so not only in case of foreign invasion but also in response to “civil disturbances” within the country. The term was intentionally vague, so that it could be applied to almost anything—strikes, demonstrations, conspiracies, even mere rumors of any of these. Since a state of siege brought with it a suspension of civil and political rights, the executive was now armed with an extremely powerful mechanism for establishing near-total control. As Claude Moïse notes, this simple-seeming clause within the constitution allowed the president to dispense at will with the entire legal edifice that surrounded it. And Duvalier did not hesitate to take advantage of this ability: indeed, “the entire Duvalier regime can be summarized as an almost uninterrupted chain of states of siege and special powers.”29

Over the next years, Duvalier created an ever-widening web of repression and terror. Occasionally, his efforts at establishing total control were frustrated: a Cuban opened a clandestine radio station in Haiti that broadcast anti-Duvalier messages, for example, and the police were never able to locate it, even though it was based in a butcher shop across the street from the National Palace. But what the regime lacked at first in surveillance skills, it made up for with ruthlessness that shocked and ultimately silenced most opponents. No one was exempt from the brutality; prominent women, in particular, suffered some remarkably vicious attacks. In early 1958, a group of cagoulards sent by Duvalier entered the home of Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel, an admired feminist activist who had criticized the new regime, beat up her two daughters, and carried her away. The next day, she was discovered dumped along a roadside, unconscious and almost naked.30

The repression was motivated in part by a series of attempted coups against Duvalier in the early years of his regime. In July 1958, three exiled Haitian officers backed up by a handful of U.S. mercenaries (including two deputy sheriffs from Florida) sailed into Haiti, hijacked a bus, and briefly took over the garrison in downtown Port-au-Prince before being killed by Duvalier’s forces. A year later a small group of rebels landed at Les Cayes, but the Haitian military—working with the U.S. marines—rapidly crushed the uprising and carried out brutal reprisals against those suspected of having aided the insurgents. In April 1961, the leftist activist Jacques-Stephen Alexis arrived with four other Haitians from Cuba, intending to start a popular uprising, but they were quickly captured. After several days of torture, Alexis and his companions were executed in a particularly gruesome way: local residents were ordered to publicly stone the men to death. “Revolutions must be total, radical, inflexible,” Duvalier declared afterward. “I have conquered the country. I have conquered power. I am the new Haiti. To wish to destroy me is to wish to destroy Haiti itself. It is thanks to me that it breathes, thanks to me that it even exists.”31

Duvalier seized upon these attacks to justify the creation of his own security forces, transforming the informal bands of cagoulards that had helped him to win the election into a more formal organization under his direct command. Although the Haitian army had played a crucial role in getting him into power, Duvalier was extremely wary of it, realizing that it was one of the few institutions that could effectively stand up to him. Accordingly, he routinely purged the armed forces of anyone he suspected might oppose him, kept the military off balance with frequent firings and demotions, and closed down the military academy to eliminate a source of potentially independent-minded officers. Meanwhile, his longtime collaborator Clément Barbot was placed in charge of creating a new civil militia, which began taking in recruits in 1959. These recruits were paid relatively little, but through their connection with the regime they gained social prestige and nearly limitless power, especially in rural areas. Within a few years, the force was given the official name of National Security Volunteers, while many Haitians had started referring to them as Tontons Makouts. Ultimately, the security forces became twice as large as the Haitian army itself, and by the mid-1960s they were consuming more than two-thirds of the entire government budget.32

These new troops—the men with guns who pop up everywhere in Vieux-Chauvet’s novels—were quickly deployed by Duvalier to assert complete control over all political activity. Early in 1960, a group of them entered the house of Dantès Bellegarde in downtown Port-au-Prince. The former minister of agriculture had retired from public life several years before and now spent much of his time cultivating his garden, a small oasis in the increasingly run-down center of the capital. But this disengagement didn’t offer him protection: his status as a renowned intellectual was enough to make him a potential threat who needed to be intimidated into silence. The men held a gun to him and ransacked his residence, ripping up his papers and throwing his books on the ground. Bellegarde was comparatively lucky: the intruders, having roughed him up, left him in his home. Many others simply disappeared. When six senators from Duvalier’s slate spoke up against some of his actions in late 1959, the president declared them “enemies of the Republic” and accused them of terrorism. Five of them fled into exile, but one, an Episcopalian minister named Yvon Emmanuel Moreau, stayed behind. He declared that he was “a believer in democracy” and just doing his job as a senator. Within days, Moreau was arrested, and he was never heard from again.33

Well-known activists and politicians were not the only ones Duvalier saw as a danger to his regime. In September 1960 he arrested several young university students, accusing them of “subversive activities.” When other students went on strike in protest, Duvalier closed the university, declaring an early vacation, and reorganized the university system in a way that gave him firmer control over the institution. During the same period, four of Haiti’s major newspapers were shut down, their premises destroyed, and their journalists imprisoned and tortured. Duvalier also attacked unions, arresting the president of the country’s largest labor organization. “All popular movements will be repressed with utmost rigor,” he announced. “The repression will be total, inflexible and inexorable.” Among the groups he banned under this edict was the Haitian Boy Scouts.34

The violence infused everyday interactions with terror and uncertainty. To protect themselves from being harmed by the state, people sought to tie themselves to it in whatever way they could. At the same time, government connections became a sort of trump card that could put an end to any argument. “In the course of daily life anyone could claim a relationship, even fictitious, to the sole center and source of power in order to ensure a place on the side of the survivors,” notes Trouillot. “Thousands of everyday disputes, from a parent’s arguments about a child’s school grades to a brawl at a nightclub over a dancing partner,” led “one or another of the contending parties” to invoke the regime as a way of gaining the upper hand. This habit constantly reinforced and solidified the state’s claims to power, sundering links of friendship and conviviality. Over time, people coped with the situation in different ways. Some chose to work with the regime, seeing this as the only way to guarantee a certain level of security for themselves. Others sought simply to minimize their interactions with the state and go about their daily lives as quietly as possible. Many went into exile, waiting and hoping that they could one day return to a land free of Duvalier. Year after year, however, the regime seemed only to get stronger.35

“Do you know why I have succeeded where other intellectuals, like Firmin and Bobo, failed?” Duvalier once asked a group of army officers. “I was the first to have a pen in one hand and a gun in the other.” Drawing skillfully on his own involvement in the decades of intellectual and cultural effervescence that began in the 1920s, Duvalier presented himself as the embodiment of the aspirations of an awakened Haitian nation. His regime, he insisted, was the fulfillment of the powerful demands made during and after the occupation for a more authentic, indigenous form of governance. “The Haitian democracy is not the German or the French democracy,” Duvalier declared a few years after his election. “It is neither the Latin American or U.S.-type democracy. It is defined in full, according to the ethnic background of the people, its history, its traditions, its sociology, all overflowing with humanism.” Those who opposed him abroad, he proclaimed, were participating in a form of “masqueraded colonialism.” “No power in the world can come and give us a lesson in democracy,” he belligerently announced in 1963.36

Duvalier’s self-presentation as a champion of authentic Haitian culture made expert use of the language of Haiti’s cultural renaissance. The irony—and indeed tragedy—of the situation was that he twisted the argument for culturally rooted forms of governance into nothing more than a justification of authoritarian rule, stifling any hope for actually achieving social change. Like many leaders before him, Duvalier trumpeted the virtues of Haitian independence and sovereignty while doing little to address the profound social and economic difficulties facing the population. And though he played up his devotion to the rural Haitian masses, most of them remained profoundly disempowered. His regime offered them little more than symbolic inclusion, frequently busing in large numbers of supporters from the countryside to listen to his speeches in Port-au-Prince. Duvalier became a patron for popular singers, and he sponsored celebrations in his honor that showcased the traditional rara music played by musicians during the carnival season. But Haitians who tried to exercise the traditional right to parody long granted to carnival acts found that this, too, had been taken away from them. One performer in 1962 built a castle out of papier-mâché and carried it through the streets, demanding pennies for “maintenance”—a humorous reference to the government’s habit of demanding coerced “contributions” for new construction projects. Many laughed at the joke, until the Tontons Makouts came to arrest the man. Another group pantomimed a forceful critique of life under Duvalier: they worked on repairing the road, but whenever they asked their boss for their wages, he pulled out a mimed gun and pointed it at them. These performers, too, soon found themselves facing the quite real guns of the militia, and were taken off to prison.37

Observers of Duvalier’s implacable hold on power have often dwelled, sometimes obsessively, on one aspect of his rule: his use of the symbols of Haitian Vodou. Some have claimed that in order to spread fear among the population, Duvalier consciously dressed so as to make himself look like the Vodou lwa Bawon Samèdi, who wears a dark suit and top hat and is associated with the realm of the dead. Duvalier was widely reputed to be a practitioner of Vodou, even an oungan himself, leading many to conclude that Vodou was one of the central pillars of the regime and its practitioners near-automatic Duvalier supporters. In fact, however, Duvalier approached Vodou in the same way that he handled all other institutions in Haitian society, through a combination of co-optation and repression. He eliminated those oungans and manbos who resisted his regime and rewarded those who supported him. In the countryside, where religious leaders wielded significant influence, Duvalier did recruit many of them as militia members or local enforcers; but this was a strategic decision, meant both to draw on the existing rural power structures and to make them subordinate to the state. Overall, Duvalier’s use of Vodou was opportunistic, and he did little to change the status of the religion in the country. Indeed, laws outlawing “superstitious practices” remained in effect throughout his time in power. As for the loyalty of Vodou practitioners, the extremely diverse and decentralized nature of the religion meant that it was never a monolithic political force. Vodou rituals were deployed both to support the regime and to resist it, depending on the region, the circumstance, and the individuals involved.38

Duvalier’s attitude toward the Catholic Church was similarly driven by political calculations rather than any overarching principle. As a young intellectual, Duvalier had made a name for himself in part by criticizing the Church for its 1941 antisuperstition campaign, and many Catholic priests in the country remembered this with bitterness: during the 1956 election, a prominent bishop had opposed Duvalier’s candidacy by calling on Haitians to “vote Catholic.” Once in power, however, Duvalier frequently used Catholic imagery to present himself as Haiti’s moral leader. A newspaper published an image of Christ tapping Duvalier’s shoulders and declaring “I have chosen him,” and a popular portrait of the president showed him at his desk with Jesus standing behind him, like a patron and protector.39

While he embraced Catholic imagery, however, Duvalier saw the established Catholic Church in Haiti as a potential threat to his power, an institution that might provide opponents with a sanctuary and a platform for airing their grievances. Soon he found the perfect pretext to attack the Church, one that fit well with his image as an ardent nationalist: he denounced it as a foreign establishment. It was an easy charge to make: in the early 1960s, the Catholic Church in Haiti was still staffed almost completely with priests from France, Canada, and Belgium. Duvalier also took advantage of the simmering anger in the countryside about the anti-Vodou campaign, accusing a foreign priest of having destroyed “archaeological and folkloric riches” in his diocese.40

Such claims, along with more direct accusations of sedition, formed the basis for a systematic purge of priests and bishops who were critical of the Duvalier regime. The attacks were carried out with startling brazenness: at one point, Duvalier sent troops to break up a prayer meeting in the Port-au-Prince cathedral and briefly arrested the bishop. Eventually, he negotiated with the papacy to secure the nomination of five Haitian bishops, who distinguished themselves by their steadfast support of the regime. Still, as with Vodou, Duvalier’s co-opting of the Catholic Church was never complete, and it continued to harbor pockets of resistance to his rule throughout the years—resistance all the more meaningful because now the Church was largely Haitian.41

*   *   *

While Duvalier was extremely adept at gaining control over the institutions of Haitian civil society, that would not have been enough to sustain his regime if he had not also been able to outmaneuver the most powerful outside force he faced: the United States. At the time, Washington’s approach to Haiti was (as it so often has been) uneven and fragmented, with different actors—the president and Congress, the State Department and the diplomatic corps in Haiti, the CIA and the U.S. military—each pursuing their own agenda. Duvalier understood that, and he also understood that the broader Cold War context provided him with ample opportunities to manipulate the U.S. government to his own ends.

When the 1956 election began, the U.S. State Department had initially come out in support of Déjoie, not Duvalier. But some U.S. officials in the country noted that Déjoie was distinctly oriented toward France, while Duvalier had long-standing professional connections with the United States. Duvalier also offered what some Americans saw as an appealingly limited project of reform, an anticommunist agenda that did not call for overthrowing existing economic hierarchies. Many Haitians became convinced that Duvalier was the U.S. government’s preferred candidate, and though there was in fact division among the ranks of American officials, just before the election, the U.S. embassy openly endorsed him. Duvalier responded in kind: in his first press conference as president, he announced his hope that Haiti would become the “spoiled child of the United States, with the help of American capital.” The example of Puerto Rico’s prosperity, he said, was an inspiration.42

As soon as he was installed in office, Duvalier hired a New York public relations firm headed by John Roosevelt, the son of Franklin, to promote Haiti and the Duvalier regime. (This was the first of many U.S. firms hired by Duvalier, who at one point turned to Lehman Brothers for advice on economic reforms.) The publicity efforts soon paid off. A New York Times editorial concluded that, despite the problems with the election, Duvalier should be “accepted as the legitimate president of Haiti”: what was done was done, and it was in the best interests of the United States to work with the country’s new ruler. And in May 1958, a Marine Corps training team, led by a veteran of the U.S. occupation, arrived to work with the Haitian army. Though quite small, the marine presence was symbolically significant, buttressing Duvalier’s power during his crucial first years. Direct financial aid also began to pour in from the United States: $7 million in 1959, and over $9 million in 1960—30 percent of the state budget in that year. By 1961, the $13.5 million received from the United States (the equivalent of over $100 million in today’s currency) made up 50 percent of the Haitian budget. In addition, both the Haitian military and the Tontons Makouts were largely armed with U.S. weapons: the Americans sent about two million dollars’ worth of equipment in 1959, including rifles, mortars, and machine guns. Though the weapons were technically U.S. property under control of the marine mission, they were in fact widely distributed and stockpiled by Duvalier’s militia units. U.S. officials working in Haiti were well aware of the violence of Duvalier’s regime. But Duvalier’s repressive approach also gave his government unusual stability—something that the United States had long wanted to see in Haiti, and that they found particularly appealing in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.43

For a brief moment in the 1960s, the U.S. government did seem poised to turn decisively against Duvalier. The John F. Kennedy administration, pursuing a new approach for economic and political collaboration with Latin America known as the Alliance for Progress, saw Haiti, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as a “disgrace to this hemisphere.” “We were very concerned about Haiti,” Rusk later recalled. The country was “a political and social cesspool,” plagued by problems of “poverty, illiteracy, superstition, inadequate public services of the most minimum sort, human rights—make your own list.” One U.S. official who served in Haiti during this time summed up Duvalier’s regime as “unconstitutional, uncooperative, unreliable, unresponsive, unfriendly, inhumane, insincere and ineffective.” Americans also felt that Duvalier represented a strategic liability. The Alliance for Progress, as one official put it, was supposed to “encourage the growth of reasonably stable governments capable of absorbing reform and change, secure from both the extreme Left and the extreme Right,” and Duvalier did not fit the bill. They feared that he could end up being for Haiti what Batista had been for Cuba: a brutal dictator who opened the way for a communist revolution. In addition, U.S. officials were worried about Duvalier’s new militia, which they rightly perceived as usurping the role of the traditional military. Since creating the Garde d’Haïti, the U.S. military had maintained close contacts with the Haitian army and indeed trained a number of Haitian officers, and Washington considered that institution an important conduit for the transmission of U.S. ideals.44

The showdown between Duvalier and the Kennedy administration began in earnest in May 1961. Haiti’s constitution established a six-year presidential mandate, which meant that Duvalier was supposed to leave office in 1963. In the previous decades, every Haitian president approaching the end of his term had tried to extend his time in power; Duvalier decided to get an early start on the process. In 1961 he called a referendum on a yes-or-no question: Should he continue to serve as president until 1967? The U.S. considered the election a farce: under the watchful eyes of the president’s militia, voters filed in and had to publicly ask for either a yes or a no ballot. Unsurprisingly, a massive majority voted in favor of the extension. In protest, Kennedy withdrew his ambassador and cut off direct military aid, though the United States continued to supply some assistance to the country. The goal was to establish distance from Duvalier himself and search for a political alternative within Haitian society, while trying to avoid a social upheaval by continuing to provide humanitarian assistance.45

With Kennedy’s approval, the CIA gave some financial support and military training to groups of exiles who volunteered to invade the country. One plan, optimistically, hoped to kill two birds with one stone: a joint force of Haitian and Cuban exiles would topple Duvalier, then Castro. But support for such schemes was halfhearted at best, and the exile groups who eventually did attack Haiti from the United States in the 1960s would do so largely on their own initiative. In the meantime, the CIA explored other possible ways to influence Haiti: for a short time they apparently bought editorial control of the astrological forecast of the French magazine Horoscope, which they believed Duvalier read avidly, hoping to manipulate him through the stars.46

As Rusk himself later admitted, the United States found the Haitian dictator to be “extraordinarily resistant.” In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Duvalier astutely played on U.S. fears about the spread of communism in the Caribbean. “Haiti has to choose between the two great poles of attraction in the world today to realize her needs,” he threatened in a 1960 speech. At a key meeting of the Organization of American States in January 1962, when the United States was pushing for the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS, the Haitian foreign minister met with Dean Rusk and offered his support in return for a promise of aid. The U.S. secretary of state agreed, and Haiti cast the swing vote. A burst of aid to Haiti soon followed. The pointed joke among staffers in Washington was that on his return from the meeting, Rusk submitted a receipt for expenses that read, “Breakfast: $2.25. Lunch with Haitian Foreign Minister: $2,800,000.00.”47

Even as he held the United States at bay, however, Duvalier faced continuing threats of coups and insurrections in his own country. Many of these plots originated right next door, in the Dominican Republic. After his election Duvalier had signed a pact with the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo: the two agreed to protect each other by suppressing any such conspiracies within their borders. Trujillo was nearing his third decade in power, and he planned to stay seemingly indefinitely; at one point he declared that he would still be running the Dominican Republic in the year 2000. In May 1961, however, he was assassinated. The longtime Trujillo opponent Juan Bosch returned from exile, won the ensuing election, and embarked on a far-reaching project of reform. Bosch made no secret of his distaste for Duvalier, and he allowed groups of Haitian exiles planning to overthrow the president to gather and train in the Dominican Republic. One of these groups flew planes over Port-au-Prince dropping leaflets announcing that they would destroy “all noxious insects who accompany the gorilla Duvalier” and calling on army officers to join in the uprising.48

As tensions mounted, Duvalier rarely appeared in public, and when he did, he was always surrounded by groups of Tontons Makouts. “It was a marvel,” wrote a pair of U.S. journalists, “that Duvalier was not killed accidentally amid the ocean of cocked pistols waving around him.” At the same time, he baited his opponents, declaring a celebratory “month of gratitude” in his own honor. Dr. Jacques Fourcand, the head of the Haitian Red Cross and a loyal Duvalierist, set the standard for defiant pugnacity in his speech at the celebrations. If anyone tried to attack Duvalier, he declared, Haiti would become a “Himalaya of corpses … Blood will flow in Haiti as never before. The land will burn from north to south, from east to west. There will be no sunrise or sunset—just one big flame licking the sky. The dead will be buried under a mountain of ashes.” Fourcand also lashed out against the American criticisms of the Duvalier term-extension referendum. Given the segregation and racial violence in the U.S. South, and Americans’ own history of invading Haiti, he said, “what right have they to advise us and give us a lesson in constitutional law?” In a final insult, he dubbed the United States a “democracy of sluts.”49

A few days after Fourcand’s speech, the car bringing Duvalier’s children to school was ambushed by gunmen. The precise goal of the attack was unclear, and the children were able to flee unharmed into their school, though their bodyguards were killed. Duvalier’s reprisals were immediate, furious, and indiscriminate. When suspicion fell on François Benoît, an army officer who had been trained as a sharpshooter by the United States, Duvalier’s militia stormed his house. Benoît himself wasn’t there—he had fled to the Dominican embassy—but his parents were on the porch when the Tontons Makouts arrived, along with a family servant and a neighbor. The militia opened fire, killing them all. Afterward, they burned the house down; inside was Benoît’s baby, who died in the flames.50

Angry that Dominicans were shielding suspected conspirators, Duvalier sent his militia into the Dominican embassy, where they roughed up the lone secretary who was there at the time. The Dominican ambassador had already moved to his own, better-guarded residence, along with the group of Haitians who had requested refuge; but Duvalier’s forces surrounded the house, making it impossible for anyone to go in or out. “Only a government of savages, of criminals, is capable of violating the sanctity of a foreign embassy,” a furious Bosch declared. In the capital of the Dominican Republic, crowds threw stones at the Haitian embassy, and the Haitian ambassador himself decided to resign and go into exile, announcing that he felt compelled to join “the forces fighting to regain the prestige my country deserves.” Summing up the situation, Bosch said that “Haiti is a powder keg and we are a lake of gasoline,” adding that if outside governments wanted to prevent a crisis, they should “send a psychiatrist down to examine Duvalier.”51

Alarmed by the developments, the OAS dispatched a mission to Haiti. Duvalier brought in huge crowds of supporters to the National Palace and delivered a blistering speech to the visitors. “I am the personification of Haiti,” he declared. “Those who seek to destroy Duvalier seek to destroy our fatherland … God and the people are the source of all power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it and, damn it, I will keep it forever.” “I am here to continue the tradition of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines,” he went on. “No foreigner is going to tell me what to do.” Duvalier’s representative to the United Nations, meanwhile, complained that criticisms of Haiti were part of a racist conspiracy aimed at “bringing about the death of the only Negro republic on the American continent.”52

For all their strong language, neither Kennedy nor Bosch was willing to carry out a direct assault against Duvalier. A bigger threat, as it turned out, was someone much closer to home: Clément Barbot, the man who had been one of Duvalier’s most important partners during his rise to power. Barbot had overseen the creation of the Tontons Makouts, and in 1959 he had briefly taken over the reins of government while Duvalier was recovering from a heart attack. When the president got better, Barbot stepped down. He ended up paying for his loyalty: Duvalier concluded that his longtime ally, having tasted power, was now a threat, and threw him into prison. Eighteen months later, without explanation, Barbot was set free. He kept out of sight for a while, but eventually decided to use the very networks he had created to support Duvalier to overthrow him. The attempt to kidnap the president’s children was in fact his doing, though Duvalier didn’t suspect so at the time, and he followed it up with a series of guerrilla attacks. “Duvalier is a madman,” Barbot told a U.S. reporter who managed to interview him during this period. “Duvalier is not a communist, a democrat, or anything else. He is an opportunist.” A few months later, Duvalier’s forces tracked down Barbot and his small group of supporters. The rebels fled into a nearby sugarcane field, but Duvalier’s militia set it on fire and shot the men as they tried to escape the flames.53

A similarly bleak fate awaited a rebel group led by a young man named Hector Riobé, whose father had been executed by the Tontons Makouts. Tracked down by government forces, Riobé’s band fled into the mountains above Pétionville, where they holed up in a cave stocked with guns and ammunition, holding the militiamen at bay for days. Duvalier dispatched his best troops, a unit of marine-trained soldiers armed with mortars, but they, too, were beaten back. Eventually, he sent Riobé’s mother, on muleback, to the entrance of the cave to plead with him to surrender. Inside, the lone survivor of the earlier battles, Riobé shot himself.54

With these battles raging in and around Port-au-Prince, many were convinced that Duvalier’s days were numbered. The United States positioned warships around Haiti and developed a plan for a provisional government; Duvalier himself booked seats on a flight to Paris. But he never had to use them. The military structure he had built, it turned out, was strong enough to withstand both foreign pressure and internal insurrection. In September 1963, after just seven months in power, Juan Bosch was overthrown by a military coup in the Dominican Republic. Two months later, Kennedy was assassinated. Duvalier had outlasted them both. Just to make sure that no more rebel groups could attack him from the Dominican Republic, Duvalier ordered his troops to create a no-man’s-land several miles wide along the Dominican border. All the houses in the region were burned, and the residents who lived there were forced out; anyone found moving through the area could be shot on sight.55

Even with the odds overwhelmingly against them, though, some Haitian exiles still hoped to overthrow Duvalier and reclaim their country. One of the best-organized attempts came from a U.S.-based group of thirteen men who could boast degrees from Harvard and NYU and training from the U.S. military and the CIA. The rebels, who called themselves Jeune Haïti, disembarked in August 1964 on Haiti’s southern peninsula and carried out what Marine Colonel Robert Heinl described as “the most hard-fought guerrilla campaign Haiti had seen since the days of Péralte.” As always, the government’s reprisals were brutal and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because most of the members of Jeune Haïti had roots in Jérémie, Duvalier’s forces killed several hundred people in the town, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. A family called the Sansaricqs fell under suspicion, for example, because one member of the family was studying abroad in the United States. As a result, they were almost entirely wiped out; the victims included a handicapped grandmother and a two-year-old child.56

The Jeune Haïti fighters managed to keep Duvalier’s militia at bay for a month, but one by one they were eventually tracked down and killed. By the end of October, Duvalier declared “total victory” over the rebels, publishing pictures of the severed heads of three of them. Two captured members of Jeune Haïti were shot by a firing squad in a public ceremony attended by a large crowd and televised live on government TV. Duvalier distributed a leaflet at the execution explaining that he had “crushed and will always crush the attempts of the antipatriots,” whose goal was to put Haiti back under the “whip” of foreign masters. “No force will stop the invincible march of the Duvalierist revolution,” he proclaimed. “It carries the strength of a torrent.”57

There has never been full documentation or public recognition of all the victims of the Duvalier regime. The stories of many of those who lost their lives during this period remain untold. But what happened to one of them can perhaps stand in for the unpredictable and devastating cost exacted by the Haitian state during this period. The soccer player Joe Gaetjens, part of a prominent Port-au-Prince family, was a legend in Haiti both because of his professional playing in the country and for a goal he had scored during the 1950 World Cup—not for Haiti, but for the United States. Gaetjens was living in New York at the time, and thanks to lax regulations about player citizenship, he was recruited to play for the Americans. It was a brilliant choice: against the heavily favored English team, Gaetjens scored on a diving header, and the U.S. won 1–0 in one of the most famous upsets in the history of soccer. When Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1953, he was greeted by a cheering throng and a banner declaring him “the best player in Haiti, the U.S.A. and the Whole World.” Settling down in his native country, he ran a laundromat and coached youth soccer. A few of his brothers were active in politics, supporting Louis Déjoie in 1957 and later joining an anti-Duvalier group, and in 1964 most of the Gaetjens family decided to flee abroad. Joe, however, was convinced that—given his fame and the fact that he had stayed out of politics—he was not in danger. He was wrong. On June 8, 1964, two Tontons Makouts stopped him and carried him off to the infamous Fort Dimanche prison. The family never heard from him again. Eventually, the Haitian government confirmed that he had died behind bars. After the fall of the Duvaliers, one of Gaetjens’s relatives visited Fort Dimanche and saw the only trace left of Joe: his name scrawled on the wall of one of the cells.58

*   *   *

By 1964, after several years of crisis and violent conflict, there was no room left in Haiti’s public sphere for anything but strident assertions of loyalty. When Duvalier presented a new constitution to the Haitian Congress that would make him president for life, representatives competed with each other to express the loudest approbation. One exclaimed that followers of the “Duvalierist Revolution” should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause; another riposted they should also be ready to sacrifice “their father, their mother, their brother.” After being approved by Congress, the constitution was presented to the Haitian people for a national referendum. There was only one kind of ballot: it said “yes.” By now Haitian voters knew what they needed to do to avoid trouble, and over 2,800,000 of them cast the preprinted ballots. The three thousand or so who wrote “no” on the cards were in danger of arrest—for defacing their ballots. A few days before the voting, Duvalier had predicted the result. “There will never again be an election to elect a chief of state on the soil of Haiti,” he told a group of judges. “I shall be lord and master.” Along with a lifetime presidency, the new constitution gave Duvalier a series of titles that recalled the elaborate court of Henry Christophe: Supreme Chief of the Haitian Nation, Uncontestable Leader of the Revolution, Apostle of National Unity, Renovator of the Fatherland, and Worthy Heir of the Founders of the Haitian Nation.59

“Duvalier is the professor of energy,” declared a Haitian newspaper in March 1964. “Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Duvalier is an electrifier of souls.” The government issued a new catechism to be recited by schoolchildren. “Who are Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion and Estimé?” it asked, in what could seem at first an innocent enough introduction to some of Haiti’s historical leaders. The answer, however, was not about history but the inescapable present: “Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion and Estimé are five distinct Chiefs of State who are substantiated in and form only one and the same President in the person of François Duvalier.” A new version of the Lord’s Prayer enabled Haitians to pray for the success of their ruler: “Our Doc, who art in the Palais National for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those antipatriots who daily spit upon our country; lead them into temptation and, poised by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.” The country, writes the historian Claude Moïse, was “saturated with portraits, slogans, posters and speeches constantly reminding people that Duvalier was president-for-life, the supreme chief, and the personification of the nation.”60

Duvalier also remade the Haitian flag, getting rid of the traditional blue and red horizontal stripes and replacing them with vertical stripes in black and red. The change was a return to the flag used by Dessalines when he was emperor and by Christophe when he was king. It carried a potent meaning: the blue and the red had long been considered symbols of Haiti’s two social groups—red for the lighter-skinned people of mixed ancestry, blue for the darker-skinned blacks. Changing the blue to black made the blacks’ presence more prominent. Switching the orientation of the stripes from horizontal to vertical, meanwhile, meant that instead of having both colors share an equal attachment to the flagpole, the black now became the only color that connected to the mast—just as black leaders, Duvalier argued, should have pride of place. Having remade the design, the president placed a neon sign in front of the National Palace flashing a message with his signature at the bottom: “I am the Haitian flag, One and Indivisible—François Duvalier.”61

While Duvalier presented himself as the heir to Louverture and Dessalines, he had come most of all to resemble the authoritarian Jean-Pierre Boyer. The political order he created was the most powerful and long-lasting government in Haiti since Boyer’s time. Indeed, Boyer’s ability to control the population was significantly limited in comparison to Duvalier’s. Building on the legacy of centralization from the U.S. occupation, and using his powerful, well-armed militia, Duvalier had established an iron grip on the country beyond anything that Boyer could have imagined. And unlike Boyer, who struggled for years to gain international recognition and only bought it at the steep price of the 1825 indemnity, by the mid-1960s, Duvalier had managed to stare down the United States and win. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson had resumed diplomatic relations with Haiti. A new ambassador was sent from Washington, and he declared that his government looked forward to “close cooperation and solidarity” with Duvalier.62

American journalists, for their part, found Duvalier a fascinating subject. The president for life had a friendly chat with a visiting reporter from Newsweek magazine, and when asked about malnutrition among Haitian peasants, had “goggled with disbelief.” “Do you know how many mangoes they eat a year?” he asked, and then “answered himself with a spur-of-the-moment statistic: ‘400 million.’” Duvalier, the journalist wrote, “impressed me as Big Brother masquerading as the Mad Hatter.” Much of the coverage tended toward the sensationalistic, and recalled the outlandish visions of Haiti cultivated during the U.S. occupation. “Foreign journalists and scholars in search of exotic buffoons,” notes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “enjoyed painting François Duvalier as an incoherent madman, a black Ubu, a tropical Caligula who would spout any amount of nonsense at any time.”63

While Duvalier denounced negative depictions of Haiti, he also played a complicated double game, cultivating the idea that his form of despotism was the country’s only viable form of governance. He hired a publicity director named Herbert Morrison, a one-time Hollywood press agent, who in an NBC interview gave credence to the idea that Duvalier used Vodou to keep his hold on power. Morrison claimed that Duvalier’s office had a “voodoo altar” with two dolls of U.S. officials—former president Eisenhower and former secretary of state John Foster Dulles, the latter with pins stuck around his pancreas. Such descriptions were calculated to appeal to U.S. stereotypes of voodoo dolls, which are not a part of most Haitian Vodou practice. But they also served Duvalier’s political interests, urging viewers to conclude that Haiti had the leader it needed and deserved. Many in the United States decided that the Haitian population as a whole was primitive and irrational. In 1957 a New York Times editorial described Haitians as a “highly emotional people, who have little but tribal rule and superstition to guide their thinking” and who were therefore “notoriously susceptible to demagogic political appeal.” A decade later, a study carried out by the State Department said that Duvalier had a “paranoid personality” that “approached psychotic proportions at times.” However, the document went on, that made him a fitting president for Haitians, who were a “paranoid” group in general. Even Haitians who had a “veneer of education,” the study argued, were burdened by a belief in “animism.”64

The logic of such reports was that while Duvalier might be brutal, he was the inevitable product of Haitian culture. As during the U.S. occupation, depictions of the supposed religious and cultural backwardness of Haiti conveniently neglected to consider the effects of America’s massive economic and military involvement in the country. The exoticizing representations of Haiti and Duvalier both justified U.S. support of his regime and buttressed his hold on power, legitimizing it by delegitimizing the idea of Haitian democracy.

A few American reporters did manage to talk to ordinary Haitians, who described a life plagued not only by state violence but by ever-increasing poverty. “Duvalier has performed an economic miracle,” one Haitian told a U.S. journalist in 1964. “He has taught us to live without money and eat without food.” Indeed, while after his election Duvalier had promised to give the population “the opportunity to liberate itself from the throes of misery,” the Haitian economy worsened significantly during his time in power. He created a strong state, but it was essentially the shell of a state: it served almost entirely to assure control over the people rather than to serve their needs for health care, education, or land reform. Duvalier’s regime perfected the forms of extraction long practiced by Haitian leaders, using monopoly control over a number of industries—tobacco, flour, sugar, automobiles, alcohol, and other goods—as a way of indirectly taxing the rural population. Much of the budget went into officials’ individual accounts, enabling widespread corruption that enriched those tied to the regime even as it sucked resources from the rest of the country. And while Haiti’s population grew and the cost of living increased dramatically, sources of income—particularly agriculture—stagnated. The GNP went from $338 million in 1962 to $329 million in 1967, and coffee exports dropped by 31 percent between 1960 and 1967.65

In perhaps the most cynical profiteering of all, the Haitian government worked out a deal with the Dominican Republic to earn money from the emigration of laborers who wanted to work on Dominican sugar plantations. Driven to leave their country by the increasingly difficult economic conditions, Haitian workers found themselves indentured to their own government. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, migrant workers had to pay the Haitian government the significant sum of $10 (approximately equivalent to $75 today) to gain the right to go to the Dominican Republic. The plantation owners there paid an additional $15 to the Haitian government for each worker, and subsequently deposited half of each worker’s wages into special accounts held by the Haitian state. Like much of the other money that went into government coffers, these fees mostly flowed to Duvalier and his close associates. By 1981, the Haitian government was charging Dominican planters a fee of $182 per Haitian worker, collecting nearly three million dollars that went into hidden accounts. The garnishment of wages made it extremely difficult for Haitian laborers to do what many had intended to do—work in the Dominican Republic for a while and then return home with savings to buy land. Instead, they were left destitute and stranded.66

While Haitian migrants were being squeezed by their own government, the rural residents who remained behind were suffering as well. The massive network of rural Tontons Makouts in the countryside used their extensive control to levy arbitrary “taxes” on farmers and market women, and to deprive people of their land under one pretext or another. The prominent anti-Duvalier activist Jean Dominique described the regime as a “dictatorship that systematically organized the pillage, exploitation, spoliation and dispossession” of the poor, leaving them with only two options: “to flee or to fight.” Documenting the sporadic uprisings that took place through the Duvalier years, Dominique compared them to the ancient forms of resistance practiced by the enslaved against their colonial masters. Residents arrested after one such revolt, he noted, sang songs dating back to the Haitian Revolution to taunt and shame their guards.67

For a short time in the late 1960s, groups of young urban activists sought to tap rural resentments against Duvalier to create a national movement against the dictatorship. Some advocated armed struggle, explicitly presenting themselves as new maroons resisting a new kind of slavery. They were, however, no match for Duvalier’s police apparatus. Students, labor leaders, and others suspected of leftist sympathies were imprisoned, executed, or forced into exile; at one point, Duvalier’s forces attacked the headquarters of an activist group, killing twenty of its members. Duvalier also appropriated the imagery of the resistance, constructing a statue dedicated to the “Unknown Maroon”—a kind of “tomb of the unknown soldier” for those who had resisted slavery and laid the foundation for Haiti’s independence. The message was clear: Duvalier was the one true representative of the Haitian nation, the authentic descendant of the country’s revolutionary founders. The era of resistance was past; the present was for obedience, and the only revolution was the one led by Duvalier himself.68

Duvalier’s suppression of leftist groups impressed the Nixon administration, which began to strengthen its ties with the regime. In July 1969, Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York, came to Haiti in a high-profile visit and was photographed smiling and shaking hands with Duvalier. The visit marked an era of intense and open cooperation. A new U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Clinton Knox, lobbied so intensely for aid to the Duvalier regime that some Haitian officials apparently dubbed him an honorary Tonton Makout. Soon the Nixon government officially ended the embargo on the sale of arms to Haiti that had been put in place after Duvalier’s 1963 attack on the Dominican embassy, and in 1971, one million dollars’ worth of weaponry was bought by Haiti from the United States. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration had considered Duvalier a threat to democracy and Caribbean stability; a decade later, he had firmly established himself as one of America’s most favored client governments in the region.69

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Standing on the balcony of the National Palace with Duvalier in 1969, Nelson Rockefeller realized that he had to hold up the president as he waved to the crowd below. The sixty-two-year-old Duvalier was in poor health and becoming increasingly frail. But in an odd if telling oversight, he hadn’t indicated in the 1964 constitution that made him president for life what would happen when that life ended. In 1970, Duvalier explained to his close associates that there was only one solution: his presidency would become a dynasty, passed on to his only son, Jean-Claude. (Though he had older daughters, Duvalier did not consider handing power to them.) Jean-Claude, however, posed a problem: he was only nineteen. He couldn’t even vote, and he certainly couldn’t be president—the constitution required a person to be at least forty years old to take that position. So Duvalier, talking of the need to include Haitian youth more fully in political life, changed the age of majority from twenty-one to eighteen and revised the 1964 constitution to make Jean-Claude Duvalier’s accession to power possible. “That a Duvalier should one day succeed a Duvalier,” the ailing president declared in January 1971, “should alarm nobody.” The next month, Haitians were once again called to the polls. They were asked the following question: “Citizen Dr. François Duvalier has chosen Citizen Jean-Claude Duvalier to succeed him as President-for-Life of the Republic. Does this choice respond to your aspirations and your desires? Do you ratify it?” According to the official results, there were 2,391,916 yes votes. Scholars differ on the question of how many voted against the measure: some say 1, others 0.70

The United States, eager to see an untroubled transfer of power in the country, sent warships to patrol the waters between Miami and Haiti to make sure no exiles decided to use the moment to launch an attack. The Duvalier regime knew precisely what kind of language to use to appeal to the Americans. The Duvalierist official Luckner Cambronne proclaimed that “in the Caribbean basin, this crossroads of civilization,” Haiti represented “an enviable example of political and economic stability.” The country, he said, was a “barrier” to leftist ideologies that were seeking “the destruction of the spiritual and moral values of a Western civilization based on humanistic and Christian values.” François Duvalier died on April 21, 1971; the next day, Jean-Claude was sworn in as the new president for life. In his first speech, he declared: “The United States will always find Haiti on its side against communism.”71

The younger Duvalier was widely considered a protected playboy lacking the political skills of his father, and many thought that his reign would not last long. But despite a series of family dramas that intrigued and entertained many observers, he would stay in power for fourteen years. It helped, of course, that he inherited his father’s well-established system of control and extraction, as well as his close ties with the U.S. administration. During his time in office, Haiti’s relationships with the United States and other countries continued to improve, and an increasing amount of foreign investment began coming into the country. Corporations eager to take advantage of the low cost of labor in Haiti built factories to produce wigs, clothes, and baseballs. There was some incongruity to the last item, since Haitians themselves never took up the American sport. Soon, however, every baseball used in the U.S. professional leagues was made in Haiti.72

Many commentators and economists were optimistic that foreign investment would help transform Haiti into a prosperous nation; one went so far as to imagine it becoming a new Taiwan. By 1984, there were as many as thirty thousand people working in factories around Port-au-Prince, and Haiti was competing with countries like Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong in the production of assembled export goods. Still, even Jean-Claude Duvalier himself admitted that export industries did little to address the overall problem of poverty in Haiti, declaring in a 1981 speech that they “remained enclaves with a weak level of integration into the economy.” A bigger transformation came from two other trends, whose impact continues to be felt to this day: the rapidly growing presence of private foreign aid groups, which came flooding into Haiti in the 1980s, and the creation of a massive diaspora as Haitians increasingly left the country to settle abroad.73

The amount of aid that came into Haiti during the Jean-Claude Duvalier years was staggering: between 1972 to 1981 alone it amounted to $584 million (roughly equivalent to $2 billion today), with 80 percent of that coming from the United States. But foreign governments were well aware that Duvalier and his associates were simply taking much of the official aid money sent to the country for their own private gain. Loath to stop sending assistance altogether for fear of the social and political consequences, the donor countries found an elegant solution: channeling more and more of their aid into what were then called private voluntary organizations, or PVOs, which now largely go under the name of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Giving money to independent groups bypassed the Duvalier government while still promoting stability by addressing poverty, lack of health care, and agricultural problems. Soon Haiti became a magnet for evangelical religious groups and secular relief agencies alike, in part because of what one scholar describes as the “marketing of its paganism and poverty.” By 1984 there were at least four hundred PVOs, and probably more, operating in the country. Two years later, a Haitian association set up to assist the work of voluntary agencies reported that a new aid group was arriving in Haiti every week. In time this process created what some critics today refer to as the “Republic of NGOs,” with a bewildering patchwork of foreign aid organizations playing a central role in Haiti’s economic and political life.74

In at least one case, U.S. involvement ended up being devastating for rural Haitians. In 1983, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Haitian government carried out a campaign to prevent the spread of swine flu among pigs in the country. The only way to stop the disease from spreading, they insisted, was to slaughter the entire existing pig population in Haiti. Unlike many other government efforts in the countryside, this one was carried out with remarkable efficiency. “We didn’t imagine the Haitian state was capable of such determination and effectiveness,” an economist who studied the situation later remarked. “And it’s too bad that they don’t apply them to more constructive projects.” Over the course of a few months, nearly two million pigs throughout Haiti were collected and killed. The Haitian government and the aid groups saw this as a logical public health measure, but from the perspective of rural Haitians it was a brutal assault. Haiti’s indigenous black breed of pigs, known as creole pigs, were crucial to rural survival. Descended from animals first introduced to the island by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century, the black pigs were well adapted to the environment, nourishing themselves with local plants, familiar with what they could eat and what was poisonous.75

USAID and the Haitian government promised to provide compensation for the slaughtered pigs: assistance with purchasing white pigs, to be brought in from the United States. But the reimbursement plan turned out to be much less effectively run than the eradication program, and many Haitians got nothing in return for what they had lost. Moreover, those peasants who did get access to the new pigs rapidly learned that they were effectively useless. Unsuited to the climate, they frequently got sick and died; few of them bore young, and any piglets also usually died quickly. The imported white pigs had to be kept in pens to protect them, and they had to be fed special feed—imported from the United States—that the farmers could not afford. Indeed, as some noted bitingly, the new pigs required food and health care of a kind far superior to what the peasants themselves had access to. As one farmer told journalist Amy Wilentz a few years later, “the big white American pigs … cost too much, they eat too much, they eat fancy feed, not garbage and mango skins like the little Haitian pigs, they need lots of water, and who has lots of water? And then you’d have to find a sty to house them in, because the American pigs aren’t used to Haitian soil … They get sick. They die, and you’ve wasted all your money.” In a way, the moment symbolized all of the contradictions of Duvalier rule: a regime that insistently presented itself as the defender and embodiment of the Haitian nation had allowed outsiders to target a cornerstone of rural life, slaughtering the black pigs and offering foreign white ones in return.76

As foreign aid groups struggled to find their way, for many Haitians the most important source of external assistance came not from any well-meaning outsiders but from their own connections and relatives abroad. By the early 1980s, Haitians themselves had become the country’s most significant export. The three decades of Duvalier rule were a time of massive exodus, of a scale and breadth never before seen in Haitian history. In one of the many ironic twists in the Duvalier saga, it was money coming from Haitians driven into exile that in many ways propped up the economy during Jean-Claude Duvalier’s rule. In 1960, remittances from immigrants overseas had made up 5 percent of all the money coming into the country; by the early 1980s, that had increased to one-third of the total amount.77

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, those who left Haiti had been mostly wealthier officials and professionals who feared political repression and who were often able to secure visas to travel by airplane to the United States, Canada, or Europe. By the middle of the 1960s, observers estimated that as many as 80 percent of Haiti’s professionals were outside the country; physicians, psychiatrists, and other medical personnel fled in droves. But in time the exodus claimed people from every social group and region in the country. Poorer residents, seeking to avoid the exploitation of working on the sugarcane plantations in the Dominican Republic, began escaping by boat to other parts of the Caribbean and to Florida. Many left hoping for temporary exile, but for most it became permanent. By 1970 there were already 35,000 Haitians in the Bahamas, and the number would continue to increase in the coming decade. A tally of Haitians in New York City found approximately 150,000 of them there in 1976, and that figure would climb to at least 400,000, and probably significantly more, by the end of the 1990s. Although a precise count is difficult to come by, it is estimated that up to a million Haitians—about 15 percent of the country’s population—fled during the thirty years of Duvalier rule.78

By the early 1980s, Haiti had become what it remains today: a vast and seemingly boundless territory made up of communities not only within the borders of the country but in Boston, New York, Miami, Montréal, Paris, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, the Bahamas, and many other places as well. This diaspora was later dubbed the “Tenth Department”—an international supplement to the nine official districts within Haiti itself—as a way of acknowledging both how essential it is to Haiti’s present and future and how firmly established these emigrants have become in their adopted lands. The novelist Edwidge Danticat, who came to New York as a child in 1981, recalls noting a particularly poignant turning point in the history of that diaspora. For a long time, when a Haitian died in New York, the body would be sent back to Haiti to be buried near family. One day, Danticat heard the news that a Haitian resident of New York had been traveling in Haiti and had died there, and the body was being sent back to New York, to be buried in the new place—the surest sign that it had now become home.79

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Those in the “liberated territory” of the diaspora had the freedom to speak out against Duvalier, and many took the opportunity to do so. The New York radio station WRUL, for instance, broadcast a daily program in Kreyòl with news about Haiti and sharp attacks against the Duvalier regime; Duvalier tried hard to jam the signal, but many Haitians were able to tune in nonetheless. Within Haiti itself, criticizing the president was still difficult and fraught with danger. In the mid-1970s, though, courageous activists in Haiti began increasingly to test Duvalier’s regime. Newspapers and magazines spoke out against the government, and with the spread of transistor radios, a series of new radio stations popped up, enabling journalists to reach a far greater audience. Some of them began reporting from the countryside, providing accounts of the suffering of rural residents, which in turn emboldened the rural population to organize protests against local officials.80

Activists in Haiti got a significant boost when Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States in 1976. He instituted a new approach to foreign policy in Latin America, putting pressure on U.S. allies to demonstrate a commitment to human rights in return for continued aid. In response, Duvalier eased restrictions on the press and allowed for local elections. Two non-Duvalierist political parties were formed, and the population in Le Cap shocked the regime by taking the liberalization seriously enough to elect an independent political leader to Congress. Activists created the Haitian League of Human Rights, which collected testimony by victims of the government, while delegations from the OAS published reports detailing the disappearances and government-sponsored torture. During the 1979 carnival, one group of revelers took the bold step of parading through the streets in Fidel Castro masks.81

Carter did not win a second term, though, and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 dealt a profound blow to the Haitian prodemocracy movement. Within weeks of the U.S. elections, realizing that American foreign policy was about to change, Duvalier carried out a sudden wave of arrests, attacking those who had spoken out against his regime over the previous years. Opposition radio stations were ransacked and shut down, journalists imprisoned and tortured. Reagan, for his part, sent Coast Guard ships patrolling the waters between Haiti and the United States in order to stop Haitians fleeing their country from making it to Florida. The goal was to prevent Haitians from setting foot on U.S. soil, where they had the right to apply for political asylum. Only a tiny number of Haitians were ever granted such asylum—despite the widely reported political repression in Haiti, the “boat people” were systematically categorized as “economic refugees”—but the U.S. government wanted to avoid having to carry out such hearings altogether. The Haitians who were intercepted on the seas were often shipped back to Haiti, where they risked severe punishment from the Duvalier government. Others were held at Guantánamo Bay or in the Krome detention camp in Florida, sometimes for years. Activists in the United States lambasted the policy, insisting that it was both unethical and racist, especially given the continuing welcome of refugees fleeing Cuba during the same years. But Haiti remained a U.S. ally, and immigration policies flowed from that.82

Facing hostility abroad and continued repression at home, Haitians found their horizons closed off in every direction. But the flowering of opposition in the late 1970s was impossible to suppress completely. Journalists continued to brave the threat of arrest and torture, and young people carried out ever-bolder street protests against the regime. The disastrous pig eradication campaign pushed rural Haitians to criticize local power structures with increasing fervor. And Haitian Catholic leaders, influenced by the broader currents of 1970s liberation theology, added their voices to the demands for reform. A young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide attracted large and impassioned crowds with his riveting preaching, packed with wordplay and complex symbolism and fearless in its attacks on Duvalier. “We must end this regime where the donkeys do all the work and horses prance in the sunshine,” he declared in 1982 in his first sermon as an ordained priest. The following year, Haitian Catholics got high-profile encouragement for their efforts when Pope John Paul II visited the country and declared to a crowd that included Jean-Claude Duvalier: “Something must change here.”83

The Duvalier family, meanwhile, seemed increasingly unhinged from the population. In 1984, the first lady, Michèle Bennett, held a lavish benefit dinner to raise money for her pet project, a hospital in Port-au-Prince. “If Nero were to come back to earth and throw a party, this was the party he would throw,” one of the guests said of the proceedings. Bennett made sure that the entire evening was televised: the Haitian population was meant to see the luxurious event as a symbol of how much their rulers cared about them. The next year, Bennett took two dozen of her friends to Paris for a $1.7 million shopping spree. U.S. officials and Haitian industrialists, longtime supporters of the regime, worried that such provocations would make a revolution inevitable. Even Duvalier’s loyalists began to perceive him as a liability.84

In November 1985, an incident in the town of Gonaïves opened the way for the final push against the dictator. As a student demonstration raged in the street outside, a student named Jean-Robert Cius was leaning against the wall in the courtyard of his school with a notebook in his hands. Cius himself wasn’t demonstrating, but when government militiamen trying to suppress the protests fired into the courtyard, a bullet hit him squarely in the chest. He fell dead to the ground, the bullet-pierced notebook still clasped against his body. Two other students were also killed that day. One of them, who had shouted out in protest after watching Cius die, was chased into a dead-end alley and shot by a militiaman at point-blank range. The other, wounded by militia gunfire, was beaten to death as he lay on the ground.85

Somehow, after all the tens of thousands of killings, after the decades of political repression and poverty that had sent more than a million fleeing Haiti, these three murders tipped the scale. Students poured into the streets in Gonaïves and other towns; fifty thousand protesters marched in Le Cap. Invoking the spirit of Dessalines, they proclaimed that a new revolution was imminent, and that Duvalier had to go. “Get out, Satan!” Aristide cried in a sermon. In January 1986, Duvalier apparently called a delegation of leading Vodou oungans to the National Palace to get advice about how he should respond to the situation. He got an earful, as the leader of the delegation, Max Beauvoir, laid out the grievances of the Haitian people against the regime. A few days later, Beauvoir delivered the verdict: “The spirits are annoyed and angry.” For many months, he said, “the spirits have wanted you to leave.” The U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince gave Duvalier the same message, arranging for him to be carried out of the country to a comfortable life in France—sustained there by a Swiss bank account filled over the previous decades with millions of dollars from the Haitian treasury.86

The thirty years of Duvalier rule left behind a devastated country. As many as a million Haitians had fled into exile. The treasury was empty. The civil institutions that had previously provided an alternative means of organizing Haitian society had been largely demolished or absorbed by the state. Haiti was still burdened by crushing foreign debt and battered by foreign involvement in its affairs. And while international investment and aid had helped to build up some aspects of the country’s infrastructure, what remained of the state had little capacity to maintain it. The only truly functioning institution that Duvalier left behind was a massive military apparatus. By the early 1980s, perhaps as many as three hundred thousand individuals were incorporated into the Tontons Makouts hierarchy. The army, meanwhile, had long ago been purged of its opposition elements and now was composed of men who had also loyally served the dictator. The militia chiefs and the army officers had little desire to let go of the social and political power that the regime had given them, and they retained tremendous influence even after Jean-Claude Duvalier himself was gone.87

The protesters who had at last succeeded in overthrowing Duvalier, however, were buoyed by a sense that radical change was truly possible. The uprising of 1985–86, and the years of activism that preceded it, had created a network of grassroots organizations that seemed poised to reconstitute a democratic order in the country. The moment had come, they hoped, to finally put an end to Haiti’s perpetual cycle of violence and poverty. Stripping politics to its core, the student demonstrators had demanded: “Long live life! Down with death!”88