Haiti

THE sleepy, impoverished Negro republic of Haiti nestles between Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic and Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Caribbean Sea. Although Haiti has provoked a few headlines in the past half year, mainly because of a dramatic attack by the government on the Roman Catholic Church, most Americans watching the Caribbean, waiting for the inevitable explosion, fixed their attention on Trujillo and Castro. But Haiti has a dictator, François Duvalier, as tyrannical as his neighbors.

This spring Duvalier maneuvered an election that shocked even those familiar with the long tradition of cynical Latin American elections. Duvalier dissolved the two houses of the Haitian National Assembly in April and called for elections to a new, unicameral legislature. Since he allowed only one candidate for each of the 58 seats and all campaigned on a pro-Duvalier platform, the election stirred little interest or enthusiasm. Duvalier, however, wanted to drum up a massive turnout, and his army and government trucks herded huge numbers of Haitians — and, in fact, foreigners, French priests, and prisoners — to the polls on April 30. The voters, if they could read, were astonished to find that the ballots listed an additional line over the name of the single legislative candidate in each district. The extra line read: “Dr. François Duvalier, President.”

Five days later, the government informed the people they had re-elected Duvalier to a second six-year term as President, although his first term had two more years to run. The government listed 1,320,748 votes for Duvalier and none opposed.

Although the election had its comic aspects, it cannot be dismissed as the ridiculous joke of a ridiculous man. Duvalier staged his election as a show of power, not of democracy. He knew that any announced campaign for re-election, either now or two years from now, might revive the bitter outbursts of opposition that plagued him last fall. His unannounced election avoided that and helped maintain our State Department’s image of him as the only source of stability in Haiti.

Duvalier’s troubles began last November 22, when students of the University of Haiti went on strike to protest the jailing of some of their leaders months before. Duvalier declared martial law, expelled Roman Catholic Archbishop François Poirier on charges of aiding the “Communist” students, wiped out the student organizations, attacked labor unions that had supported the students, threatened all agitators with death, and threw a host of underground political opponents into jail. Although the strike lingered on for four months, the crisis ended with the President still in control. But the scope of Duvalier’s retaliation — against students, unions, the Church, and the underground — revealed the scope of Haiti’s discontent.

Duvalier’s difficulties were compounded by the assassination of the Dominican Republic’s Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo on May 30. Haitian exiles long have hoped for an anti-Duvalier, democratic Dominican Republic that might permit them to mount an invasion. As soon as the news of the assassination reached Port-au-Prince, Duvalier rushed troops to the border and anxiously awaited developments.

Bitterness and gloom

The Haitian intellectual sees in the United States, perhaps unrealistically, the source of cure for the inner rottenness of his land. At the same time, perhaps unjustly, he views the United States as the sole source of power for the regime of Duvalier. America gives the Haitian his vision of a democracy he never has known. Yet America feeds the guns and money for a brutality the Haitian feels and knows every day. The result of this confusion is bitterness in the hearts of those who seek freedom for their hapless land.

Haiti, once the richest colony in the French empire, now ranks among the world’s poorest nations. No Latin American republic has a per capita income lower than Haiti’s $70 a year. It has the greatest population density in the Western Hemisphere; its arable land, only 13 per cent of all the land area, holds 2314 persons per square mile. Malaria, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and yaws rack the people. Doctors outside the capital find that almost everyone has intestinal worms, which cause anemia, malnutrition, and general debilitation.

Literacy and education, so essential for democracy, are the privilege of a few in the towns. Almost 90 per cent of the population of three million is illiterate and takes little interest in the political intrigues, skirmishes, and shifts in the capital. About 600,000 children do not go to school because there are no schools where they live. Only three out of every ten elementary school teachers have had any professional training. Yet, despite this woeful shortage of trained personnel, graduates of teachers colleges cannot get jobs in Haiti, because politicians appoint unschooled teachers in their stead.

This corruption can tear the heart of anyone trying to help the Haitian people. At an orphanage in a remote village, an American doctor refused to hand over stocks of protein preparation for fear the orphanage director would sell the food rather than feed it to the children swollen with malnutrition. A year ago, the United States suspended a sorely needed $4.3 million irrigation project because the Haitian government had fired a capable engineer on the project, replacing him with two political appointees. Members of the underground have a simple solution to the problem: replace Duvalier with an honest man. “If the head is corrupt, the whole body is corrupt,” one of Duvalier’s secret opponents recently said. But an outsider, knowing that Haiti has lived its whole history wallowing in corrupt administration, cannot feel optimistic about this glib off-with-hishead solution.

The secret terror

Duvalier, a mild-looking, ailing doctor and sociologist, came to power in 1957 in an election controlled by the army. Dark-skinned and middleclass, he was expected to champion Haiti’s black, impoverished masses. In a negative sense, he has done so, for most of his terror has struck the lightskinned, intellectual professionals and businessmen of the middle and upper classes. But this affliction of pain on the light-skinned has done little to alleviate the suffering of the dark-skinned.

Duvalier’s instruments of terror have been the army and a bizarre, secret, recently disbanded organization known as the Ton Ton Macoute. The thousand cagoulards, or hooded men, of the Ton Ton Macoute had beaten and killed Haitians at night and destroyed their shops and homes while cloaking themselves as private ruffians rather than functionaries of the government. In this way, Duvalier, emulating a favorite device of the late Generalissimo Trujillo, tried to disassociate his regime from some of the terror it had fostered. And he created a private army to balance the power of the professional army.

Duvalier has been particularly brutal in his successful attempt to wipe out a free press. On the night of January 6, 1958, for example, Mine. Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel, editor of the newspaper Escale, was abducted from her home in the presence of her daughters. The Ton Ton Macoute took her to the St. Martin woods, usual trysting place for lovers, beat and molested her, mutilated her sexual organs, and abandoned her, half dead. The regime then shut down Escale, and six months later, the newspaper Le Patriote.

Duvalier’s ascendancy over the army was a remarkable achievement, for the Haitian army usually has controlled the President, not the other way around. Duvalier accomplished the turnabout by a continual series of surprise promotions and dismissals, until a staff dependent upon him administered the army. And to ensure that the army would not regain its power, Duvalier organized a civilian militia to balance army strength.

The U.S. marines

Opponents of Duvalier put the responsibility on our government, no matter what form the terror takes. The occupation of Haiti by U.S. marines from 1915 to 1934 is a minor incident in American foreign policy, but it overwhelms all Haitian history in the twentieth century. The marines, sent by President Woodrow Wilson to bring order out of financial and political anarchy, built hospitals, roads, sewage systems, and telephone lines. But, despite these tidbits of physical improvement, Haitians have bitter memories of the occupation, during which marines killed 6000 Haitians while suppressing guerrilla rebellions.

Many Haitians now feel they live under the second occupation, for once again U.S. marines walk through the streets of Port-au-Prince. In response to a request of Duvalier’s, the United States has assigned a small detachment to his army. In addition, under an agreement signed last September, the United States is shipping small arms and other military equipment to the 5000-man Haitian army. The United States maintains that it is merely helping a small country to lake a place in the defense line of the Western Hemisphere. But such aid to a country as weak as Haiti must be more political than military, and it is clear that American aid bolsters Duvalier. not the defenses of the hemisphere.

Despite possible exaggerations in Haitian charges about the American role in the regime, the fact remains that Haiti is ruled by a tyrant and the United States does its best to keep him in power. But would removing this prop under Duvalier bring freedom to Haiti? Haiti abounds with problems that cannot be solved by the removal of Duvalier alone. Without thorough reorganization of the land, for example, Haiti never will step forward, no matter who leads. Unlike the rest of Latin America, Haiti does not have lavish plantations tilled by impoverished serfs. The huge Haitian estates were parceled to the serfs soon after the country’s revolution against France in 1791. Now almost every Haitian peasant — still impoverished — has his own tiny plot of land, which he tills and lets become eroded, leaving Haiti without the rich crops that only plantations can produce.

The role of the Church

Haiti also weakens itself with the conflict between the black masses and the mulatto elite, and tension between the desire for the respectability of the Catholic Church and the fervor for the comfort of Vodun.

Throughout Haiti’s history, Catholicism, while nominally professed by many, has been truly embraced only by the mulatto elite straining to move as far as possible from the black masses. Until 1860, the Vatican refused to recognize the republic, and the natives, never rooted in Catholicism, drifted away. A concordat with the Church was signed in i860, but by that time Haitians had committed themselves to Vodun. known in the United States as voodoo, and Haiti became a Catholic state in name only. The priesthood has been overwhelmingly foreign and white, Even today, after years of nationalistic agitation for a Negro priesthood, the country’s Catholic clergy comprises two hundred French priests, one hundred American. Canadian. and Belgian priests, and only a hundred Haitian priests.

But despite its comparatively few native adherents, the Church, through its status as the state religion, has maintained considerable influence, particularly in the schools. The state subsidizes Catholic schools, which are the country’s best, and almost hall of Haiti’s few thousand secondare school students attend them. There also is much Catholic influence in the public University of Haiti: it operates a seminary to train priests; for years the editor of the Catholic newspaper La Phalange, which Duvalier shut down this year, was the university rector; many of the students, usually light-skinned, prepare for college in Catholic schools.

It is easy to see why Duvalier, a nominal Catholic but an admirer of Vodun, struck out at the Church when the university students began their strike last November. In the view of the dark-skinned Duvalier. the students were the children of his enemy, the mulatto elite, under the influence of a foreign element, the Catholic clergy. By banishing the archbishop, and later a bishop and several important priests. Duvalier attacked the elite without too much fear of reprisal. The Church’s excommunication decree bothered the leaders of Haiti much less than one might expect in a Catholic state.

Since 1791, no man or system of government has remained in power long enough to give the country political stability. One native historian counted at least sixty-nine rebellions between 1806 and 1879. A tradition grew where strong men, backed by an army, assumed the presidency and remained in power until other strong men slapped together a bigger army. In the ten months between the overthrow of President Paul E. Magloire and the election of Duvalier in 1957, a halfdozen provisional governments, manipulated by the army, rose and fell.

The program of the underground

Problems like these add to the hopelessness that suffocates discussions with members of the underground. Speaking perfect French, sipping rum, reclining in comfortable chairs in ornate homes, the dispirited underground leaders seem very far away from the Creolespeaking peasants suffering from elephantiasis, intestinal worms, anemia. or malaria.

The underground’s basic program actually has but two elements: it is anti-Duvalier and anti-American. And this, of course, makes Haiti ripe for a Fidel Castro. Faced with such a situation, the United States has a difficult choice to make. Why destroy a tyrant friendly to the United States if an anti-American tyrant could take his place?

Fortunately. there now is a framework within which the United States Can move to end the terror of Duvalier. That framework has been created by the historic meeting of the hemisphere’s foreign ministers in San José, Costa Rica, in 1960 and by the recent pronouncements of President Kennedy.

Kennedy, in his March 13 speech to Latin American diplomats, expressed some new concepts of foreign aid. The President said the Latin countries must “modify their social patterns so that all, and not just a privileged few, share in the fruits of growth.”If this is not done, he stressed, “no amount of help will advance the welfare of the people.”He clearly was talking about U.S. economic aid and Latin social and economic reforms. But it would not be difficult to apply his principles to U.S. military aid and Latin political reforms.

In the case of Haiti, adherence to the Kennedy principles would destroy Duvalier. The State Department could withdraw all economic and military aid, including the detachment of marines, until the Haitian government underwent political and social reforms. If need be, the State Department could justify its action be submitting to the Organization of American States a bill of particulars defining the terror and corruption of Duvalier.

Surely the United States has every right to withhold bullets from murderers and money from thieves and promise more and more help to all others. That kind of policy will not guarantee freedom and progress, but it is the only, slim hope for some improvement in Haiti.