THE FUTURE DICTATOR of Haiti first came to prominence as a specialist in tropical medicine. After becoming Director General of the National Health Service and Minister for Health and Labour, he was popularly elected as the first-ever president of the Caribbean nation of Haiti to win power through universal adult suffrage. While ballot rigging was undoubtedly in play, Duvalier was genuinely well-liked and admired. By the time of his death 14 years later, he was universally feared and reviled as one of the worst murderers, torturers and kleptomaniacs ever to hold power.
A small nation of only 27,750 square kilometres, teeming with over ten million inhabitants, Haiti occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Once it must have seemed like a paradise, for Haiti was blanketed by tropical rain forest, with palm-lined beaches and colourful exotic flowers. By the mid-20th century, most of the forest cover had been hacked or burned down, fertile pastureland over-grazed and beaches that, elsewhere would have thronged with visitors enticed by a burgeoning tourist industry, lay deserted.
The first Europeans to visit the Caribbean were under the command of Christopher Columbus, who reached the island Spaniards later named Hispaniola during his first exploratory voyage in 1492. The island was occupied by Ciboney Indians from 5000BC and Arawaks from around 1000BC. Both Native American Indian cultures, together with a more sophisticated Taino Arawak culture that arrived from Mexico in 200AD, were peaceful. The natives grew maize, built temples and worshipped human and animal spirits. The name they gave their island was ‘Hayti,’ meaning ‘mountainous land’.
In 1496 the Spaniards founded the town of Santo Domingo and began to colonise the island in search of gold. The half million or so natives were enslaved, ruthlessly exploited and forced to work in mines and agricultural estates established by the colonists. Disease, to which the natives had no resistance, overwork, despair and Spanish brutality almost exterminated them within decades. From 1520 slaves were brought from Africa primarily to work on sugar plantations, as there was more wealth to be wrought from ‘white gold’ than mining for the real stuff, which existed in only tiny quantities on the island.
After the conquest of Mexico, Spanish interest in Hispaniola waned and many colonists and ‘conquistadors’ moved to ‘New Spain’ as their new possession was then called. French pirates began to use the western part of Hispaniola, particularly the small island of La Tortue, as a base to attack and loot Spanish shipping. The pirates were encouraged by an expansionist France to settle on Hispaniola itself and soon flourishing French sugar and coffee industries developed, all built on slavery. Eventually, at the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain acknowledged their rivals’ claims to western Hispaniola and it became a formal French colony with the name of Saint Domingue. By the end of the 18th century some half-a-million black slaves, two thirds of them African-born, toiled for around 40,000 whites, most of whom wanted independence from France with themselves in control. There were also 28,000 mixed race ‘mulattos,’ the offspring of slaves and their white masters. Often free, the mulattos also exploited the slaves, treating them with open contempt. Some 30,000 blacks were also emancipated, frequently wealthy and slave-owning. Strongly pro-slavery, their slaves were badly treated, as their masters strived to be more European than the French themselves, drenching themselves in French clothing, language and culture, denigrating Creole and their own African roots. Devout Catholics, they despised African beliefs and tried to show themselves as distinct from the slaves. Despite their efforts to become French, the whites scorned them.
The life of a slave in Saint Domingue was hard in what was the richest, most desired colony not only in the West Indies, but the entire world. Often cruelly worked to death on a meagre diet, the death rate of slaves exceeded the birth rate seven-fold. To replenish numbers, tens of thousands of fresh slaves were imported from Africa annually. Seething with hate and resentment, the slaves saw little of the wealth from the sugar, cotton, coffee, cocoa, sisal, fruit and vegetables exported to France.
African-born field slaves would form the backbone of the forthcoming slave revolt. They also retained much of their native languages and traditions, which would later fuse with French to produce a unique Creole cultural, linguistic and religious hybrid. The latter, combining African and Catholic beliefs would ensure a cult known as ‘voodoo’ survived and flourished.
Following the 1789 French revolution, the whites, mulattos and free blacks bickered among themselves. Seeing their oppressors weaken, the slaves of Saint Domingue rebelled against their colonial masters, on 21 August 1791, led by Francois Toussaint L’Ouverture, born a slave in 1743 but freed in 1777. The spark was a Petwo voodoo service on 14 August at which a woman named Boukman claimed to be possessed by Ougoun Feraille, the voodoo warrior spirit. In his voice she called for all slaves to rise up and slaughter the whites.
Thousands of whites and mulattos, men women and children, were massacred and the country set ablaze. With British and Spanish help, the rebels built up a sizeable guerrilla army, aided by maroons; runaway slaves who lived deep in the mountains.
For years black slaves, free blacks, poor whites, rich whites and mulattos fought against and between each other. The French National Assembly dispatched a three-man commission led by Leger Felicite Sonthronax to take charge. Eventually, in order to retain French control, Sonthronax took the momentous step of freeing the slaves in exchange for their help in resisting British and Spanish incursions. The declaration, made on 29 August 1793 and ratified in Paris on 4 February the following year, brought freedom to the slaves but internecine warfare continued.
Military expeditions sent by France to reclaim its most prosperous colony were decimated by yellow fever as Haiti was engulfed in a savage war of unbelievable horror perpetrated by all sides. Rape, torture and murder of non-combatants of every age and both sexes were de rigueur. Heads were mounted on spikes along roadsides and on pikes erected on stockade walls. Dogs were used to tear apart prisoners and eyes were gouged out. After a hard-fought and bloody struggle, independence was declared on 1 January 1804. Almost a third of the pre-war black population was dead, the plantations looted and burned to the ground and the countryside utterly devastated in the preceding orgy of destruction. The new nation was named ‘Haiti’ and Saint Domingue confined to history.
Toussaint L’Ouverture had died in a French prison on 2 November 1802, and the first ruler was his former general Jean Jaques Dessalines, an illiterate ex-slave who declared himself emperor, tearing the white from the French tricolour to create Haiti’s new flag. His first act was to order the entire slaughter – man, woman and child – of the remaining white population, thousands having already been killed or fled. Members of the Catholic clergy were not spared, resulting in the breaking of ties between Haiti and the Vatican.
Dessalines launched a vicious wave of terror against the ex-slaves and introduced forced labour, restricting them to their former plantations. Slavery was formally abolished ‘for all time’ although his subjects barely noticed as they toiled under barely different conditions, minus the whip. The Haitian constitution, promulgated in 1804, prohibited the ownership of property by whites and confiscated all that they previously owned. Assassinated by mulatto officers in 1806, Dessalines’ ‘empire’ soon split into a northern kingdom, ruled by Henri Christophe, and a republic in the south and west, ruled by a mulatto, Alexandre Petion.
Petion broke up some of the estates to raise money and pay his soldiers, creating a class of smallholding peasants who subsisted on the bounty of their land. Gone were the sugar plantations of before. Yams, corn and bananas were the new staples of a nation the Europeans and United States refused to trade with, for fear of encouraging revolt among their own slaves.
French language and culture, even in the absence of any Frenchmen, remained attractive to Haiti’s new rulers. It allowed them to distinguish themselves from the illiterate masses. Even amongst the Creole-speaking majority, French mores proliferated. Curiously, everyone in Haiti had, or soon took, French Christian and surnames, even those born in Africa who had perhaps been enslaved only briefly.
Haiti re-united in 1820 when Christophe shot himself with a silver bullet and two years later the Haitian army, under its new ruler, General Jean-Pierre Boyer, conquered the rest of Hispaniola. In 1826, Boyer introduced a labour law restricting peasants to their farms. This repressive law also banned travel without an overseer or landowner’s approval, prevented workers’ associations buying plantations and insisted on labourer respect for the new, usually mulatto, elite, all on pain of imprisonment.
In 1844 the Haitians were driven out of eastern Hispaniola. Throughout the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, Haiti lurched from dictatorship to murderous dictatorship, ravaged by coups, foreign invasion and civil wars, often between the predominantly black and the powerful minority mulatto population, who continued to own considerable territory, the land distribution ‘reforms’ of Petion having impacted only modestly, even in south and west Haiti.
During the early years of independence, voodoo came out of the shadows after decades during which the French had banned it. Voodoo had originally taken many forms, developing from 1730-1790 until the Benin form was ascendant. Benin, West Africa, is the only country today in which voodoo is an official religion. From 1790 to 1800 it became cohesive and spread rapidly. Toussaint, Dessalines and Cristophe suppressed voodoo, but after the latter’s death it became publicly acceptable. Almost all voodoo worshippers considered themselves Catholic too and the two religions merged in a strange amalgam of Christianity and African spirit worship.
From 1860, when the Vatican re-established relations with Haiti, until 1945, voodoo was again persecuted at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, an all-out campaign to eradicate it peaking in the early 1940s. At that time, shrines were burned, voodoo priests killed and the religion shunned. After the failure of these efforts, Catholics gave up trying to destroy voodoo and almost legitimised it by accepting voodoo drums and melodies into church services. The main enemy of voodoo during the Duvalier years and since has been the rapid growth of Protestant evangelism. Evangelists currently own seven of the country’s 11 radio stations and frequently denounce voodoo as devil worship. Some 15% of Haitians are now Protestant and hold no truck with the religion promoted by Papa Doc. Ironically, since 1975 there has been a voodoo revival in connection with the peasant movement towards progressive reform in Haiti.
By 1915, anarchic Haiti had suffered 22 heads of state in only 71 years, almost all of whom died violently or were forced to seek exile in France or Jamaica. The last of these, President Jean Vilbrun Gullaume Sam, was impaled on the spiked fence of the French Embassy. He had hidden in the toilet, fearing for his life after murdering one of his predecessors, the mulatto President Oreste Zamor, in prison along with 167 of his supporters. Sam was then dragged off and torn limb from limb by his mulatto subjects seeking revenge. This was too much for the Americans and on 28 July 1915 the US occupied Haiti. The pretext was that it feared German encroachment, although a garrison remained until 1934, long after any German threat had vanished.
The Americans restored order, installed a telephone system, the rule of law and built roads, schools and hospitals, but were never welcome. A guerrilla movement, the Cacos, harried them until their leader Charlemagne Peraulte was assassinated by a marine. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt withdrew the marines, a seething, resentful population quickly evicted from office the puppet government left behind. The President, Stenio Vincent, was allowed to limp on to avoid an American return. Vincent retired in 1941. Stability soon evaporated as, in the years preceding Duvalier, a dozen ‘strongmen’ ruled Haiti in turn before their overthrow and replacement by yet another populist dictator from either the army ‘Military Council’ or political elite.
The world’s first independent black republic, Haiti suffered from chronic instability, endemic poverty, illiteracy and low life expectancy. Corruption was the norm. Resentment of the wealthy, usually mulatto minority was strong, and would be fully exploited by future President Dr Francois Duvalier. When Duvalier assumed the presidency, on 22 October 1957, Haitians rejoiced, believing a new day of democracy and prosperity had dawned.
Duvalier was born on 14 April 1907, in the capital, Port-au-Prince, during the military dictatorship of Nord Alexis. He was one-year-old when General Antoine Simon overthrew Alexis, four when revolution overthrew Simon, five when Simon’s successor, President Cincinnatus Leconte, was blown to pieces following the dynamiting of the old, wooden Palais Nationale and six when President Tancrede Auguste was poisoned. At the funeral of Auguste, two generals squabbled over the succession, Michel Oreste succeeding, to be followed in the next two years by Oreste Zamor and Joseph Davilmar Theodore respectively. It was little wonder perhaps that, when he himself became president, retaining power was Duvalier’s one overriding priority.
The man who later became ‘Papa Doc’ was the scion of a prosperous middle-class black family. His father, Duval Duvalier, was a respected journalist and justice of the peace, his mother, Uritia Abraham, a bakery worker. Education was revered in the Duvalier household and young Francois attended the prestigious Lycée Petion and was taught by his political mentor and future President Dumarsais Estime, at a time when only 9% of Haitians of his generation obtained any schooling at all.
Leaving high school, Duvalier hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps as a journalist and gained employment on the Action Nationale newspaper using the pseudonym ‘Abderrahman’, the first Iberian caliph, who founded a medical school in Cordoba, Spain.
Duvalier soon realised that journalism was not his forte and enrolled at the University of Haiti to study medicine, graduating in 1934. He did his internship at Hospice Saint Francois de Sales. There he met a pale skinned, half-black, half-mulatto woman, Simone Ovide Faine. She was illegitimate, socially beneath him, yet very beautiful.
By 1938, Duvalier helped found Les Griots (poets, storytellers in Guinean), a publication dedicated to ‘Negritude’ (black pride), with Lorimer Denis. The following year he and Simone were married at St Pierre’s church, Petionville on 27 December 1939 and subsequently had three daughters, Marie-Denise, Simone and Nicole, followed by Jean-Claude, eventual successor to his father as dictator and known to posterity as ‘Baby Doc’.
The Second World War saw Duvalier employed as an assistant to the US Army Medical Mission from 1943-46 and afterwards he studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taking two semesters in public health. He did not want to settle in the United States and when his studies were completed he returned home to Haiti.
In Haiti, Duvalier gained popularity by exaggerating his role in a US government-sponsored campaign to eliminate yaws, a severe and infectious bacterial disease easily treated with penicillin. Soon people came to believe Duvalier had eliminated the disease almost single-handedly.
Describing himself as a ‘quiet country doctor’, Duvalier built up support and became increasingly involved in the Negritude movement, led by Dr Jean Price Mars. At this time, Duvalier began an ethnological study of voodoo that stood him in good stead when he eventually became ‘President for Life’. In many ways it was natural for a Haitian doctor to be interested in voodoo. After all, 60% of voodoo, and much of its popularity, stems from its focus on healing, whether with herbs, spirits or modern medicine. It was, of course, not for this, but the more unsavoury aspects of voodoo that Papa Doc’s regime became infamous.
Enjoying his popularity among the public and image as a ‘fatherly’ doctor, Duvalier gave himself the epithet by which he would universally be known – ‘Papa Doc’. Certainly he was much loved at this time, spending every available minute tending to the sick and poor, steadfastly building himself a bedrock constituency among Haiti’s most poverty-stricken blacks. An astute observer and judge of character, Duvalier was familiar with their daily lives, beliefs, hopes, fears and what would be needed to cow and control them. He also realised their predisposition to paternalistic and brutal authority.
Over the next few years and during his rule, the sombre-suited, enigmatic Duvalier presented an image of quiet authority and undoubted intelligence. He joined the Worker-Peasant Movement (MOP) led by Daniel Fignole in 1946, becoming almost at once the party’s secretary general. The party rejected Marxism, believing whites overseas and mulattos at home to be the architects of Haiti’s woes. This racism would later evolve into a form of ‘black fascism’ under Duvalier.
In late 1946, a military coup against mulatto President Elie Lescot led to the Military Council installing the black Dumarsais Estime in power. His protégé, Duvalier, was promptly made Director General of the National Public Health Service and Secretary of Labour. Two years later, Estime gave him the combined post of Minister of Public Health and Labour. Duvalier used this platform to build a coalition of interest with the armed forces.
Post-war prosperity in the United States reached Haiti and a period of artistic creativity later known as the ‘Haitian Renaissance’ began. The new government encouraged this and black access to state jobs widened. Laws were passed raising the minimum wage, reforming health, banning non-Haitians from teaching the nation’s history and foreign investment increased. Corruption mounted as well and the old elite felt shut out from the largesse swirling around Estime’s regime.
Remaining loyal when another black, Paul Eugene Magliore, overthrew Estime on 10 May 1950, Duvalier returned to work for the American Medical Mission where he organised against the military regime, eventually being forced in 1954 to go into hiding. Re-emerging in August 1956, Duvalier decided to challenge Magliore, who, fast losing support following his inept response to the devastation of Hurricane Hazel that struck Haiti on 5 October 1954, decided to stand down in December following a general strike. A general political amnesty was then granted. Over the next nine months, five governments formed and fell. An election was called in 1957 to replace Magloire and Duvalier made his move. Seemingly humble, gentle and passive, he was endorsed by both the army and the desperately impoverished black masses. His rivals each had a strong constituency. Senator Louis Dejoie, a wealthy mulatto businessman and descendant of former President Fabre-Nicholas Geffrard, had the support of mulatto officers, the Catholic church, business and the elite. Daniel Fignole, former MOP leader, was a handsome rabble-rouser adored by the troops, some officers and poor of the capital. Clement Jumelle had the backing of the public administration and professional classes.
On 25 May, Dejoie supporters attempted a bloody coup, leading to over a hundred deaths. That day, Fignole declared himself president only to be arrested and shipped overseas 19 days later by machine-gun wielding troops after doubling soldiers’ pay and being subsequently accused of trying to bribe the army. When the Port-au-Prince mob heard two days later, on 16 June, that their hero was in exile, they erupted in fury across the city in an orgy of looting that plunged the city into darkness. The army was ordered by chief of staff General Antonio Thrasybule Kebreau to ‘restore order’. Thousands were slaughtered by gunfire, run over by tanks or bayoneted while taking refuge. Jumelle, seeing Duvalier controlled the army, temporarily fled abroad.
In the election, Dejoie won in the capital but lost the countryside, polling only 463 votes from the armed forces to Duvalier’s 18,841. Ballot-rigging was widespread and Dejoie supporters denounced the result as fraudulent. Along with the other defeated candidates, he would plot for years against the regime, like Fignole first from America, later from Cuba. Meanwhile, they were deprived of citizenship and their property confiscated.
The new president was elected on 22 September 1957 for a non-renewable six years and took office one month later. His supporters won 23 of 37 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and every seat in the Senate. Duvalier immediately promised to install a benevolent ‘Noirist’ regime, that is one that favoured the poor masses of black, Creole-speaking, voodoo-worshipping poor to the detriment of the pale-skinned, upper-class, wealthy, French-speaking, Catholic mulattos, who had either ruled directly themselves or through stooges, for much of Haiti’s unhappy history. The poor would gain their rightful share of the nation’s wealth, access to education, jobs and health care, through the efforts of a president who was really ‘one of them’, who heeded and understood their plight, for had he not often come among them?
From independence onwards descendents of the ‘free blacks’ and mulattos of the colonial era formed themselves into a class which was openly contemptuous of the Haitian peasantry. Disdaining Creole, they spoke only French and saw themselves as having no part of the ‘African’ culture around them. The privileged minority saw no need for a change in relative status between themselves and the descendants of those who were slaves in 1791. True, they employed Creole servants and peasants worked their land, but culturally they remained distinct, ignoring their obviously African genetic heritage.
The peasants loathed their Francophone compatriots, the ‘aristocracy of the yellow skin’ as they were known, who lived in comfort while the majority toiled in a once rich land despoiled by overpopulation, cultivating exhausted fields, ever less fertile through overuse. Plots of land traditionally divided between sons, became progressively smaller, accelerating migration to the squalid slums of Portau-Prince.
Insecurity played a part in peasant alienation, as few could read documents presented to them, or understand the French language of court and government, leaving them bewildered and defenceless when confronted by the activities of the state or the elite and their friends in government. As a result, land titles could not be proven and small farms were gobbled up by the powerful landed gentry.
In advancing his political career, Duvalier was intent on utilising the endemic inferiority complex many blacks suffered as a result of what they perceived to be US economic exploitation and Francophone cultural dominance. Cynically, the ideology of respect for African traditions and influence was prostituted to impose a parasitic caste of rogues upon the Haitian people. Anti-mulatto rhetoric and racism was designed more to keep the historic ruling class in its place, than create a spirit of equality or promote prosperity. Blacks who sided with, or were part of, the Europeanised elite, were ‘collaborators’ and treated as such. A new black middle class, it was intended, would emerge and become permanently entrenched in power. By dividing, Duvalier would rule.
The image of a compassionate ruler swiftly proved a façade. Duvalier showed himself almost at once to be vicious, ruthless and cruel. The mild-mannered, conscientious doctor became the worst kind of despot. The first steps Duvalier took on gaining power were to ensure he stayed there. Within a year, Duvalier, or ‘Papa Doc’, as he now preferred to be known, suspended the constitution. His much-vaunted humanitarianism disappeared as he used voodoo to hold sway over his superstitious people, organising purges and executions of those who had supported rivals or predecessors. Intimidation was widespread. A gang of thugs who devoted themselves to him in the election campaign by planting bombs and murdering opponents, were transformed and expanded into a secret police force of hired voodoo killers known as the Tontons Macoute (Haitian Creole for ‘bogeyman’), who took people in the dead of night and made them disappear forever.
The army was seen as a potential threat to Duvalier’s power. Its leading officers, most of them mulattos, were sacked and replaced by Duvalier cronies who were young, black and loyal to the president personally. Kebreau, who thought himself Duvalier’s master, was replaced and fled across the border. Some officers more reluctant to depart simply disappeared at the hands of the Tontons Macoute.
Soon after assuming power, Duvalier began to woo his fellow Caribbean dictators through sycophancy and by promising to clamp down on communism in Haiti, a policy that warmed the hearts of American politicians too. President Rafael Trujillo Molinas of the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shared Hispaniola, was originally hostile but soon realised that both dictators had a vested interest in watching each other’s back. President Fulgencio Batista of Cuba was flattered by the award of Haiti’s highest medal of honour in exchange for a ‘loan’ of $4 million that Duvalier pocketed. When, in January 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, Duvalier simply fawned over him instead.
It soon dawned on US diplomats what kind of man the new president was. They felt muted in their criticism because Papa Doc played the ‘race card’ when chided. As America maintained a close relationship with Trujillo, Duvalier denounced the US for neglecting Haiti as little more than a ‘poor Negro republic’, more than happy to seek aid elsewhere if not forthcoming from the US. In so doing, he kept aid flowing, at least initially. When Washington grew tired of this tactic, he switched again to anti-communism, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After this he switched support back to Castro, while letting it be known to US officials that more aid would again place Haiti in the American camp. Time and again Duvalier acted in this, eventually fairly predictable, way. Time and again the US stumped up aid money that never reached beyond Duvalier and a few close associates. Occasionally, aghast at the nature of Duvalier’s regime, America demanded a change in his policies. At such times, Haiti indignantly renounced aid with conditions attached as a flagrant violation of the nation’s sovereignty. Gradually, the US decided to tolerate Duvalier while looking forward to the day his regime would crumble.
Coup attempts flourished throughout Duvalier’s misrule. In February 1958, Duvalier persuaded the legislature to declare a state of siege and after only nine months the first of many coups was attempted. One of the most bizarre was an endeavour by eight men to overthrow the regime by invading Haiti, rallying dissidents to their side and assassinating the president. Led by Captain Ails Pasquet, a mulatto officer and Arthur Payne, a former deputy sheriff from Miami, the group comprised two other deputy sheriffs from Buffalo and New York, accompanied by two American mercenaries and two more mulatto officers.
The would-be adventurers sailed from the Florida Keys on the Mollie and landed near Montrouis on 28 June 1958, 60 kilometres north of Port-au-Prince. The group killed a local police chief who stumbled upon them as they unloaded their weapons. Commandeering his jeep, they flagged down a ‘tap-tap’, a kind of Haitian taxi-bus and hijacked it. Driving straight into the heart of Dessalines barracks, the rebels surprised the sleeping garrison and took 50 soldiers hostage. The rebels had few weapons, having expected to find more at the barracks. In fact, the weapons had been removed and were stored at the presidential palace. Duvalier was badly shaken and prepared to flee Haiti via the Columbian embassy. At dawn, the rebels allowed a mulatto officer they held hostage to buy cigarettes. He quickly informed his superiors that the ‘invasion force’ consisted of only eight lightly armed men. Duvalier, wearing military apparel, ordered the barracks stormed. Six of the rebels were killed in the ensuing assault. A mob tore the other two to pieces, paraded their remains through the streets and triumphantly took them to the palace. For their part, the US was embarrassed at the involvement of its citizens in the escapade and, denying any responsibility, the State Department offered a grovelling apology, grudgingly accepted by Papa Doc. Haitians demanded the repatriation of former President Paul Magliore and Louis Dejoie, who were blamed by Duvalier for funding the invasion and picketed the American embassy in Port-au-Prince. Realising the fate that would await the enemies of Duvalier if repatriated, the State Department politely declined the request. The mini-invasion prompted the Haitian legislature to give Duvalier emergency powers and he began ruling by decree.
After the failure of the eight-man invasion and what the dictator saw as its ‘complicity’, the army was dramatically slimmed down and the military academy closed. In the old days of the US occupation, the Guarde d’Haiti (Haitian Guard) had been formed. Supposedly impartial, they acted in an almost ‘Praetorian’ manner, often choosing who did and did not rule, post-1934. In exchange for personal privilege, their new master expected their loyalty to be to him alone and so he strengthened the guard, making it several hundred strong. Political parties were banned and curfews introduced. Meanwhile, Duvalier sought to portray himself as the defender of Haitian independence in the face of a rapacious and imperialist US.
Duvalier was convinced that he must strike at all real and potential opponents before they could seriously threaten his regime. One such ‘threat’ was his former rival for the presidency, Clement Jumelle. Searching for him, the Tontons Macoute located his two brothers in the town of Bois Verna, exactly one month after the eight-man invasion, shot them in cold blood and then photographed their corpses holding guns. Clement Jumelle now fled in fear for his life. As he went into hiding, it was announced that he and his brothers were behind the Petionville and Mahotieres bomb explosions of 30 April and 29 June earlier that year, the former of which was originally blamed on Dejoie. In the search for the surviving Jumelle brother, Jean-Jaques Monfiston, owner of the house in which Charles and Ducasse were discovered, was taken to the gloomy US-built Fort Dimanche and hideously tortured to death. He revealed nothing. Clement Jumelle was never caught, dying soon after of uraemia. Macoutes hijacked Jumelle’s funeral cortege and he was secretly buried in his hometown of Saint-Marc.
The political opposition such as it was, was fractured, corrupt and inept. Papa Doc had them swept up and sent to Fort Dimanche where they could be leisurely tortured to death by his Tontons Macoute, officially known as the Voluntaires de la Securite Nationale (Volunteers for National Security or VSN), who grew to eventually number up to 15,000 men, twice the size of the shrunken, emasculated regular army, The nation’s press and radio barons, truculent newspaper editors and journalists of newspapers such as the L’Independent and Miroir, were rounded up and jailed on trumped-up charges of sedition and their offices bombed. Not only was Duvalier here to stay, he wanted everyone to know it!
Tontons Macoute were recruited from Duvalier supporters he met when in hiding and knew as Negritude followers. As volunteers, they received no salary, were lightly armed with antiquated firearms and dressed casually in denim, wearing the ubiquitous sunglasses and a red neckerchief representing Ougoun, a voodoo demon. Tontons Macoute owed their loyalty to Papa Doc alone. To make ends meet, they terrorised, pillaged and extorted from the people. Those who resisted were killed or mutilated. During Duvalier’s despotism, babies would be burned to death, whole families extirpated and brutality legitimised. Invoking the powers of voodoo, the Tontons Macoute patrolled the cities, towns and countryside killing, raping and stealing as they wished. They behaved almost like a religious cult and were feared as one. The superstitious populace, cowed by dread of physical violence, also had to contend with the horror that the Tontons Macoute could summon evil spirits against anyone who defied them.
In Duvalier’s Haiti, venturing out during the hours of darkness could be a life-threatening venture. The rigorously enforced curfew might bring down prowling Tontons Macoute who would, at the very least, ‘shake down’ the miscreant and dole out a severe beating.
The twenty-ninth of June was ‘Macoute Day’, in memory of the Pasquet invasion and Tontons Macoute swarmed into the Palais Nationale to hear words of wisdom from Papa Doc. They supported him utterly, revelling in power for the first time and believing it would be torn from them if their patron fell. Soon they were everywhere, establishing a huge network of informers. People would be terrified of them. Some Tontons Macoute were women. Madame Max, one of the most notorious and sadistic, was reputed to enjoy mutilating and tearing off the genitals of male victims. Duvalierist minister Luckner Cambronne announced that a good Tontons Macoute ‘stands ready to kill his children, children to kill their parents’.
Haiti soon became a ‘kleptocracy’, with industrialists, landowners, shopkeepers and anyone else with a modicum of wealth stripped of it. This ‘redistribution’ was not from the wealthy to the poor but from the people upwards through every echelon of society right to their president, who soon amassed vast riches. Ideologically, the regime was bankrupt. The Noirism espoused by Duvalier was merely a sop that delivered no tangible gains whatsoever for his core constituency; save the ranks of those Tontons Macoute recruited from it and their families. Power and loot were Papa Doc’s primary motivations. Voodoo gave him the power to manipulate and harness for himself the ignorance of the population.
As the educated and wealthy minority grew to fear Papa Doc, the illiterate peasants began to see him as a monster, a demon of the night. It was rumoured that Dr Duvalier was a houngan (voodoo priest), who acted as a mediator between the iwa (spirit) and human worlds through trance. Mrs Duvalier was considered a mambo, the female equivalent. Revelling in his reputation, Papa Doc masqueraded as evil voodoo divinity ‘Baron Samedi’, who could put the living in touch with the dead. Many were struck by their president’s physical resemblance to the deity, especially when Duvalier dressed in the supernatural being’s attire of black top hat, tails and sunglasses. To emphasise that he and Samedi were one and the same, Duvalier had posters of himself displayed in the guise of the evil one. Topping this, posters also showed Christ leaning on Duvalier’s shoulders proclaiming: ‘I have chosen him!’
Rumours abounded that black magic ceremonies were held in the Palais Nationale at which goats entrails were studied, bocors (sorcerers) and zombies (the living dead) were called upon and live babies bloodily sacrificed. To absorb the power of Haiti’s first despot, Duvalier occasionally slept on the gravestone of General Dessalines.
On 12 August 1959, another attempt was made to oust Duvalier. This group of 30 or so was led by Henri d’Anton and consisted of Cuban guerrillas and Haitian exiles. They landed at Haiti’s most southern point, Les Irois. Once again when faced with overthrow, Duvalier panicked. He did not need to. The Haitian army, ignominiously bolstered by US Marines – the US Government being fearful of a Cuban ‘domino effect’ in the Caribbean – crushed the rebels. By 22 August all but five Cubans were killed. The rest were captured and after being paraded in the capital, repatriated to Cuba.
Like many a dictator before him, Papa Doc needed to believe himself adored by ‘his’ people. At the same time he was paranoid about potential enemies, believing friends and allies were out to usurp him. Any found to be ambitious or a potential threat were murdered, including, with some poetic justice, the head of the Tontons Macoute itself, Papa Doc’s closest friend, Clement Barbot.
Barbot became the island’s effective ruler when Papa Doc was felled on 24 May 1959 by a massive heart attack and plunged into a coma. With the best cardiologists available flown in from the US, Duvalier made a slow but steady recovery. In the interim, Barbot effectively held the reins of power. Duvalier could not reconcile himself to this and, on 14 July 1960, when Barbot questioned Duvalier’s sanity and refused to share extorted money with him, his own Tontons Macoute arrested him on charges of corruption. Dragged off to Fort Dimanche, now nicknamed Fort Mort (Death), Barbot was tortured for 18 months before being finally released.
While Barbot was incarcerated, Duvalier sought to legitimise his rule and secure an extension of his presidency until 1967. On 8 April 1961, the bicameral parliament was abolished. On 30 April an ‘election’ was held. Incredibly, 100% of votes cast were for the president, as he won by 1,320,478 to nil.
As international criticism of Duvalier increased, the doctor turned Haiti into a one-party state, appointing all 58 of the congressional seats in his new legislature to Duvalierists. The Americans, having aided Haiti to prevent ‘another Cuba’ on its doorstep, suspended assistance in 1961, which that year constituted almost half of its budget. The Americans believed, rightly, that most of their largesse was ending up in the dictator’s bank accounts. Suspension of US aid gave Duvalier the opportunity to again appear defiant and independent of America, which was denounced as a ‘bully’ to the Haitian masses. On 15 September 1961, ‘parliament’ responded by voting Duvalier full economic powers. By now taxes were sky-high, half the national budget was going to the presidential guard or the Macoute and monopolies were being sold for kickbacks. Meanwhile the Haitian infrastructure crumbled.
No one was safe from Duvalier and Barbot realised he was living on borrowed time unless he struck first. Apparently reconciled to Duvalier, Barbot swore revenge. On 26 April 1963, he botched an attempt to kill the president’s children. Two bodyguards were killed and an enraged Duvalier ordered the liquidation of Barbot and his associates. For weeks, Tontons Macoute hunted down Barbot allies, army officers and anyone with whom they had personal grievances. Hundreds were dragged off to Fort Dimanche. Bizarrely, Duvalier believed his bodyguards were killed by army crack shot Lieutenant Francois Benoit, who at the time was hiding in the embassy of the Dominican Republic. Benoit’s house was stormed and his parents, servants, dogs and a passing neighbour machine-gunned. The house was razed to the ground and with it Benoit’s infant son. The already crippled economy, reeling from the depredations of Duvalierist gangsters, ground to a halt as roadblocks were established across the island, traffic grid-locked and ‘dubious’ persons arrested, never to be seen again.
Papa Doc believed Dominican Republic President, Juan Bosch Gavino, to be behind the plot. The two presidents were at loggerheads and Bosch was harbouring Haitian exiles known to be plotting against Duvalier. Papa Doc ordered the Haitian presidential guard to occupy the Dominican chancery in Petionville. Gavino was outraged, ordered his troops to the border and threatened to invade. An invasion would result in the fall of Papa Doc. However, the Dominican army was unenthusiastic and the crisis petered out.
As corpses littered the streets of the capital, Duvalier insanely ordered a carnival to be held. Peasants were bussed into town and free rum distributed as dancers entertained a crowd exhorted by their president: ‘I am the personification of the Haitian fatherland … bullets and machine guns cannot harm me … I am already an immaterial being!’
Meanwhile, Barbot and his brother Harry were organising their forces. They planned to take over the country by first seizing Information Minister Georges Figaro and using him to slip two carloads of ten men into the palace. There, the Barbot’s expected to be joined by 20 Tontons Macoute still supposedly loyal to their former chief. After killing Duvalier, the regime would fall. The day of the operation, 14 July, the plan was aborted. A peasant reported to the authorities that he had been shot at. Duvalier immediately dispatched troops to the area. The Barbots and their associates were cornered in a sugar-cane field. It was set alight and the rebels gunned down while trying to escape the smoke and flames. Despite the failure of Barbot, another group headed by Hector Riobe, whose father had been stripped of his wealth and murdered in the street by Duvalier’s henchmen, launched an attack originally meant to dovetail with Barbot’s. Armed with a flame-thrower and possessing an armoured car, Riobe and his comrades attempted to move against Petionville police station. After a shoot out, Riobe fled to the hills, taking Kenscoff barracks. Tontons Macoute who responded to the attack were ambushed and slaughtered.
Riobe and his supporters retreated to a well-provisioned cave in the mountains with only one entrance but was soon discovered by the Duvalierists, who laid siege to it for days. As the battle raged, fatalities grew. Finally, Papa Doc brought Hector Riobe’s mother, who appealed to her son to surrender. His reply was a single gunshot. The last surviving insurgent, he had taken his own life.
The attempts to overthrow Duvalier by Barbot and Riobe galvanised a third group of rebels into action. Based in Santa Domingo, exiled Haitian general Leon Cantave was permitted by the Dominican Army to train a contingent of 70 exiled Haitian peasants, who were drilled and taught how to shoot. When Gavino learned of their presence, Cantave’s ‘army’ were ordered to leave. On 2 August 1963, they crossed into Haiti, clad in the boots and uniforms of the Dominican Army. On 5 August, they entered the small town of Derac, killing two militiamen and six Tontons Macoute. The invaders then marched on the Ouanaminthe army barracks; Cantave believed the garrison would come over to him. In fact, Papa Doc had known of Cantave’s plans and the army commander was under guard. He would later be executed.
Cantave switched his attack to Fort Liberté. Calling on the fort to surrender, the Duvalierist commander shouted back, ‘Take the fort if you can’. After a feeble attack, Cantave scurried back across the border with his troops but minus much of their equipment. Undeterred, he sent a column back to Haiti on 15 August, where after some modest success they were driven out. By now the CIA were financing Cantave and, after yet another cross-border raid, he again invaded Haiti, this time on 22 September, with 210 men equipped by the Americans with bazookas, machine guns and assault rifles. The attempt was a dismal failure, as a forewarned Duvalier marshalled his troops and repelled Cantave. A government did fall however. Rising tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic were used as an excuse to topple Gavino. Cantave went into exile in New York and his army was dissipated.
During the numerous coup attempts, the reaction of the regime soon formed a familiar pattern. Sirens blared, a curfew was imposed and roadblocks established at which drivers were routinely fleeced. Anyone looking ‘suspicious’ was beaten, arrested and/or murdered. Families of invaders were routinely massacred, their bodies left to rot in the streets and ultimately denied burial.
On 4 October 1963, a hurricane struck Haiti and, on 10 November, a landslide. Together these disasters killed 5,500 Haitians, bringing further misery to the country. Such environmental disasters were bound to happen. Only 30% of the country was arable although today 40% is cultivated. The search for land to farm and charcoal to burn has almost completely destroyed the forest cover and topsoil continues to wash into the sea by the thousand tonne. Haiti is becoming a desert, a transformation expedited by the desperate impoverishment of the Duvalier years.
When President Kennedy was assassinated, Papa Doc let it be known that his death was brought about by an ouanga, a voodoo charm he used against a man he considered behind the frequent attempts to overthrow him. The masses were impressed. If a man as great as President Kennedy could succumb to their all-powerful sorcerer-president, what chance would an ordinary Haitian have if offering resistance?
Although they were ostensibly Catholic, the majority of poor Haitians believed in voodoo. Those who did not, the educated Catholic elites, who fought against voodoo in the 19th century and mid 20th, were the least disposed to the new order. Courting notoriety, the populist president took on the church, three-quarters of whose priests were foreign, mostly French and Canadian, from the start of his presidency. Macoutes invaded Port-au-Prince Cathedral during Mass and mercilessly beat up both worshippers and clergy. Duvalier further emphasised his ‘nationalist’ credentials by expelling priests almost all foreign bishops, including two archbishops and leaving the remainder fearful and wary of offending him.
For this and numerous other transgressions, the Papal Nuncio was recalled and Papa Doc formally excommunicated in 1964 from a church he was only nominally a member of. Astonishingly, Pope Paul VI reinstated him in 1966 and even allowed Duvalier to appoint and discipline bishops. It was not long before a number of Tontons Macoute found themselves members of the Haitian Catholic hierarchy. Duvalier’s reputed practice of black magic and sorcery and his subjugation of Catholicism gave him an almost respectable, if feared, persona among those at the bottom of Haitian society and even provided him a modicum of popular support.
By 1964 Haiti was on its knees. Per capita income had plummeted to a woeful $80 a year. As this included the huge wealth of the Duvaliers and their supporters, the poor were even more destitute than the figure suggests. There was widespread malnutrition, fuel shortages and power cuts. Infant mortality from easily preventable diseases was shockingly high and life expectancy only around 45 years. The small, educated, pre-Duvalier middle class had had enough and ‘voted with their feet’, fleeing to the US in their thousands. A few were ‘co-opted’ by the regime and participated in its system of rule by patronage. Soon Haiti was bereft of its intellectuals, specialists and even basic social services, as some 80% sought new lives elsewhere. Teachers, engineers and doctors could barely subsist on salaries that were often stolen by Tontons Macoute thugs. Many of the peasants, to whom the regime supposedly dedicated itself, lost their tiny land holdings, which were expropriated and handed over to gangsters. Sharecroppers could not buy fertiliser or pipe water to their eroded and overworked plots. Left homeless, destitute and abandoned by government, rural migrants were driven to seek work for a pittance in the sweatshop factories of Port-au-Prince.
In the capital’s sprawling slums, such as Site Soley and Kiton, the deprived were effectively abandoned to their fate, aspiring to eke out a meagre existence in Duvalier’s brave, new Haiti. A few chose to build rafts and attempted to float in the direction of America and, they hoped, a better life. Thousands drowned, thousands of others were returned to face Papa Doc’s wrath, while many more sought escape over the border, finding employment for poverty wages in the sugar-cane fields of the Dominican Republic, working in conditions little better than those under which their slave ancestors toiled and died. The economic and social impact of losing so many skilled professionals and hard-working peasants on the fabric of Haiti is incalculable.
Duvalier was defiant. Unabashedly, in April 1964, he changed the constitution and appointed himself ‘President for Life’. The idea was not his, he insisted. He was merely ‘bowing to popular demand’. It was not an original idea; seven previous heads of state in Haiti had done likewise. Simultaneously, Duvalier announced a new red and black flag, supposedly representing L’Union fait la force (the union of blacks and mulattos). The black represented Africa and, Duvalier hoped, would resonate with his poorer subjects. Those journalists still alive and in post, printed eulogies to this new state of affairs:
Duvalier is the professor of energy … an electrifier of souls … one of the greatest leaders of modern times … the renovator of the Haitian fatherland … synthesises all there is of courage, bravery, genius, diplomacy, patriotism and tact in the titans of ancient and modern times.
This kind of propaganda spin washed over some but was taken in by many. To indoctrinate Haitian children in support of their megalomaniac president, schools were ordered to recite a Duvalier version of the Lord’s Prayer, known as the Catechisme de la revolution:
Our Doc, who art in the National Palace 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 anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country.
Let them succumb to temptation and under the weight of their
venom, deliver them not from any evil …
The madness and ego-centrism continued, with the dictator insisting he was the re-incarnation of five famous forebears combined. When children were asked who Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Petion and Estime were, the correct answer was:
‘Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Petion and Estime are five distinct Chiefs of State who are substantiated in and form only one and the same President in the person of Dr Francois Duvalier.’
As the number of Haitian exiles multiplied, so did stories of the horrors inflicted on the Haitian people. Yvan Laraque, a political foe of Duvalier who tried to stage a coup at Jeremie Airport, was murdered in northern Haiti. As an example to others, his body was taken to the capital, stripped down to its underwear and propped up under a coca-cola sign between Grand Rue and Somoza Avenue that read, ‘Welcome to Haiti’. As it decomposed and stank in the sun, Tontons Macoute murdered those who supported Laraque, along with their families. Men, women and children were tortured to death at Fort Dimanche while Duvalier allegedly watched approvingly through peepholes in the walls.
On occasion, children were hacked to death in front of their parents, infants in their mother arms, before they too were gruesomely despatched. For sport, and as an example to others who might contemplate rebellion, in 1964 the Sansaricq, Drouin and Villedrouin mulatto families were ordered to walk through the streets of Jeremie stark naked, whereupon the adults were shot dead after the children were first knifed, in full view of the citizenry. These families, once the most powerful, cultured and educated in their locale, were completely wiped out and their houses pillaged and burned.
As well as murdering known and suspected opponents of the regime, it was postulated that the Tontons Macoutes randomly killed 300 people a year, merely to maintain a state of terror. In all, some 20-60,000 people were murdered during Papa Doc’s bloody reign.
Despite the grinding poverty that immersed Haiti, Duvalier decided to construct a new town in his name. ‘Duvalierville’ provided an excuse to further milk the populace and the dwindling number of foreigners with financial interests in Haiti. The town, now known as Cabaret, was brimful of monuments to Duvalier’s ‘greatness’ and neon signs proclaimed ‘I am the best thing that ever happened to you’ and ‘I have no enemies save the enemies of Haiti’.
Coup attempts continued and by the time Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were shot to death by firing squad on 12 November 1964, an astonishing 11 had already failed. On this occasion, the execution was shown live on television – huge crowds were encouraged to attend the bloody spectacle and given leaflets informing them that ‘their’ Papa Doc would always protect them from such traitors.
Eventually, fear of communist Cuba made the US re-think its Haiti policy. Food and medical supplies were provided along with financial assistance, most of which Duvalier and his aides inevitably stole. However, Duvalier still earned grudging respect from some. His austere, eccentric appearance belied a quick, devious mind and he was certainly considered wily and shrewd. ‘He was tough, very tough, but he cares for the people,’ was the belief of many. Papa Doc would visit a market, gravely declare the prices too high and, after he left, prices would fall, endearing him to the poor.
By 1967 innumerable attempts had been made on the life of Papa Doc yet still he survived. ‘God and the people are the source of my power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it and damn it, I will keep it,’ Duvalier frequently said. God and the people were thus credited, in Duvalier’s eyes, with providing his right to rule, terrorise and exploit. That year, bombs exploded in the Palais Nationale. Tontons Macoute dragged off 19 presidential guards, along with the alleged leader of the plot, Duvalier’s son-in-law Colonel Max Dominique, who was married to Marie-Denise Duvalier. Among the guards arrested was Major Jose Borges, head of radio station Voice of the Duvalierist Revolution. Like the others arrested, with the exception of Dominique, he was tortured, murdered and disposed of in Fort Dimanche. Dominique was permitted to assist in shooting his colleagues before being sent overseas as Haiti’s new ambassador to Spain. The president spoke to the nation: ‘I am an arm of steel, hitting inexorably, hitting inexorably, hitting inexorably. I have shot these officers to protect the revolution and those who serve it. I align myself with great leaders of peoples such as Kemal Ataturk, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Azikwe and Mao Zedong.’
As in most developing countries in those days and with Cuba less than a hundred kilometres away, Haiti had a Communist Party looking to one day seize power. In June 1969, Duvalier liquidated it, catching almost its entire Central Committee in an attack on a ‘safe house’ in Avenue Martin Luther King. All were murdered. Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, visited the island and Papa Doc emphasised his virulent anti-communism. The two were photographed together waving from the balcony of the presidential palace to crowds of Haitians bussed in for the occasion. America and Duvalier’s Haiti were seen by the world to be friends once more.
As the years slowly passed, other coups failed. In April 1970 even the Coast Guard made an attempt, all five boats shelling the Palais Nationale. Once again it failed. After a two-day stalemate, the coup ended with the fleet sailing to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to seek political asylum.
At the end of the 60s it seemed Duvalier would go on forever. True, he had diabetes and a heart condition, had been ill for many years and was, if frail, obviously still in command. The army was quiescent, the opposition hopelessly divided and bickering among itself, planning more for the day Dr Duvalier died rather than working for his removal. Cabinet ministers were frequently re-shuffled, sacked, demoted, arrested, occasionally brought back into favour and sometimes disappeared. Papa Doc was more securely in power than ever. The church, now packed with voodoo-worshipping Macoute priests, was reconciled. The peasants and urban poor were docile, although the ‘Duvalierist Revolution’ delivered nothing. Their lot did not improve. For the privileged few that worked with the regime, gains were spectacular. The 30 or so clans who ran Haiti for the preceding one-and-a-half centuries, expanded to around 200 wealthy families, almost all black, mostly drawn from the bourgeoisie, all dollar millionaires and fervent Duvalierists. The banning of strikes, poverty wages, government contracts and private monopoly eventually reconciled the business class to the administration they loathed, realising that stability and continuity might be the lesser of many evils and that having Papa Doc’s son succeed his father as president could be to their advantage.
At the beginning of his rule no one thought Duvalier would last. He showed them all. Politicians, generals, priests and plotters had come and gone. Many had been destroyed, obliterated while Papa Doc ruled supreme, feared and without serious challenge. It seemed to the simple folk that Duvalier was indeed Baron Samedi, evil, all-powerful and immortal. Actually, their Papa Doc had not long to live. On 21 April 1971, Duvalier finally succumbed to heart disease. The nation ‘mourned’.
Exploiting black nationalism in his almost exclusively black nation assisted Papa Doc’s maintenance of power throughout the 14 years of his rule. While a minority supported him to the end, social and economic progress were non-existent during the Duvalier years and when the dictator died more than 90% of Haitians were uneducated, over one-sixth had fled abroad and there were more Haitian doctors in Paris, Montreal or New York than in their homeland.
Of course, the regime of Papa Doc did not really end with his death. Duvalier named his fat, dim-witted 19-year-old son Jean-Claude, soon to be known as ‘Baby Doc’, as his successor. Said the president to his people: ‘Caesar Augustus was 19 when he took into his hands Rome’s destinies and his reign remains the “century of Augustus”.’
Only two months before Papa Doc passed away, a referendum had been held to reduce eligibility for the presidency from 40 to 18 and ratify his son’s succession. A resounding 2,391,916 in favour, with none against, approved it.
Born on 3 July 1951, the vacuous Baby Doc, also nicknamed ‘Tête-Panier’ (basket head) became the world’s youngest president, ruling Haiti for a further 14 years before being toppled on 7 February 1986. Inevitably, his obvious incompetence, corruption and acute unpopularity, due mainly to the ostentatious living of his hated mulatto wife Michele Bennett, while he presided over Haiti’s decline to becoming the poorest nation in the Americas, forced him to seek a life of luxurious exile in France.
On 25 March 2004, the anti-corruption body Transparency International placed Baby Doc sixth on its list of most corrupt dictators of the previous two decades, accusing him of looting between $300 and $800 million during his presidency. The amount stolen by his father remains unknown as dies its whereabouts.
To this day, the legacy of a country pillaged by the Duvaliers remains political instability, economic stagnation, desperate poverty, superstition, illiteracy and disease. HIV/AIDS possibly had its genesis in Haiti, where it is now rife. Said one opponent of Papa Doc’s rule, ‘He has performed an economic miracle. He taught us to live without money, eat without food and live without life’.
And of the end of Papa Doc? After a funeral lasting almost seven hours over two days at which 101 cannonades were fired, church bells pealed and a sycophantic song entitled, ‘Francoise, we thank you for loving us, your star will be shining in the night’ was sung, Papa Doc Duvalier was finally buried, among thronging, weeping, hysterical crowds, if not exactly ‘laid to rest’. A sudden gust of wind rose up and the crowd were gripped by panic, believing that the soul of their former chief was leaving his body. Houngan that he was, many feared that the old monster would not stay dead!
On the very day Baby Doc fell, an angry mob invaded the National Cemetery, extinguished the ‘eternal flame’, and with their bare hands tore down and smashed to pieces his father’s grandiose mausoleum. Bashing in the roof and ripping open the vault, the frenzied horde was stunned into silence. The tomb was empty! Almost 15 years after he died, Papa Doc had the last laugh. The mob dispersed, frightened and confused. Papa Doc had once again returned to haunt their waking hours and dreams … just as he had done when he was alive.