The day before starting our trip to the border I picked Graham up at the British Ambassador’s residence and announced my plan.
‘We’re going to an insane asylum.’
‘Not Haiti, I hope,’ Graham said.
‘No. No such luck. It’s where the rebels are. We’re going to meet the rebels, the Kamoken.’
‘At an asylum? Are you serious?’
He squeezed his tall frame into the seat of my Volkswagen, and we were off without further questions about my own sanity. As we headed west out of Santo Domingo he rolled the word ‘Kamoken’ over and over as a scrabble player might to try and identify it, until he finally asked me about the name.
‘It’s the name of an anti-malaria pill, Camoquin, they sell in Haiti.’
‘Really?’ Graham laughed.
‘The pill gives people a yellow complexion. The first anti-Duvalier invaders were mulattos and whites,’ I explained. ‘Was this recent?’
‘No. July ’58.’
‘You were still in Haiti then and covered it.’
I nodded. ‘I was the only foreign reporter on the scene. Unfortunately the insurgency against Duvalier is full of fantastic plots and even more fantastic failures.’
As we drove out to Nigua I explained to Graham how in the early summer of 1958 rumours of an invasion by an exile force were circulating all over Haiti. Duvalier had been in office for only ten months and there had already been a number of bomb plots against him. Many Haitian military officers such as army captain Alix Pasquet had escaped into exile. The National Pententary prison was full of suspected anti-government agents. (Later Papa Doc made Fort Dimanche his major prison and killing field.)
Pasquet and exiled lieutenants Philippe Dominique and Henri Perpignan, who were living in exile in Miami, recruited Dade County Deputy Sheriff Dany Jones, retired Dade County Deputy Sheriff Arthur Payne and two adventurers Robert Hickey and Levant Kersten to help fight their insurgency. The Haitians agreed to pay the men $2,000 each. The eighth man in the force was Joseph D.J. Walker, captain of the 55-foot launch the Mollie C.
Pasquet was motivated not only by his hatred of Papa Doc but by his own ego and the delusion that he might become ruler of Haiti. He kept in touch with many of his friends and fellow officers, lining them up to support his attack on the Palace. He even sent his wristwatch to a friend to get it fixed at a repair shop in Port-au-Prince, saying he would pick it up in a couple of weeks.
Dominique had been the commander of the military riding school. He had the reputation of a playboy, romancing the younger women at the school, despite being married with children. Perpignan had spent most of his military career behind a desk and had little experience in action. He had been a member of former Haitian President Paul Magloire’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ of unofficial confidants and managed the payroll of government spies to the tune of $12,000 a month.
The group boarded the Mollie C and left Key West on what they said was a lobster expedition. The cabin was crammed with arms and ammunition, and the deck was loaded with drums of fuel. They stopped in Nassau, Bahamas, where they were wined and dined by Clément Benoít, Duvalier’s new Consul. Then, under a full moon, they began the 600-mile journey from the Bahamas. On the afternoon of 28 June the Mollie C entered La Gonave Bay and anchored in a small cove at Deluge, some forty miles north of Port-au-Prince.
The three Haitians stayed inside the boat while Jones and Payne went ashore in the dingy. They posed as typical tourists, wearing only their bathing suits and purchasing several woven straw hats. Payne used sign language to communicate with a group of local peasants, telling them they needed transport to the capital because their boat had broken down. The peasants promised to return with help, but a rural policeman was alerted to the presence of the blans (foreigners) and notified the nearby army post at St Marc.
At ten o’clock that night Walker brought the Mollie C within wading distance of the beach. As the men unloaded their weapons a three-man army patrol drove up to see what they were up to. A firefight ensued. Payne was wounded in the thigh, but the insurgents killed the three soldiers. The eight men climbed into the jeep and sped off into the night, passing through Montrouis and the army post there without being detected.
When they reached the crossroads leading to the town of Arcahaie, not far from another army post, the jeep broke down. Pasquet managed to hire a taptap (jitney bus). Inscribed on its front was the warning Malgre tout Dieu seul maître (In spite of all, God is the only master).
Dominique took the wheel. Pasquet sat next to him in the front while the others sat in the back on the jitney’s two passenger benches. They bound Payne’s leg in a tourniquet and sped off towards the capital, passing two more army posts without incident. They raced through the pre-dawn darkness of the capital and headed straight for the main entrance of the Casernes Dessalines (army barracks), behind the National Palace.
Pasquet barked an order to the sentry announcing they were bringing in prisoners and drew a confused salute as they sped through the gate. Dominique swung the taptap in a sharp U-turn and stopped in front of the administrative offices. They hopped out of the jitney and ran up the steps with Payne following behind.
They surprised the duty officer and shot him dead before he could reach for his gun. Within minutes Pasquet and his men had managed to overcome the sleeping soldiers and secure the barracks. The troops were locked inside the garrison and forced to sit in their underwear with their hands on their heads. Pasquet worked the phones, trying to recruit his friends in the military. Unfortunately none were willing to take a chance. One of his calls was to the Palace, where Papa Doc answered the phone and the two men had a quick and peculiar exchange of words, with Duvalier telling Pasquet to be a man and face him at the gate of the barracks.
Outside the Casernes Dessalines Haiti had once again woken to the sound of gunfire. The rumours circulated that a rebel force of two hundred had seized the barracks. The entire army and police apparatus appeared paralysed. Many of the army officers were literally sitting on their hands waiting to see how the scales tilted.
The early daylight hours gave some of the Duvalierists more courage. The plea came over the radio. ‘Aid your president,’ the announcer shouted. ‘Hated Magloirists have seized the Casernes Dessalines and they have brought foreigners with them, Dominicans!’
However, few appeared to heed the call. In the downtown area a stream of tradesmen, market women and store employees went about their daily chores, setting up for the day’s business, pretending to ignore the obvious. Market women with baskets loaded with vegetables on their heads walked casually past the National Palace without so much as glancing at the soldiers lying on the ground with rifles at the ready.
Duvalier himself, dressed in a soldier’s khaki uniform, a combat steel helmet and two pistols at his hips, moved about the place giving orders.
Pasquet and his men held the barracks and waited for reinforcements to arrive. But Perpignan, a heavy smoker, could not control his craving. He sent out one of the prisoners, who also happened to be Mrs Duvalier’s driver, to fetch a pack of Haitian-made Splendids from a street vendor. A group of Duvalierists seized and interrogated him, learning the truth: there were only eight invaders.
From there, things got progressively worse for the rebels. The reinforcements Pasquet expected never arrived. Captain Daniel Beauvoir, a friend whom Pasquet believed would side with him and fight Duvalier, arrived with troops from Pétionville and took up firing positions in the military hospital across the streets from the barracks. The four hundred yards separating the Palace and the Casernes Dessalines turned into a free-fire zone. There was a general distribution of pistols to volunteers at the Palace side gate.
The final assault on the rebels came when the Palace guards opened up on the barracks with a .50-calibre machine-gun, making a terrible din. The rebels returned fire with a .30-calibre. Grenades exploded, and there was a loud cheer as fifty soldiers escaped from the barracks, signalling that it was all over for the invaders. The shooting stopped. The eerie silence that followed was broken when a man ran out of the barracks with a bloody cloth in his hands, yelling frantically that he had the brains of Alix Pasquet.
Pasquet’s skull had been shattered. He lay face up with open eyes as if gazing into Duvalier’s official portrait hanging on a wall across the room, a cynical smile on his face, his likeness pierced by a single bullet. Dominique’s bullet-riddled corpse lay propped in the corner next to a door. Near him Captain Walker lay dead, shot through the right ear, a pack of Lucky Strikes balanced on his neck. Dany Jones lay half sitting, a small, clean bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
Payne was still alive. He was wrapped up in a mattress, his complexion pale from the loss of blood from his leg wound. When the soldiers ran in he pleaded for his life and called out, ‘Journalist, journalist!’ But the soldiers cut him down with a burst of gunfire.
Perpignan, Hickey and Kersten managed to escape. Perpignan and Hickey ran across the street, through the grounds of the military hospital and over a back fence. Hickey was spotted by a soldier and shot through the head. Perpignan ran into the yard of a house and forced the houseboy to hide him in the chicken coop, but when the boy heard the mob outside he became frightened and ran. Perpignan shot him down with a burst from his Thompson submachine-gun, giving away his hiding place. The mob closed in. He was shot and stabbed. His clothes were torn and his naked body was dragged through the streets and into the Palace, where it left a trail of blood over the marble floors and stairs as it was hauled before Duvalier.
The mob also caught up with Kersten behind the barracks, where they hacked him to death with machetes and paraded his body through the streets.
‘I can’t believe it. Eight men,’ Graham said when I finished telling him the story. ‘They really thought they could do it.’
‘It always seems to be that way,’ I said.
Graham made reference of the invasion in The Comedians when Philipot visits Brown who is swimming in the pool. The two men speak, wondering what Jones is up to. Philipot tells Brown about the invasion. ‘I told him how seven men once captured the army barracks because they had tommy-guns.’
‘I’m sure that helped Papa Doc more than anyone can imagine,’ said Graham.
‘That’s when he started his Volunteers of National Security.’
‘His militia?’
I nodded. ‘The National Assembly passed laws. There was a curfew, everything. It gave him the excuse to build his terror network.’
‘And there were the usual repercussions, I’m sure.’
‘Oh yes. And he didn’t have to hide it. He positioned a new Palace military staff that was loyal only to him. He made changes in the military. A few foreigners were expelled.’
‘They played right into his plans. It happens every time. It’s like the Bay of Pigs. It did more for Castro than anyone else.’
‘You know,’ I said after a while, ‘the problem with Haiti is that no one seems to care. That invasion made headlines because there were five Americans involved, but Papa Doc is committing horrible crimes every day. It just doesn’t make the papers.’
‘Who would believe that the Cold War would ever come to the Caribbean.’ Graham was pensive, then he added, ‘The US would support the devil if he was anti-Communist.’
‘Fascism may flow —’
‘Washington is paranoid,’ Graham interrupted. ‘They’re obsessed with Fidel. They don’t want another Cuba. Papa Doc knows how to play the anti-Communist card.’
‘If they knew what’s going on,’ I said.
‘Believe me, they know.’
‘I wish Haiti would get more attention in the press. Very little truth comes out of the country, and when it does it doesn’t get much play. There was Hector Riobé. I think he was in his mid-twenties. His father had been picked up by the Macoutes at a roadblock in Carrefour the day of the attempted kidnapping. They took his car, money and land. They executed him the same day but later told the family that he was still alive and needed money in prison. The family finally realized that they were lying. This became a Macoute racket to extract money from other families of the “disappeared”.’
‘But he was dead.’
‘Yes, very dead. Riobé was an only son. He decided to fight against Duvalier, and the Macoutes turned him into an enemy. He took his Ford pick-up and welded steel plates all around it, turning it into an armoured car. He assembled a flame-thrower and attached it to the car. His plan was to take over the police station in Pétionville.’
‘I heard about Riobé in Haiti,’ Graham said. ‘I would like to hear what you know of his fight, which would seem to be driven solely by courage. It sounds like he had no chance of success.’
‘Yes, he was courageous, but it proved to be a suicidal attack,’ I said and told him what I knew. Late on the night of 16 July 1963, as the celebration over the corpse of Clément Barbot was winding down, Riobé and his partisans drove the deserted streets of Port-au-Prince in his armoured vehicle. Halfway up the hill to Pétionville the vehicle overheated. The driver, Demas, jumped out and went to a house to ask for water. It turned out Riobé had welded a steel sheet in front of the radiator, blocking the truck’s cooling system. But it was too late to fix. It was done.
When their makeshift tank finally reached Pétionville the overheated engine coughed and died in front of the small police post at the corner of the Pétionville market. They were only a few blocks from their target.
The policeman on duty offered to fetch some water. Another policeman walked around the strange vehicle, which resembled a Mardi Gras float. He pulled himself up to see what was in the back. Four men with 12-gauge shotguns and a .22-calibre rifle lay on the bed of the truck. The unarmed policeman ran away as the men jumped out, firing in all directions, waking up the market women sleeping beside their stalls and sending them screaming for cover.
The group abandoned the vehicle. Two of the youths figured the mission had been aborted and walked home. The other three, Damas, Riobé and Jean-Pierre Hudicourt, regrouped further up the road. They decided to make the police post in the small holiday village of Kenscoff their alternate target. They stopped a car driven by a well-known Syrian-Haitian merchant Antoine Izméry and ordered him to drive them up the mountain.
They attacked the police station, killing three policemen and two militiamen and making off with arms and munitions. The little town was in turmoil. The road was blocked, and the militia began a house-to-house search; then they began to comb the mountains. As they neared the summit of Morne Godet they were greeted by gunfire.
Near the top of the mountain there was a strategically situated cave, easily defended. Within hours government reinforcements arrived in Kenscoff and moved into battle positions, but every time a soldier or member of the militia got close to the summit and became exposed a shot from the cave sent him reeling down the mountain dead or wounded.
The authorities believed the cave was defended by a group of well-trained sharpshooters. As the number of casualties grew, the US Marine-trained Casernes Dessalines battalion was ordered to join the war with mortars and grenades. It was becoming an embarrassment to the Palace. The entire country was alive with exciting rumours of a battle that Papa Doc was actually losing.
The firefight continued for three days. Then on the afternoon of Friday 19 July the cave fell silent. The government feared it was a trick. The soldiers didn’t dare approach the cave. The following day the police arrived with Hector Riobé’s mother. They put her on a horse and made her ride up to the cave calling out her son’s name as they followed close behind, using her as a human shield. There was no reply.
When Papa Doc’s forces finally reached the cave they were astonished to find there wasn’t a squad of sharpshooters but a single gunman. Hector Riobé lay dead, a bullet through his head — by his own hand.
‘That’s amazing,’ Graham said.
‘But when I reported the story it was only a short blurb. I didn’t have all the facts, and since no Americans were involved it wasn’t important.’
‘What happened to the others?’
‘All except one were captured and tortured to death.’
Graham said nothing. He looked away for a moment as we passed an open stall where a woman was selling fruit and vegetables on the side of the road.
‘Life under Papa Doc,’ I said quietly.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘And what about this group we’re going to see now, the Kamo …’
‘Kamoken,’ I said. ‘Their situation’s just as dire as everyone else’s.’ ‘But you’re helping them.’
I thought about this. I wanted to introduce Graham to all the characters I knew. I wanted him to know everything Duvalier was doing. He understood the problem with Haiti and the tyranny of Duvalier, but I imagined there had to be some things that would be better left untold. It was a fine line for me to navigate, and I was afraid of having breached journalistic ethics. I was as conflicted as any man fighting for a cause. I thought of Riobé and how what Papa Doc had done to his father had driven him on his suicidal mission. Events propel us into action. I did not want to be a guerrilla, but I had been forced to do something.
I explained to Graham about the Kamoken. Their official name was the Haitian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARH), and their leader was Fred Baptiste, a former schoolteacher from Jacmel who believed Duvalier had stolen the presidential election. He was an intense, highly strung individual. In 1959 he attacked an army post at a small grass airstrip in Jacmel. Baptiste escaped, but his brother Renel was captured and spent four months in prison. In late 1962 the two brothers crossed into the Dominican Republic and joined other exiles in the struggle against Duvalier.
Baptiste had no political ideology. The Haitian Marxists thought he was a loose cannon, and the right-wing exiles led by Louis Déjoie called him a dangerous Communist.
The group had a small camp at Dajabón. When the Dominican army broke up the camp in May 1963 the exiles moved into a tiny shack on an embankment in Santo Domingo. They had no money and no support until early 1964 when Baptiste accepted the formal patronage of Father Jean-Baptiste Georges and ex-Haitian army officer and diplomat Pierre L. Rigaud.
Father Georges found an abandoned chicken farm in Villa Mella, about twelve miles south of Santo Domingo, where the rebels could stay. The troops slept in the chicken coops and learned the art of guerrilla warfare on the blackboard. There were no firearms on the farm. At night the rebels played war games with sticks. They had no radio communications, medical unit or supplies. Every morning they raised the Haitian flag and sang the anthem of the FARH.
One night I received a call from the officer assigned to the US Military Assistance Group in the Dominican Republic. ‘General Wessin y Wessin is on to your Haitian friends,’ he warned. Elías Wessin y Wessin had been the leader of the coup that overthrew Juan Bosch the year before. ‘Be prepared. I’m sure the General’s men are going to pay the camp a visit pretty soon.’
The Haitian opposition movements were fractured and constantly denouncing one another. It had been Déjoie who told Wessin y Wessin, an anti-Communist zealot, that the Kamoken were allied with Castro and Duvalier.
I made a quick visit to the US Information Office and picked up a number of pamphlets and brochures promoting President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress programme for the Americas. Then I drove out to the chicken farm and distributed the literature to the rebels. A couple of days later Wessin y Wessin’s men raided the camp and arrested everyone, including a number of Haitians living in the Hotel Europa and two French soldiers of fortune.
I drove out to Villa Mella with my wife and our infant son, but as we came up to the police station along the route a policeman shouted, ‘Ahi viene el hombre del carrito’ (‘Here comes the man with the little car.’) They arrested us and took us to the National Police Headquarters. My wife and son were left waiting in the Volkswagen for two hours in the noon heat. Finally, at my urging, an officer agreed to allow my wife to return home rather than suffer heatstroke in the police yard.
I was not held in the same cell as the Haitians. A few hours later a high-ranking officer appeared and escorted me not to the jail but to President Donald Reid Cabral’s residence.
I explained the situation to the President, and he immediately sent someone to retrieve the evidence from Wessin y Wessin. Then we sat down to a drink. In a moment the telephone rang. It was the British Ambassador. Apparently he’d heard that I had been arrested.
‘Diederich?’ Reid Cabral said into the receiver and winked at me. ‘Yes. He’s been arrested. I have him right here. I’m torturing him with Johnny Walker.’
When the messenger arrived with the ‘Communist’ literature confiscated at the camp, Reid Cabral flipped through the pamphlets and discovered the publisher: US Information Service. The following day, on the President’s orders, the Kamoken were released.
Just as the rebels were settling back on the chicken farm, Father Georges arranged to purchase rifles, munitions and explosives from an anti-Castro Cuban in Miami. One of the guerrillas, Gérard Lafontant, was assigned to take delivery of the weapons in Miami and move them to a safe house near the Miami river.
The Cuban delivered the weapons and loaned Lafontant a garbage truck to transport them to the safe house. As he drove south on I-95 the truck ran out of petrol. A Florida highway patrolman arrived at the scene, and Lafontant, who did not have a driving licence, told him he was taking the truck to Haiti. Amazingly, the patrolman didn’t ask to see a licence or peer into the back of the truck. Lafontant delivered the arms, which were loaded aboard the 235-foot freighter Johnny Express.
The Kamoken also paid $2,000 to a member of the Jeune Haiti movement (an organization comprised mostly of young Haitian exiles, thirteen of whom later landed in southern Haiti to fight Papa Doc) in New York for the purchase of NATO-issued automatic FAL rifles. The arms arrived by ship, concealed inside the insulation of refrigerators, and the ammunition was hidden inside car batteries. The men unloaded the arms, but a few days later they were claimed by a pair of long-time Haitian exiles. At first the Kamoken refused to hand over the weapons but complied after the men threatened to blow up the house where the munitions were stored.
On the night of 27 June my wife and I attended a diplomatic party at the house of Vince Blocker, the US Embassy’s CIA man in charge of keeping an eye on the Haitian exiles. I was privy to the invasion plans but said nothing. I stayed late at Blocker’s house and watched the clock. I knew that if anything happened his police sources would notify him.
That night twenty-nine Kamoken were loaded into a van and taken from the chicken farm to a cocktail party at Pierre Rigaud’s apartment on Avenida Independencia. The men ate hors d’oeuvres and mingled until late into the night. Then they were loaded back into the van and driven to the coast near the airport, where they were ferried by a small boat to the Johnny Express.
As the freighter got under way the guerrillas broke out the weapons from Miami. They were stunned. The arms the Cuban had sold them were antique First World War British-made Enfield rifles.
A Dominican patrol boat fired a warning shot over the bow of the Johnny Express, but they managed to escape. The following day, in heavy seas, the freighter drew as close as it could to the Haitian coast near the town of Saltrou.
The landing proved difficult and costly for the guerrillas. Two men drowned, and most of the detonators for the explosives were lost. The invasion was saved when a fisherman brought his battered boat alongside the Johnny Express and helped the others disembark.
Immediately after landing two Kamoken deserted, but the fisherman agreed to join the group and helped carry the munitions. They were a poorly armed force of twenty-five, and their US olive fatigues confused the Haitian peasants, who thought they were members of Papa Doc’s army or militia.
The following day Duvalier was informed of the presence of the rebels in the Belle Anse area. The response was terrifying and typical of Papa Doc’s repression. Anyone in the area believed to be anti-Duvalier was taken from their home and killed. Sixty-seven people were executed in the town square. Because one of the Kamoken was identified as Adrien Fandal the Macoutes hunted down and killed anyone in the area with that name. They seized land from the victims, and for years the killers and the relatives of the victims had to live side by side in Belle Anse.
In Port-au-Prince Papa Doc took personal command of the armed forces. A detachment from the Dessalines battalion was sent to hunt down the Kamoken. They pummelled the mountains with mortar rounds, but the guerrillas were not there. Duvalier’s small air force made daily sorties, and truckloads of militiamen were sent into the mountains. The invasion appeared to evolve into a sustained campaign. The helpless mountain peasants who were caught in the crossfire endured three weeks of terror. If they welcomed the Kamoken they would be executed by the army or Macoutes. If the Kamoken suspected them of being Macoutes they would likewise be executed.
Haiti’s Foreign Minister, René Chalmers, complained to the UN Security Council, accusing the Dominican Republic of aggression. He claimed the invasion force was made up of Haitian and Dominican elements armed with automatic weapons, grenades, wireless receivers and a large store of ammunition. He said the invaders planned to dynamite bridges and gasoline tanks and accused prominent exiles of being behind the invasion.
I, too, was also denounced at the UN for providing the Kamoken with identifications. I immediately received a call from Manny Friedman, the foreign editor at the New York Times, asking me if I had dropped journalism and become a guerrilla.
When the Dominican government received news of the invasion, President Reid Cabral countered Duvalier’s charges with his own, accusing Papa Doc of lying and declaring that no invasion force had left from Dominican territory.
The President summoned me to the Palace. He was in a good mood, pleased at how he’d rebuffed Duvalier. Then he looked at me and asked, ‘Those Haitians are still in Villa Mella, right?’
I shrugged.
‘Goddamn it.’ Reid Cabral was furious. ‘I just protested to the OAS [Organization of American States]. How the hell did they do it?’
Meanwhile the small rebellion continued. Duvalier’s forces were reluctant to venture into the mountains and face a guerrilla force of unknown strength. The army and Macoutes contented themselves with occupying marketplaces and wreaking vengeance on anyone they suspected of helping the rebels. A member of the Kamoken who ventured into a market wearing combat boots was spotted and executed on the spot.
The guerrillas took over the village of Mapou. Someone accused the local shopkeeper of being a Macoute. The Kamoken ransacked the shop, distributing goods and cash to the peasants. They confiscated a bundle of mortgage notes and IOUs from the store and burned them in a formal ceremony. Then they killed the owner.
The Kamoken were forced to discourage recruits because they had no arms or food to offer them. The peasants in the mountains were dirt poor. Many couldn’t even afford a machete and had to cultivate their land with their hands, scratching between the rocks to plant millet.
Water was also a problem for the guerrillas. During the sixteen days it took to cross Morne La Selle and other rocky mountains, they found little food or water to purchase. To quench their thirst and hunger some of the rebels ate chocolate-coated laxatives with disastrous results.
Baptiste was a tough leader, but he was also paranoid. He forced his men to move miles at a time and forbade them to drink from waterholes, fearing they were poisoned. Towards the end of July the Kamoken were astride the Haitian—Dominican border. Baptiste ordered the men to cross back into the Dominican Republic to find rations, but Gérard Lafontant resisted, adamant they remain in Haitian territory. Baptiste became angry at Lafontant’s insubordination, which he likened to an act of mutiny. He levelled his rifle at Lafontant’s head at point-blank range and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun misfired.
In the end, the sick and hungry guerrillas buried their weapons and walked across the border on to Dominican soil, where they were promptly taken prisoner by an army patrol. Two weeks later they were released back in the mountainous region along the border.
On 5 August 1964 the Kamoken returned to their old base camp in Haiti’s Morne La Selle, a stone’s throw from the Dominican border post at El Aguacate. The Dominican soldiers had orders from their commander to ignore the Haitian guerrillas if they re-entered the country.
The ragtag force retrieved their old firearms and began to act like disciplined fighters. Columns went out on forays against Macoutes and military targets. On 11 August they sabotaged the Pine Forest sawmill belonging to Papa Doc’s sister-in-law and her husband who had the timber monopoly. Four days later another column carried out a successful night attack on the Haitian military border post at Savane Zombi. The soldiers and Macoutes fled, leaving behind their equipment and, more importantly, the post’s archives. The guerrillas set fire to the post and two houses belonging to the local Macoute chieftain. That same afternoon another Kamoken column ambushed a truckload of Papa Doc’s militia who were travelling slowly over the rugged mountain road that led from Thiotte to Port-au-Prince, inflicting four casualties.
Several days later a messenger arrived at my home in Santo Domingo with a request for guerrilla reinforcements, arms, food, medicines and winter wear. We supplied sweaters, which we had dyed dark green, food and medicines, but there were no heavy weapons.
I volunteered transport. Since my Volkswagen Beetle was too small I asked a friend, the owner of Santo Domingo Motors, if he’d let me borrow a car for the weekend. He said that if I ‘repossessed’ an automobile a Cuban exile had refused to return the car would be mine for the weekend. I took two burly Haitians with me and had no trouble repossessing the late-model American car.
At midday on 24 August, loaded down with food and clothing, three Haitian friends and I took off for the border. Hurricane Cleo was approaching the south coast of Hispaniola. The sun disappeared behind thick thunderclouds, and the sky was streaked with an eerie yellow light. We raced along the coastal road in gusting winds and heavy rain until we reached the mountain road to El Aguacate. Here the dirt road had turned to thick mud and the going became rough and slow. At times the wheels would spin and the heavy car would slide backwards on the difficult road.
When we finally drove into the military compound of El Aguacate the sentries ignored us. Fred Baptiste strode out of the mountain fog accompanied by a squad of his men. We handed over to the goods, and they gave us several rolls of film to be developed in Santo Domingo and provided to the media.
After we finished unloading, Baptiste looked at me with disappointment. ‘Where are the arms?’
‘There are none,’ I said.
Baptiste was crestfallen. He thought Rigaud had convinced the Dominican military to release the guns General Cantave had received in an airdrop at Dajabón.
‘You tell Rigaud we need arms and munitions. This is top priority. We plan to go on the offensive.’
I knew they needed arms, but all I could do was hand over a .45 -calibre automatic pistol I had purchased for $400 from a fixer I knew in Santo Domingo. It was a clean weapon with the serial numbers filed off. Baptiste took the weapon and shrugged as he placed it in his belt. ‘A lot of good this will do.’
We were out of time. Hurricane Cleo was beginning to turn the mountain road into a river. We made it down safely, but when we arrived in Baní the waters were too high and the car stalled. We had to abandon the vehicle and take a bus back to Santo Domingo.
Two months later a member of the Kamoken arrived at our door in Santo Domingo with a letter from Fred Baptiste. It said he was hospitalized in the Dominican army barracks in Azua with a fractured leg. The remaining members of his guerrilla force were being held in the army’s fortaleza in Neyba. ‘I must get out of the Azua fortaleza this week, and the fellows must be moved,’ the note read. ‘Alas, the inaction is killing me; I cannot stay any longer in the Azua fortaleza. Do your best for us. We cannot let go of the struggle … We are young. We will win or die.’
According to Baptiste, the Kamoken heard voices coming from across the valley on the Dominican side of the border. They decided they were Dominicans. Two hours later one of the sentries saw two dozen men dressed like Dominican soldiers approaching through the pine trees into Haitian territory deployed and preparing to attack. He fired a shot in the air to sound the alarm. The approaching force opened up with a .30-calibre machine-gun. There was no question of fighting the intruders coming from the Dominican side. The only alternative was to split up into small groups and retreat further into Haitian territory. Baptiste fell over a precipice and fractured his left leg in two places.
The weary Kamoken left their hiding places inside Haiti and straggled in twos and threes back across the Dominican border, and once again they were taken prisoner by the Dominican army. Because of his injuries, Baptiste was transported to the fort in Azua.
No one knew who had attacked the Kamoken. Speculation focused on Dominican General Elías Wessin y Wessin, who feared that the Haitian guerrillas might cause an escalation of trouble with Papa Doc. At the time the top command of the Dominican armed forces was divided. One group of high-ranking officers supported exiled President Joaquín Balaguer, while another, which had opposed the overthrow of President Bosch, was in favour of a return to constitutional rule. Only Wessin y Wessin gave full support to President Reid Cabral.
Reid Cabral had ordered reinforcement of the border but refused an army request for additional tanks in the area. He told me he was concerned that rival military groups might be trying to have Wessin y Wessin disperse his tanks around the country in order to weaken his force in Santo Domingo and bring off a coup d’état. In early March 1964 Reid Cabral set off a minor controversy in the Dominican media and military when at the urging of the OAS he suggested it might be a good thing to re-establish relations with Haiti, even at a consular level, to learn what was happening there.
There was another version of the attack on the Kamoken, in which Papa Doc’s Dominican-exile recruits may have been the ones who actually assaulted the Kamoken disguised as regular Dominican soldiers and speaking Spanish.
Only twenty-four Kamoken returned from battle. The fate of the other four was never known. Still, for the Haitian peasants the Kamoken had taken on all the mystical attributes of the nocturnal airborne werewolf, the lougarwu. Like that fearful phantom, the Kamoken seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. The Macoutes feared the Kamoken were still in the hills.
The men were in dire need of medical attention, one for a broken arm and the others for malaria. The prison commandant provided them with a daily ration of twelve pounds of rice from his own prison allotment. The Kamoken cooked the rice at night with a little salt and an occasional plantain. They gradually sold off their clothing and boots to Dominican soldiers. Their home for seven weeks was a dark room filled with the stench of open latrines. They slept on bug-infested mattresses. They had no toothbrushes or soap, and there was no electric light. At dawn and dusk swarms of mosquitoes descended on them.
I appealed to President Reid Cabral, asking him to release Fred Baptiste for specialized medical treatment. He summoned his army Chief of Staff, who addressed a note to the commander of the Neyba garrison giving me permission to see the Haitian prisoners. As I walked out of the Presidential Palace Reid Cabral stopped me and asked me to report back to him. He wanted to know what else he could do for the Haitians.
At Neyba the prisoners paraded before me in military fashion. They resembled Second World War concentration-camp victims: emaciated and barefoot. What little clothing they had had been reduced to rags. While none of them complained about their physical state, they were desperate for news of Haiti and inquired when they might be released.
I drove Baptiste to a private clinic in Santo Domingo and checked him in under a fictitious name. Papa Doc had spies everywhere. Baptiste’s leg was set and placed in a cast. I paid the $180 bill, and when he was released from the hospital he convalesced in my home office, sleeping next to the telex machine and playing with our infant son.
‘So how is it they ended up in this place?’ Graham said as we veered off the road and drove up a narrow dirt driveway to the grounds of the former insane asylum.
‘The conditions at the garrison in Neyba were so bad I asked Reid Cabral to help us out.’
‘And this is the help they got.’
‘This is it.’
The asylum consisted of a series of long concrete barrack-style buildings set one after the other with a main door and barred windows. When the Kamoken first arrived, the inside of the buildings were filled with mountains of goat shit. They spent days shovelling out the manure and cleaning up.
The goats remained and roamed freely around the compound and inside the barracks. Adding a touch of the surreal to the scene, a crude barbed-wire fence separated the asylum from an empty field in which a herd of African zebras that had belonged Trujillo were pastured.
We found Baptiste in one of the buildings, which still reeked of goats. He was lying on a cot, resting his injured leg. When we entered he stood and with the aid of a stick walked with us out to the garden.
The compound did not look or feel like a guerrilla training centre. The group was using the goat manure as fertilizer to grow vegetables. They had organized a small education centre and invited the children of the Dominican soldiers guarding the property to attend, teaching them to read and write Spanish.
Graham shook his head. ‘How can they succeed by determination alone?’ The Kamoken were everyday Haitians, taxi drivers, former soldiers, mechanics, farmers, schoolteachers and peasants from different regions of the country. ‘There are so few of them. They have no arms.’
‘Yet this is the insurgency against Papa Doc,’ I said.
‘They’re just going to end up like all the rest. Like Riobé and Pasquet.’
‘They all think it’s going to be different with them. Castro started his revolution with twelve men.’
Graham shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand and looked at me. ‘That’s different. Batista was a fool. And Castro had the support of the people.’
‘I agree. But you try to tell them they can’t do it.’
Graham looked away where two billy-goats were charging and butting heads against one another.
We walked back across the garden. Graham paused to observe several of the guerrillas who were completing a new bamboo aqueduct to irrigate their crops of tomatoes and beans. Baptiste pulled me aside.
‘Maybe the Englishman can get guns for us,’ he whispered in Creole.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not his business.’
‘Maybe he has connections,’ Baptiste persisted.
I walked away from Baptiste and met Graham between rows of tomato plants. Later Graham gave the rebels a $30 contribution. Baptiste told him the money would go to purchase hatchlings for a chicken farm.